Bandcamp drafts
I cannot count the amount of times I've set my own album cost to $0, so I can download it myself and download the .wavs from one album and re-upload them to another. I've done it between albums, bandcamp accounts, and sometimes as a way to archive songs I like but feel like they're not really ready or meant for any particular project. Very few songs ever get truly lost with no bandcamp draft attached to them.
I always felt kind of "beholden" to keep my albums tonally consistent, and that meant regularly re-evaluating my songs and listening to my unfinished albums with different tracklists regularly. I think trying to listen to your songs in the album format is definitely a plus, as you push to times has been uploading a song to a bandcamp draft album, deleting it because I realize it belongs on a different draft album tonally, then changing my mind shortly after. It was around 2021 when I realized that externalizing my album draft planning was probably a better move than winging it, or making a short notepad file of tasks.
Having multiple songs on the backburner is a hard thing to organize. It's not uncommon for me to make a song intended for one album and have it feel like it belongs elsewhere once a different album takes shape. "Vibe" and "genre" are big players in terms of how I sequence an album full of incomplete songs. Some of the songs get made without much foresight, others are made to fill a tonal gap in the album I'm trying to make.
I used to have a big spreadsheet of all my songs in Coda (a Notion-like webtool) where I'd re-order my songs to fit under different album headers. What I'd cobbled together as a tool was fine, but even when it worked as intended, I didn't feel like I was accomplishing much.
When I'm sitting down to record guitar and I want to know which songs need guitar recorded, then its useful, sure. But otherwise, having the freedom to move stuff wherever I wanted only invited me to be more indecisive about which songs go into which album, and what order they go in. Often I'd change the song titles, delete them for later, or add ideas for new songs before I'd done anything to make the song a reality. The organizational tool was fine eyecandy, but not really helping me finish my albums.
It wasn't until 2023 that I came up with the idea of a "mission control" word document. The idea being that it's just a text document, and anything that I want to tinker with lyric-wise or chord-wise can be adjusted from my phone (while I'm jamming on the guitar) or on my laptop (while I'm recording producing.) This has hands down been the best for me, especially with headers to skip ahead to certain songs or to add additional production notes outside of the lyrics and chords.