Maintaining Your File Through a Multi-Day or Multi-Week Season
A file built for one tournament needs ongoing maintenance to stay useful for the next one, especially as news cycles move quickly between competitions. You will be able to plan a post-tournament file maintenance routine.
Post-Tournament File Audit
Within a few days of a tournament, reviewing which folders were used most, which sources actually got cited in rounds, and which areas felt thin helps prioritize the next block of reading before returning to weekly maintenance covered earlier. Retiring genuinely outdated articles — not just old dates but stories that have been fully resolved or superseded by newer developments — keeps folders from becoming bloated and slow to search.
Tracking Recurring Topics Across a Season
Certain topics, like a major election cycle or an ongoing conflict, persist across many tournaments in a season, so maintaining a single evolving folder for these persistent topics, updated continuously rather than rebuilt from scratch each time, is more efficient than treating every tournament as a fresh start. A season-long tracking document noting how a persistent story has evolved tournament to tournament can itself become a valuable analytical resource during prep.
A competitor just finished a tournament where she drew three questions related to an ongoing trade negotiation.
That weekend, she updates her single ongoing 'Trade Negotiation' folder with two new articles from the tournament week rather than starting a new folder, and she jots a two-sentence note in her season-long tracking document summarizing how the negotiation has shifted since the last tournament three weeks ago, so the next time this topic appears in a draw she can quickly see the whole arc of the story.
1. What is the purpose of a post-tournament file audit?
Answer all 1 to check.
Regular post-tournament audits and continuously maintained folders for persistent, recurring topics keep a file efficient and current across an entire season.