Is an organized artist and oxymoron?

It is now January 7th. Sometimes beginning a new day requires a plan. One of my worst areas of organization is my filing systems...my file cabinet is more of a crypt than a system. Most of the things that go in it never come out. I have successfully recovered documents and patterns form the metal box and that is a good thing, however my computer has been a nightmare for years! Organization - I can organize! The problem is remembering where the organized stuff went!
As my goal for this year is to be very proactive and very intentional about becoming successful as a working artist I have set an secondary goal of being aware and actively develop more discipline with my filing and storage methods!

I spent a good part of 3 days getting my computer files organized and cleaned up. I wanted to free up some of the Macs memory and now I could put my very large numbers of photographs where they can be easily accessed!  Husband Dave gave me an external hard drive  for my Mac. I wanted to file photographs on that drive.

Was so excited about getting my plans accomplished! I thought things were going very well when I began installing the new drive.....then....after spending an hour and a half online searching for an answer as to why the installation instructions were getting me nowhere I stumbled upon a 'HELP" item.

Guess what? I was going to have to update my computer. I knew that a lot of upgrades could be downloaded from apple and I searched for what I needed. After an additional 45 minutes of search time online i determined what I needed could not be simply downloaded. After ordering what I needed, and punching in the digits off my credit card for programing $129.00 for what my system required, I realized it would be 6-7 days before it would arrive. It took 7 the full 7 days to receive my order.

I began downloading my upgrades within 10 minutes. 14 hours to completely download disk one including the time that it took to download all of the updates for the stuff on the program cd. I waited until I went to bed to download the second one. The third one was short, only 2 hours. I spent several hours today familiarizing myself with the new programing.

I have gotten several things organized so far:

I have created searchable lists of all the websites that I visit  which indicate passwords including a lot of art references including tutorials and downloads that I can refer to. I also updated my address book to save time finding emails and client information. I updated my Vendor emails as well.