{"id":14825,"date":"2025-07-25T17:04:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T17:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14825"},"modified":"2026-02-27T07:46:46","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T07:46:46","slug":"collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2025\/07\/25\/collections\/","title":{"rendered":"make collections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2026feb27: revisiting this post while reviewing my archives and thinking that I ought to be making collections on here too. always be making collections. I gave this advice to one of my clients and he loved it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been freshly noticing recently that when I sit down to go through my writing and notes, I tend to get overwhelmed pretty quickly. And when that happens I tend to look for a distraction, like twitter or a game of online chess. Now that I happen to be in a place where I have a bit of meta-awareness of the feeling of overwhelm, I wonder if I can intervene differently and do something about it. Or maybe even before that, I wonder if I ought to describe the feeling of overwhelm? Let\u2019s try that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a document on my Roam titled \u2018substack drafts\u2019. It\u2019s a nested list of lists of lists, with 74 top level bullets, and 65,000 words in total. That\u2019s basically a book\u2019s worth of wordcount, and it suggests to me that there might even be multiple books worth of ideas in there, because a lot of the writing is sketchy and incomplete. This thought itself gives me a bit of anxiety. What am I to do with all of that? Even writing out all the top level bullet points here would take a bit too much time and space. Or would it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, right away I find myself thinking back to previous times in which I\u2019d managed information overload. I remember when I used to work on infographics in my last job with my designer colleague. One of the things I\u2019d do is, I\u2019d lay out all these quotes or data points on a spreadsheet\u2013 there might be 50, 100 points\u2013 and then I\u2019d try to sort them into buckets, maybe about 12-16 buckets. Maybe I should try that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Alright so\u2013 here are the first 21 out of 70+ drafts. That\u2019s already more than the number of categories I\u2019d like. This also fits nicely into 1 screen on the macbook I\u2019m using. Before I add more drafts vertically, I\u2019d like to move some of these to be horizontal to others that are related. What are the themes here? Digressions feels like a sub-point rather than a main essay. I think I\u2019ll put that next to \u2018cleaning up a body of work\u2019. \u201cShould I be capitalizing substack\u201d is actually an essay about language, and also about media, so it could go either next to \u2018understanding media\u2019 or \u2018in other words\u2019 or \u2018plaintext literacy\u2019. Oh, and \u2018hypertext magic\u2019, \u2018luckmaxxing\u2019 and \u2018becoming a legend\u2019 are clearly all related\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After moving some stuff around, I have this. I could try and collapse it further into fewer rows with more columns, but I think that would be premature\u2013 I don\u2019t yet know what the optimal configuration is, and new entries might change how I think about ordering them. I think it\u2019s time to add more drafts\u2026 as I keep going I notice some bullets that are similar enough to be worth literally merging\u2026 here\u2019s an update of where we are now:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Okay! Okay. Here are almost 60 drafts laid out in 10 \u201ccollections\u201d. I feel some kind of vague relief at this. It\u2019s not a perfect structuring or ordering, but I find it vastly preferable to the unordered list I had earlier. I\u2019m still missing some entries, and there\u2019s a whole \u2018nother set of drafts on my substack itself that possibly deserves similar treatment. Funnily, I\u2019m now reminded that I have a draft that\u2019s about the idea of relief, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have several options here. I\u2019ve made some progress on a problem for myself in real time, so this was time very well spent for me. I decided to do it while \u2018writing out loud\u2019, so now I have the above document you see before you. If you\u2019re reading it, it means I had hit publish. But there\u2019s an additional little puzzle I have to solve first: does me solving a little puzzle for myself, without much explanation or detail about the specific elements of the puzzle, feel like it crosses my internal \u2018publishing threshold\u2019? Not quite. I need to add something else to feel good about sending it into people\u2019s inboxes. But what? I could\u2026 describe more about how I\u2019m feeling. I could\u2026 go look at the rest of my drafts and see how they fit into this. Now I gotta go to bed though\u2026 gn and let\u2019s see if I pick this up tomorrow or some other day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(note to self: if the above images break, I can recreate them by looking for ‘2025jul blog architecture’ on my google drive)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2026feb27: revisiting this post while reviewing my archives and thinking that I ought to be making collections on here too. always be making collections. I gave this advice to one of my clients and he loved it \u2731 I\u2019ve been freshly noticing recently that when I sit down to go… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3R7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14825"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14971,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14825\/revisions\/14971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}