When I was about 11 years old, I used to blog on a now-defunct service called Diary-X.com. It was something like Blogger or LiveJournal, but I liked it for a bunch of reasons – some of my favorite people were on it, and it had great templates, and so on. As Wikipedia put it: “In early 2006, the server’s hard drive failed, and since there was no backup, the entire website and all users’ diaries were lost irretrievably”. I was devastated. I started over on LiveJournal, and also started a WordPress blog, and I was a bit disoriented for a few years.
When I was in the military in 2010-2012, I kept a paper journal that I would write in meticulously. I kept a daily calendar of notes, I wrote all of my thoughts, ideas, feelings, todos… the Quantified Self movement was in full-swing at the time, and while I never quite managed to muster the discipline or conscientiousness to do the elaborate self-tracking that others did, I admired it, and I tried to live up to it in my own janky way. One day, I brought the journal with me outfield, and I lost it. I was devastated again, and disoriented for a few years.
Sometime maybe around 2013-2015 or so, my WordPress blog (visaisahero.wordpress.com, which I since migrated to visakanv.com) was starting to feel clunky, tedious, overwrought. I can’t remember what exactly inspired me to do it, but I decided to delete a great many number of posts, summarizing them in a few sentences each. It was a relief in the short term, but in the subsequent months and years, I found myself deeply regretting that I no longer had access to some of my writing.
So here I am now, in 2023. I’ve mentioned the above anecdotes in passing here and there, but I don’t think I’ve ever properly sat down to face it, feel it. The core feeling I have is pain. It hurts to have lost so much material. I have some secondary feelings like guilt for not doing better backups, not managing my data better, and so on. I also have a part of me that’s dismissive about the sense of loss. “It’s just a blog and a notebook, c’mon. Other people have lost so much more.” Saying that out loud, I see how… dismissive and unhelpful it is. The truth is I have a lot of feelings, and if I don’t face the feelings honestly, I can’t “get past” them. And I’m someone who’s earnestly preached, lectured, sermonized on the importance of facing one’s feelings! It’s so tricky. It’s so subtle. Blink and you’ll miss it. It’s so easy to fall back into an autopilot routine of “don’t make noise, don’t cause a scene, don’t be so dramatic, don’t be tedious, just get on with it.” But zooming out, it’s like saying… “don’t poop, just get on with it”. There’s only so long you can ignore a blockage of some sort before it starts to affect everything else.
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This is an essay about… folders, files, notes, and managing all of that. I wouldn’t say I’m great at it. But I’m moderately functional. And I think what’s interesting is that I do probably manage a lot more material than most people typically do. I think of myself as an author, so everything in my life is research. And the result is that I have a pretty sprawling library of notes, files, folders and so on. Right now I’m sitting at my computer, and there are two books on the desk next to me – Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Gillette and Moore’s King Warrior Magician Lover, both of which I’ve been meaning to write overviews of. Above my computer monitors is a shelf with several more books, and perhaps more importantly, a tall stack of notebooks and journals that I’ve accumulated over the years, many of them half-full of ‘false starts’. Wait. Even the phrase ‘false starts’ is an interesting tell here. A false start is a concept from athletics – when someone goes off before the starting pistol is fired. That’s a terrible metaphor to use when it comes to creative work! Art is not a race, there is no starting pistol, no finish line. I’ve been subtly beating myself up about this for years and it’s completely the wrong frame!
And that’s just the physical stuff, which I feel would probably take about a month for me to really properly index, revisit and review. Then there’s the digital stuff, which is so sprawling and overwhelming sometimes I get anxious just trying to conceive of it. Just one of my blogs has over 800,000 words, and I have over 230,000 tweets. Another 200+ posts on my main blog, which I feel crummy about because it feels janky and outdated. I have about 1,000 notes in my iOS notes right now, which is part of my workspace. I have a whole bunch of ongoing “ebook drafts” in Google docs. I have a page on my Roam that has almost 28,000
From time to time I start a blank document and try to write, from memory, everything I can remember about what stuff I have lying around. I have attempted to write an essay about it at least a couple of dozen times, and every single time I end up exhausted, stretched too thin, lost and confused.
As I write this now, I realize this is a project management issue. When faced with something obviously unmanageable, after you’ve made several attempts to test the assumption, the next smart thing to do is to carve out a manageable chunk and do something about that. Clearly the approach I’ve been trying isn’t quite working, so I ought to articulate what the approach is, and what I think is wrong with it, and what I think a better approach might be.
A thing I often do is…
- open my notes app
- see that there’s a lot of stuff in there
- start clicking around a bunch, see if there’s anything I can merge or delete
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I noticed myself getting tired and distracted. Lately I’ve been wanting to experiment with the idea that I don’t really believe in “distraction” as a concept.
I was thinking earlier when helping someone with their struggle with writing fiction, about how I’m good at being dynamic, right-sizing…
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In 2013, I wrote a post about productivity apps that was #1 on Hacker News. It was titled “productivity apps fill buckets when they should be lighting fires”.
i’ve changed my perspective over the years.
resonance, interestingness, earnestness, desire paths, yeet yourself, constraints– the common theme in all of these essays, the quality without a name… all of these essays are circling around the same thing, gesturing at the same thing. it might be focus, it might be attention sovereignty. i dont think this essay is that yet, so i’m still putting stuff off, still teasing
michelle akin talking about eroticism… yes. how do we bring aliveness, zest, gusto to our being? how do we be honest with ourselves?
information architecture… delivery, on-time delivery, on-demand, what is important and relevant at some moment in time?
mcluhan on artists
my practical problem of having written so much and also there’s so much more to read every day… this is not a technical problem or a technological problem, though it could be framed as such…
i can imagine a hypothetical system that’s beautiful in its elegance… when I used to work a proper job, content calendars… i’ve resisted this for a long time and maybe it’s time i reconsider that
somewhere in this essay i will figure out something that makes my heart burst into flames about folders and naming conventions and deleting and archiving and storing things
i believe in indexes, meta indexes, good reply game between notes
scaffolding… everything is scaffolding
past versions… version control… partitioning… referencing… threading… highlighting… condense the Index google drive thing into a single essay? worth a shot, right? feels like a bit of an impossible task. am i going to talk about the mitosis stuff here? I can link to it elsewhere… i like having standalone links
twitter, tumblr, reddit, how much of it can you really rely on? ideally it shouldn’t be necessary. ideally i should be able to recreate everything i need from scratch. truth is i’m still torn up and sad about stuff I’ve lost over the years. but… i can address that now, no? i can save some things that feel like they ought to be saved?
i find myself repeatedly thinking that i want to write my memoirs… what about a first draft? a table of contents?