I was struck by this post from digital Photography School about the digital storage and organisation of images. I love organising files. There's definitely something therapeutic about knowing that everything is exactly in its right place on your hard drive.

The problem when you're a productivity nerd, of course, is that things are never just right. There's always some little tweak to be made, or a new system to try. You can very easily end up wasting time organising things, as opposed to actually doing them.

For the past month or so I've been using PortableApps for all of my data/email/browsing/image-manipulation/design. It's been working well, because I'm sort of between computers just now whilst I save for a Macbook (which I'm getting very excited about... I'm sure I've nearly crashed the Apple store a few times because of all the reloads of the product images I've done¹.) The portable applications run maybe a little slower than they would if they were running off the hard drive, but ever since I bought my Cruzer Titanium it's done a very good job. The only thing I'm worried about is that if I lose the flash drive, I lose everything. I'm looking into some way to automatically back it up (not using the proprietary bundled U3 software, which is rubbish... pre-installed software on a pen-drive?)

Of course my main source of productivity comfort is my multiple Moleskines, of which much more later.

¹Yes, I know, the images are cached...