I’d been doing admin most of the morning, attempting to organise my chaotically scattered body of work into a coherent and useful list. It was such a mess I had to engage the help of the AI to scan through all my files across my laptop and cloud to find my files (Specifically, Anthropic’s Claude Code Terminal). Be organised people, do as I say, not as I do… erm, did.

Seriously, you might think, right now, there’s no way you’re going to produce a list of writing or artistic work so long that you cannot keep track of it all. You might think, What is the point? It’s just an additional administrative burden.

But it is so easy to let it slide… We all do it… I would write draft 1. But then make some changes, so I’d call it v2. But then I changed the end entirely and called it version 2b. So, almost done so I called it the Final Draft… but, oh, it needed an edit. Then I wasn’t sure which one I had last saved before I looked for all the “thats” and the “thens” and any sneaky adverbs that might have slipped in. So saved it as Final_draft_Edited. But, what if the draft before sounded better, before I made the changes… Maybe I should just make sure and call that one the Final FINAL Draft. You get the picture.

Believe me, a little work getting organised now will prevent a whole lot of pain and work later down the line when you are looking at a VERY long list of files that may or may not be duplicates. All in varying stages of development. Some you wrote so long ago that you can barely even remember them.

TLDR Solution

All it takes is a simple spreadsheet. You don’t even have to make the spreadsheet. Just copy this Google template of my writing inventory spreadsheet… Here. That link will enable you to save a blank version of the exact tracker I use. It is editable, so feel free to save your own version and edit it to the way you prefer to work.

The first tab is the inventory itself with: title, form, status, word count, file location, submission history, themes, notes, and an optimistic column for income potential. The second tab pulls stats from the inventory automatically. My background is in IT and Business so I am a bit nerdy about stats.

From now on, every time I complete a new piece of work, I will endeavour to add it to the spreadsheet and stay organised. Hopefully, now I will always know what I have written and where it is.