btothed:

I’m a little neurotic. A bit of a neat-freak. And probably borderline OCD at times. I like the comfort of having routines. Routines feel safe. They give order. Which, ultimately, allows you to make it through portions of your day on cruise control. Y’know, basically the same governing principles of the zombie genus.

For this reason, I’ve been known to alphabetize my movie, music, and video game racks over the years. Order over chaos. Even as a kid, I preferred this sort of system. It allows me to scan the rack and immediately find whichever title I’m seeking out, rather than having to focus on each title to see if it’s the one I’m looking for. All that happens in that scenario, is you get distracted by another one along the way and veer off in another direction.

But they’d throw you a curveball, sometimes. Because you have to make a decision very early on – do you file them by the title/name that appears on the spine of the case or by what you know it as?

This. Is. Huge.

[…]

That’s why you should do like I do and arrange them thematically.

First shelf: sci-fi movies. These of course are in order progressing from The Matrix, through other robot-y movies like The Terminator, into alien robot movies like Transformers, into just alien movies (like, maybe, Alien), etc. Starting on the second shelf are action movies, beginning with military/spy movies — these are your Bourne movies, Bond, etc. It keeps going through other themes like comedy, drama, vampire/monster/zombie movies, and comic book movies.

Makes it easy to immediately identify at least a type of movie you want to see, then narrow it down from there. Also, no need to worry about having a movie in a series with a different title (so “Live Free or Die Hard” gets to sit right next to its other Die Hard brethren despite its awful name).

It also helps that I have a database of all my movies, tagged with their genre. So… yeah.