ORGANIZING INFORMATION
If you’ve been collecting and recycling information and stockpiling contacts, then the next step is to organize everything so you can find it when you need it. Decide what you’re going to keep and where you’re going to keep it—and remember to make the filing system part of your professional life so you don’t recreate the research wheel every time you need a pithy piece of insight.
Here are four tips for turning vast stockpiles of otherwise latent research and data into user-friendly, actionable and powerful snippets for your stories or leads for future pieces.
• INDEX YOUR PAST WORK. If you specialize in a certain area, create an index of past articles so they can be reused, or at least accessed, for information. This way, you’ll have all your work—by topic, date, subject, etc.—at your fingertips. Just open a Word document or Excel file and start to log your work. Include the date the article was created, the file name, a brief note about the story, and whom it was written for. Archiving must be done regularly or it will become daunting to go back and enter months of articles—and a potentially powerful tool will become useless.

• DEVELOP A ‘‘TOPICAL’’ TIPS FILE. When editors come calling for story ideas to take into their editorial meetings, grab the hanging file you should have filled with potential leads and clips, and type up some ideas from it. Central to being an expert scribe on a topic is knowing what the trends are and having plenty of story ideas to pursue. This is especially important if you write a recurring feature or column and have to think up stories with regularity.

• REVISIT YOUR FILE CABINET. It’s great to have a powerful, insightful and deep research archive—but only if you actually use it. Every few months, browse through your folders, whether they’re on your computer or in the file cabinet, as well as your Internet bookmarks. This will refresh your memory about the data you’ve amassed—and the variety of topics at your fingertips to cover for a new market or from a different angle.

• CULL YOUR FILES.
It’s important to have a filing system that fits your personal information needs, but it’s more important to live that system. Stay up to date with your data, files and categories. You may find that one category should be broken down into several more to aid in retrieval of useful information.

Researching is an essential part of writing, but it doesn’t have to be tedious or difficult. Planning ahead and staying organized can make any daunting research task much easier. Take the time you need, and enjoy the research phase of your writing—just don’t get so caught up in it that you postpone the actual writing part of
the process.

Courtesy: Writers’ Digest