For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to put some semblance of order on my YouTube channel and in frustration, I’ve realised it’s a MASSIVE job.

There are over 400 videos on the site and as it’s a channel that is used as a record of work and learning, a portfolio if you will, I thought that I could unlist – or make private – many of the videos I shared over the years especially the ones where I was recording my work out loud experiments every day (or thereabouts).

That means there are tons of videos of a lot of what I have been learning, experimenting and doing over the years since 2016. I can do a search through the YouTube channel to find videos on specific things (as it picks up the words in the description) BUT not all videos have this. Instead, I must rely on my memories about an event and recall the year, then trawl through the videos to find the exact one.

Not very user friendly.

As my YouTube channel is really a learning portfolio, it’s not meant as an educational or informational channel for people. That is, I’m not EDUCATING (yes, there are some where I am) as you see many other YouTubers doing. However, most of the videos are where I’m merely sharing my results of what I’ve been learning and experimenting on; or you see me in action – that is learning in process. Or many of the videos are simply reflecting pieces.

I decided to create different playlists (and I should have had more of a coherent and consistent approach to this when I first started the channel). Here are how I’ve recategorised them:

• Learning Through Books (which cover my book reviews)
• Learning Through Experiences (which cover me at conferences, events, courses, places, etc)
• Learning Through Others (which cover the videos where I interview people)
• Learning Through Experiments (pretty much the entire annual videos – see below are in this but I haven’t put them all in this but only selected some videos to be shown here).
• Learning Through Travel (I’ve made this private for now)
• Learning Through <Years> – these are all my daily videos and a document of all the things I did through that year

To organise all the videos, is an utter nightmare and part of me wants to make the entire channel private but another part of me thinks that I have shared these videos and continue to share them here and to others and that they need to be open – at least unlisted at a minimum.

I have also updated the channel art to remove the solutions in my name and just keep it as ‘Activate Learning’ which is more aligned to what I’m doing – I’m learning – technically, I don’t have solutions – just various methods and practices that may solve a problem for that point in time. Who knows, it may not be the right way tomorrow.

I feel a bit better with how it’s looking now because the difficulty with the YouTube channel is that it’s my own learning portfolio which means it is evolving and growing with me. It’s morphing as I share things that are of interest to me. I can go ahead and create MULTITUDES of YouTube channels for each topic but that’s not the point. My idea is to have the channel as a porfolio of my work and learning so that it becomes an extension of my work and life’s projects.

In some kind of way, it’s my evidence of existing in this world.