How do you organize your clips when composing/arranging?

I'm pretty sure there must be some of you out there who are like me in that the process of composing and arranging in Sonar involves a lot of experimenting - shuffling clips around, substituting one clip for another, playing with multiple variations of musical phrases and song structure etc. So what I generally end up with is a mess in my track window, with clips lying all over the place, some piled up in tracks past the end of the song, some stored in the blocks of silence at the beginning of the track, some muted and lying around randomly. It makes me feel very disorganized and to be honest my heart sinks sometimes when I open a project and see all this clutter. It makes it hard to get an overview of the song structure and distracts me to the point where I find myself aching for some kind of tidy "storage solution" for unused and inactive clips that I'm keeping. 
 
So 3 things that I've toyed with are: 
 
1) Creating silent tracks for clip storage. I create one under each track, and move any clips I'm not using into them. It's a good idea in theory, but in practice I find that they quickly fill up and it's easy to lose track of which clips are where. Plus there's lots of horizontal scrolling involved in moving and retrieving the clips. Sometimes I want to swap a clip in the active track with a clip in the storage track and find myself horizontally scrolling a long way just to find an empty spot to move the first clip while I retrieve the second. It gets old pretty quickly. 
 
2) Dragging clips into a folder in the browser. This seems like the best solution, but I've found dragging MIDI clips into the browser to be temperamental and buggy in Sonar. For instance, if you drop a named MIDI clip into a folder it uses the clip name for the file name, but when you drag that clip back into Sonar it ignores the file name and just calls it "track 1." This completely defeats the purpose of organizing clips with names. 
 
3) Storing clips in take lanes. This is something I tried tonight. I've never used take lanes before - I don't do any comping of audio takes, for instance. I'm mainly a MIDI guy and just want to use them to store spare clips. But this evidently doesn't work because when you collapse the take lanes, Sonar piles all the clips on top of each other and the one that's visible in the track isn't necessarily the one you have unmuted (unless I'm misunderstanding how they work). 
 
So does anyone have any other ideas? Some feature of Sonar that I'm evidently blind to? To be honest I reeeeeally wish Sonar had something like Pro Tools' clip list, a little pop up window which lists all of your clips by name, from which you can drag clips into tracks. This is absolutely ideal and it's one of the biggest things I miss about Pro Tools, in that I felt so much more organized when arranging a tune. In fact I'm going to submit a feature request right now....

I guess creating track folders is a good idea in terms of organizing my storage lanes. The only trouble being that you have to open the folder every time you want to edit the track. 

How do you view these versions? I have this option checked, but don't see how to view or revert back.

I avoid the mess by taking more time in the composing phase of the project to work out the arrangement.
 
Then I create new tracks of each instrument that needs it to play in the finalized arrangement.
 
That may not work for all styles but it works for me as I try to go for an organic sounding performance.

Tom Riggs
I avoid the mess by taking more time in the composing phase of the project to work out the arrangement.
 
Then I create new tracks of each instrument that needs it to play in the finalized arrangement.
 
That may not work for all styles but it works for me as I try to go for an organic sounding performance.

Yeah I think my creativity is a little too haphazard for such forward planning....I almost never know what I'm going to end up with when I start a project. Usually I'll be banging away on the keyboard or my guitar and think "oo that sounds nice...must record it for posterity" and so I'll create a project and record what is usually a few bars at most. Then things kind of grow in all different directions from there and get reworked and shuffled endlessly until what's beginning to look like a tune emerges. I hate to use the old monkeys banging away at typewriters analogy (it's offensive to monkeys) but that's me to a tee...

One thing that would be extremely helpful to my method is if we could put folders within folders. That way all my original tracks (which I refer to as my pool and label each track/folder with OG) and the folders that contain them can just go into a single folder named Pool or OG. Then I wouldn't necessarily need to hide them with the track manager. I could just drag that folder to the bottom of the list if I want to get it away from the time ruler. I'd also like to see the console view have a folders option that could be set to stay in sync with the folder status in the track pane because even if I could have folders within a folder the strips would remain which is even more problematic than in the track pane. With all those clones the strip count is out of control.

Oh and it may be pertinent to the convo that I tend not to allow final clips to remain in lanes. I'll either do the comping and bounce or more often they'll get their own track so I have fader control to mix the part in. That last thing is another reason having a folders within folders option would be handy. Lead Guit Folder > Pan Left Folder > Pan Left Clip Segment Tracks
                                                 V
                                           Pan Right Folder  > Pan Right Clip Segments Tracks