How I actually organized evidence before it went into the petition

Sharing my system since it saved me from a lot of the "wait, which exhibit was that again" chaos I hear about in other posts here. I kept one running spreadsheet with a row per piece of evidence: exhibit number, one-line description, which criterion(s) it supported, and a status column (gathered / needs translation / needs a better scan / ready). Sounds obvious written out, but the discipline of updating it every time I added or removed something is what actually mattered — I didn't let it drift out of sync with the real folder. Two things I'd do differently next time: - I didn't lock exhibit numbers early enough, so renumbering late in the process created exactly the kind of cross-reference gaps other posts here have warned about — I caught them, but it took an extra full pass I could have avoided. - I underestimated how long "needs a better scan" would take in aggregate — a handful of documents I'd been putting off re-scanning turned into a genuinely time-consuming task right before filing, when I had the least slack in my schedule. Not a fancy system, but having one consistent source of truth for exhibit status, instead of scattered folders and mental tracking, made the last month before filing much less chaotic.