Media Collection Time

With so many video, games, music, pictures, and related activities increasing in our lives, we must address a common life component – time management. Extra time gives us the compatibility to do different things, but are we diverting that time to community building endeavors (volunteering, etc.) or just finding different ways to plug in? Fast food is a great example. What do we do with the time we would spend making food, washing dishes, and buying more groceries?

We have the power, not the media, which is just the tool for us, so we need some serious development time to estimate planned time and desired results. Is it worth the time to create a huge Excel database of our video game library for our own feeling of self worth? OR…could we add fields like online options, number of players, and other features and store all the game discs in enveloped cases with this database inside instead of storing all the boxes somewhere? Of course there are always media choices for managing and “databasing” media like video games, or movies and games, but is it worth the time to replicate information that we already have? That decision might be easier with a simple bar code scan...as we slowly transform our media collection into a retail store format and receive constant recommendations for more collection editions. At what point are we satisfied? Do we have a target list? What are our standards for that collection?

It can be a slow progression, but as long as we question our processes, then we make progress. My brothers and I had a minimum “three good song” rule for music purchases since then my processes have improved where I’m spending much less time maintaining collections. Now more than ever we want our money to stretch and give us the best most useful media possible. We have to scrutinize ourselves though, not necessarily the media. “It would be nice, but is it necessary?”. Do we have one process that we keep improving on or do we float from one thing to the next with no real “media system legacy” in place? There is plenty of stuff out there and we cannot also rely on others for our processes, but we can certainly customize their tools for our purposes instead of a vice versa scenario. Feel free to share your media/item processes here in the comments.