My chaotic digital life:

Recently I asked my husband to cough up the expensive iPod I bought him for his birthday two years ago. He barely used it, has never plugged it into a computer and it still stored the exact same playlist I uploaded for him as part of the gift.

He just wasn’t that into it.

So I decided: if he wasn’t going to use it – I sure was. I was already struggling for storage on my iPhone and it made sense to delete the music and use the iPod as my portable stereo system. I would download all the tracks and take it for imaginary jogs on the beach. I would keep my playlists fresh all the time and my new iPod will be so excited its new owner loves and cherishes it - unlike the previous owner.

Now… how to work the thing.

Truth be told, even though I think I just scrape into that supposedly “tech-savvy” Generation Y, my capabilities in the digital age are pretty minimal. Sure, while I can work an iPhone, can get around a computer and use social media (albeit pretty basically) – there’s something about the ease of tech that actually makes it so difficult.

Let me explain.

Music

Remember the days where if you heard a song on the radio, you would buy the CD single and have it on repeat until your brain cells exploded? After that you would either discard the CD – depending on just how sick of it you were – or file it away in a CD album.

Then, if the artist of said CD single brought out another great track, you would buy the album. And proceed to have that on repeat until you got your money’s worth. Once all 18 songs were imprinted into your musical brain, it was filed right next to the single that started it all.

And that’s simply as organized as you needed to be.

Buy. Play. File.

Before the crazy digital age of being able to download and buy music instantly –I am talking simply  “Shazamming” a tune you hear on the radio and then purchasing it on iTunes – buying an actual CD was a real treat for me.

It would go something like this:

1.    Kat walks into Sanity or HMV and peruses the “Top 20 wall” looking for a track listing that would rock her world.

2.    Kat would spend the next hour over lunch or coffee looking through shiny enclosed booklet, would memorise the lyrics and even skim through the acknowledgements.

3.    Kat would then excitedly finish her shopping, would head out to the car and open CD case before even opening car door ready to insert and blare at full blast.

Nowadays, the ease of being able to buy music on demand is at once exciting, overwhelming and expensive. The click of a button without someone ringing up a total at a register can get a little too simple and not only can you end up with countless tracks – some you even forget about - but a music “expense” you just did not budget for.

And then there’s the organisation part of it all. If you’re like me, you have zero time to make playlists and file and sort into genre so I end up just having a monster iTunes library with no order whatsoever. As a result, you will often find me skipping tracks more than listening to them because I am just trying to find something decent amongst the album fillers.

I think its time I either get my musical megabytes in order or go back to CD’s because even writing this is exhausting me.

Photos

Remember the days where you would buy a roll of film from the petrol station and insert it into your little black camera? You would then spend the day snapping pictures carefully as you didn’t get another go at them.

Once you finished your roll, you took it to a processing place of your choice and they would either be ready in an hour or the next day. Every moment waiting for those photos to be ready would be filled with anticipation because who bloody knows how they’ll turn out.

Back then, to keep all your memories safe and secure, the only organisation required was a photo album. And because there were only 24 photos, it would only take a short time to insert them in the little clear slips and you would even have time to write a funny little caption!

Nowadays we can take photos with our phones, iPads or tablets, photo and video camera’s and notebooks. And we can take a million of the same photo just to get it just right.

So where does this easy snapping leave me?

The old school gal in me still loves to print and place photos in beautiful albums. With captions.The old school gal in me still miraculously manages to upload photos from every source acceptably. But to organise them is a different story.

So instead of organising them, I print them all. But rather than place the thousands of photos I have printed in albums – they sit in cardboard boxes. Waiting, patiently waiting for the attention I may never give them.

I put my snap-happy disorganisation down to this:

1.    Too, too many photos are snapped via too, too many sources. I must get into the habit of deleting the bad ones.

2.    Once they are sent off to be printed (when the 9c a print special comes up), they come back in random, ridiculous order. So that means I have to first order them chronologically and then put them in albums. I’ve given up on the funny captions idea for this digital age. Too much work.

3.    Not only do I have photos to sort - I have videos. Gone are the days where you had one of those mammoth video camera’s that required a tape of some description. Now we can video everything and everything and it’s distorting my iPhoto library!

The Digital age, while amazing in so many ways, is making my life chaos!

Do you have any handy tips to make my transition from the Stone Age any easier?