efficient way of creating itunes playlists

let's say you have 2 thousand songs and want to organize them into 10 playlists. do not make the "multiple-pass" mistake where you create a playlist then scan the entire 2 thousand songs to drag and drop the ones to include, then create another playlist and scan the entire 2 thousand songs again.  this will take you forever.

you only need to scan the entire 2 thousand songs once (one-pass algorithm). just go to "library" view of itunes (not the device view), click the "playlists" view option (located in the top-middle), use the drop down arrow in the bottom-left and choose the "create playlist" option to create your 10 playlists in the left pane. then just go through each of your 2 thousand songs and drag and drop the songs to whichever playlist(s) they belong.

then if you are in "manually manage music and videos" mode, connect your device or iphone and just drag and drop each play list to your device in the library view (this does not work in the device view).

but a better way is to organize the music files into directories in your computer. mine is "70s, 80s, 90s, 2000-09, 2013-14, 2015,2016). do something similar but in your computer keep an explorer or file window open for the parent directory of these subdirectories and also keep another window open for the directories containing your thousands of music files. then do the one  pass drag and drop technique.  then it will be easy to create playlists on the iphone that would mirror the structure in your computer. connect your iphone to you computer and open itunes. then:

for each music directory (e.g. 70s, 80s, etc ...) do the following"
    - empty out the entire itunes music library
    - in itunes go to file/add FOLDER to library and add the folder
    - create a playlist under DEVICE 
    - drag and drop the entire music library to the playlist in your device

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