One of the chief problems on my mind\u2013 I like to reconceptualize them as puzzles, because \u201cproblems\u201d can develop rather ominous connotations\u2013 is the puzzle of my notes. I don\u2019t<\/em> think I have a notes hoarding problem. If we focus just on my iOS notes, there are currently 679 notes in there, which I think is fairly respectable for a person who writes for a living. But if I\u2019m honest with myself, there\u2019s something \u201coff\u201d about it. I can easily envision a version of myself who has 3000 notes that are meticulously kept, and when asked would say \u201cI love my notes, they\u2019re great!\u201d I mostly do feel this way about my tweets. I suppose I want to use this essay to think out loud about why I don\u2019t feel great about my notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I collapse all my folders, they look like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Notes\u2019<\/strong> is the default folder where anything goes. \u2018cleanup<\/strong>\u2019 was a fairly recent creation that I was using as a staging area while moving notes around. Maybe I should dump them all back in \u2018Notes\u2019<\/strong>, since I can no longer remember what was going on there. Let\u2019s glance through since there are only 11: there\u2019s a todo list note that goes all the way back to 2019. The latest addition was \u201cexpand this thread<\/a> about attention sovereignty into a blogpost\u201d. A little further down there\u2019s a link to a thread of todos<\/a>, which includes, funnily enough, at number 6, \u201ccleanup my iOS notes\u201d. (already I notice that I\u2019m tempted to start going in and touching things, doing things\u2013 which is something I want to be extra careful not to do too much of right now, because\u2026 I\u2019ve tried writing some version of this post multiple times in the past, and every single time I try I end up getting sucked into the tasks. Let\u2019s just write one overview one time, alright Visa? Please? Thanks!! ) Ah\u2013 the rest of the notes are \u201ccleanup notes\u201d, which are notes that I take when I am doing things like, deleting screenshots from my phone, deleting youtube video playlists and so on. These are typically things that I saved because I had some vague intention of doing something, and I typically want to capture the intention and toss the thing. A hundred such things can be reduced into a single document, and that one document can be really valuable. I\u2019m hoping that this post itself may be, in a sense, one such document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After cleanup we have the deceptively small-looking \u201cnotes2\u201d with 10 notes in it\u2026 until you expand it and see that there\u2019s a whole lot more:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the hell is going on here? I believe that \u2018shortnotes\u2019 <\/strong>was a past attempt to consolidate literal short notes (2-3 lines), into \u2018threaded notes\u2019, so that I could have 19 notes instead of 200. What\u2019s the difference between notes2 and notes3? I have no idea\u2013 I probably partitioned them just so that I would have to scroll through fewer notes at a time. I\u2019m going to move all of notes3 into notes2, and rename notes4-long into longnotes, and\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n God, that feels so much better already. Now, what is going on with the annual reviews? We have a total of 86 notes in here. This\u2026 this stuff is important to me. It\u2019s a bit of a clusterfuck of memoirs and journal entries. I\u2019ve always been slightly obsessive about trying to make sure that I\u2019m spending my years fruitfully, and I have always had this amateur historian impulse to try and\u2026 do annual reviews. There\u2019s a whole project here, maybe even two or three. It\u2019s becoming clearer to me that this shouldn\u2019t really be\u2026 in my iOS notes. It might make sense to create some google docs for these? I need more of a \u2018workspace\u2019 to do something with them, and I don\u2019t really do work in<\/em> my iOS notes. I tend to use them for just dumping my thoughts and sort of riffling through those thoughts. Let me see if I can quickly combine any of the notes in those folders\u2026 noticed a note from aug2016 where I wondered if I should try to network more with local authors in Singapore, which is kind of quaint and amusing because it\u2019s emblematic of how I used to think more locally. I\u2019ve since cultivated an international network of peers. But I want to remember this particular detail, y\u2019know? If I don\u2019t remember, I might end up claiming that I always had an international focus\u2013 there are some notes about that too from earlier on\u2013 but the truth is messier than that. Does messy truth require messy note-keeping, though? I want to believe that it doesn\u2019t need to be this<\/em> messy. It\u2019s this<\/em> messy because I don\u2019t yet know what the salient points are. Like a beginner artist sketching with too many lines. Found a rather poetic note I wrote at my grandma\u2019s 80th birthday:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere were so many people \u2013 probably about 40-50 people in the room, all related to her, most of them carrying her genetic material in their bodies \u2013 including young children and little infants who\u2019d have no real concept of how significant that might be. I found myself thinking, that\u2019s a pretty nice milestone to experience. To be 80 years old and surrounded by your loved ones, many people living different lives, doing different things, yet all coming together with this shared bond of you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember thinking sometimes \u2013 that when you see an individual, you see them in isolation and think of them as a sort of random configuration of a human that the universe spat out. But when you meet their families, you see that they\u2019re really just a branch on a greater tree, a part of something bigger than themselves. You see that they\u2019re just one note in a greater symphony. There\u2019s something poetic about that \u2013 something about how nobody is truly alone, even if you\u2019re an orphan and you don\u2019t realize it, you\u2019re actually part of this tremendous tradition, this tremendous flowering, coming forth of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I like this because I didn\u2019t write it for twitter or for substack\u2013 I wrote it for myself. As I continue reading these notes I find myself starting to get a little emotional. There\u2019s so much of me<\/em> in here. For months, maybe years now I\u2019ve been thinking of these notes as a tedious burden, as Something I Have To Deal With, and now I\u2019m thinking I\u2019d like to spend at least a week, maybe a month, just slowly rereading these and really feeling them. And maybe I\u2019ll write up substack posts as I do, I think that would be nice. My first thought is to do one for each year, but that feels like it might get a little repetitive. Probably a better approach would be\u2026 spend a couple of hours skimming to get a sense of the vibe, then identify about 3 big themes or patterns, and then write one post per theme\/pattern. Something like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s keep moving. After annual reviews we have bookmarks\u2026 <\/strong>which contain pages and pages of links that I\u2019ve saved. I\u2019m pretty disciplined about only saving links that I\u2019m very confident that I\u2019d want to reference or revisit\u2013 but even so, I think it\u2019s probable that maybe 20% of these might be no longer relevant. A bunch of them might even be dead links. As I check these out I find myself thinking that I\u2019d like to spend maybe a day just going through all of them, deleting whatever no longer feels relevant, and moving relevant bits to their relevant contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A selection here maybe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n next we come to reviews. to be continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n reviews. here I have 85 notes from books, tv shows, movies, etc. Maybe for fun I\u2019ll list out everything here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Movies: Aladdin, I Not Stupid, I Not Stupid 2, Godfather 2, Raya, Iron Man 2, Frozen, Thor Ragnarok, EEAAO, Legally Blonde, Pattinson\u2019s Batman, Lost Illusions, Alita: Battle Angel, Greatest Showman, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moana, Monsters Inc, Kung Fu Panda trilogy,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Documentaries: Jeen-Yuhs, AND1, 90s, Clarence Avant, The Minimalists, A Solitary Mann, Arnold, Beckham, Moonage Daydream (Bowie), Five Foot Four (Gaga),<\/p>\n\n\n\n TV: Korra, Futurama, Seinfeld, Arcane, Andor, Burke\u2019s Connections, Star Trek, Paula Scher in Abstract, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Loki, Ramit\u2019s Rich Life, Lion Mums, Cowboy Bebop<\/p>\n\n\n\n Games: God of War, Borderlands 2, Witcher 3, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Mass Effect: Andromeda,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Others: a youtube lecture about the Bhagavad Gita\u2026 there\u2019s a bunch of other stuff that\u2019s harder to summarize, where it\u2019s less about some particular piece of media and more about themes, motifs, patterns and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could spend all day in this folder but I\u2019ma do a little bit of tidying up (down to 77 from 85) and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next up we have:<\/p>\n\n\n\n VOLTAIC ESSAYS is where I was dumping a lot of my notes for this substack. Looking through them now, they seem a little dated and clunky. There\u2019s a pinned note that has a lot of draft ideas in it, I\u2019ll save that for last maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I found a section of a note that said \u201cthis is more for my blog than for my substack\u201d \u2013 I cut it out and moved it to the blog folder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/\/ i fell sick here and didnt check my computer for what feels like days, though probably just one day. but i\u2019ll try to pick back up where I left off. ios notes again<\/p>\n\n\n\n when going through these notes i find myself asking, how do i write anything with a good reader experience, even for myself? why is it that some notes feel lively and interesting, while others feel dead and meaningless?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n took a looong break here, long enough that i\u2019ve kind of forgotten what\u2019s going on here. i\u2019ll ignore all of the above for now and start as though this is from scratch<\/p>\n\n\n\n what do i know about what i\u2019m trying to do? reduce total # of notes. reduce # of folders. let\u2019s open everything\u2026 \u201cicebox\u201d has 2 notes\u2026 published them to \/archive\/. \u201cbookmarks\u201d had about 7 notes, I\u2019ve moved all of them into a single google doc for triaging<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n the baby\u2019s asleep and i have a relatively small window of time to do something on the computer before i ought to go to bed myself. i\u2019d like to write and publish something on substack, so here we are. lately what i\u2019ve been doing with this time has been \u201csorting through my notes\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n note-sorting is an infinite game.<\/strong> i will obviously have unsorted notes left behind after I\u2019m dead, and i think i\u2019ve made my peace with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n imperfect, unfinished notes are a sign of a living process.<\/strong> \u201cperfect notes\u201d are a kind of death. ideally, they \u201cdie\u201d by being published in some form. but even every published work is necessarily imperfect and unfinished to some degree, since no one work can contain the entire universe, or even the entire universe of the thing it is seeking to address<\/em>. so. nothing is absolutely perfect. but there are such things as \u2018little perfections\u2019. some things are \u2018just right\u2019 for their time and context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n over the past couple of weeks, i\u2019ve made some tremendous (to me) breakthroughs with my notes. i flinch a little from talking about this, i think because there\u2019s a smarmy, corporate, utilitarian voice that people often use when talking about note-taking, and i\u2019ve internalized some of it by osmosis, and i despise that voice so much. but i\u2019ll try to get to the heart of my own experience and use my own words. my notes are a labor of love. my notes are me piecing together my understanding of the world, of life, of myself, of everything. i am<\/em> my notes. people talking about notes in terms of productivity make me a little sick. i don\u2019t take notes to make money or sell books. i take notes because they are how i make sense of myself as a person. the whole enterprise is honestly sacred<\/em> to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n i\u2019ve been focusing on only a narrow segment of my notes. my notes are everywhere. i have notes on my phone and laptop via the iOS notes app. I have notes in google docs. I have notes on my various blogs. every tweet i tweet is a note to myself, and i have over 200,000 of those. i have handwritten notes in the books that i own. i have paper journals. i would say that even material objects\u2013 possessions like fridge magnets and guitar pedals\u2013 are notes, in that they are reminders of varying kinds. reminders of what is possible, reminders of our intentions, reminders of who we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n do you see where i\u2019m going with this? i had a minor breakthrough a while ago while thinking about messes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n looking back, i\u2019d point to this as the breakthrough clarification that cascaded outwards from myself into my notes. my notes were a mess because my intentions were a mess. and if i wanted to sort them i needed to know what they were for. i had some set of intentions at some point, but intentions have a way of decaying, morphing, and after enough time passes, a bunch of them no longer seem relevant, a bunch of new ones have entered the picture but are yet unnamed, and everything just gets more convoluted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n my iOS notes, which are the notes I\u2019ve been working through, mostly date back to about 2018. that was basically when i committed properly to the apple iphone\/macbook ecosystem. there are some older notes from maybe 2013-2017 that were on evernote, workflowy and idk where else, but at some point in 2018 I merged a lot of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n a simplified way of talking about my intentions with my notes are to talk about them in terms of blogs. from 2007 to about 2013 i used to blog a lot about local politics and news in Singapore, my home country. from 2013 to 2018 I used to work in marketing, and i accumulated a lot of notes and readings from then. I left my job in June 2018, and I basically put all of my marketing notes in a few folders, and then mostly ignored them ever since. I\u2019d check in on them from time to time, but the time never quite felt ripe to do anything with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n as my note count bloated from 100 to over 1000, i found myself starting to feel stifled by them. i wanted my notes app to feel like a scratchpad, and it was starting to feel like this ominous, foreboding, overwhelming knot of intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n <wordcounter> alright its 1040pm, i’m freshly showered, had a coffee, and now i can do anything i want for a couple of hours. ideally i’d like to publish a substack but that feels like a dangerous gamble. if i could get my notes down from 393 to 299 that would be amazing, and that feels achievable, and failing doesn’t feel so bad. let’s go with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now it’s 1030pm the next day, lol. What happened yesterday? I reduced my notes from 393 to about ~360, now I’m at 356. Again I’m feeling like I would like to publish a substack but I think continuing to work through my notes is the smarter choice.<\/wordcounter><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/f_auto%2Cq_auto%3Agood%2Cfl_progressive%3Asteep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb44b9ebd-c6b8-4c09-b5cb-498eb6228837_436x784.png?ssl=1\")
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