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 \u2013 some of my favorite people were on it, and it had great templates, and so on. As Wikipedia put it: \u201cIn early 2006, the server’s hard drive failed, and since there was no backup, the entire website and all users’ diaries were lost irretrievably\u201d. I was devastated. I started over on LiveJournal, and also started a WordPress blog, and I was a bit disoriented for a few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2026 the Quantified Self<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here I am now, in 2023. I\u2019ve mentioned the above anecdotes in passing here and there, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve 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\u2019s dismissive about the sense of loss. \u201cIt\u2019s just a blog and a notebook, c\u2019mon. Other people have lost so much more.\u201d Saying that out loud, I see how\u2026 dismissive and unhelpful it is. The truth is I have a lot of feelings, and if I don\u2019t face the feelings honestly, I can\u2019t \u201cget past\u201d them. And I\u2019m someone who\u2019s earnestly preached, lectured, sermonized on the importance of facing one\u2019s feelings! It\u2019s so tricky. It\u2019s so subtle. Blink and you\u2019ll miss it. It\u2019s so easy to fall back into an autopilot routine of \u201cdon\u2019t make noise, don\u2019t cause a scene, don\u2019t be so dramatic, don\u2019t be tedious, just get on with it.\u201d But zooming out, it\u2019s like saying\u2026 \u201cdon\u2019t poop, just get on with it\u201d. There\u2019s only so long you can ignore a blockage of some sort before it starts to affect everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an essay about\u2026 folders, files, notes, and managing all of that. I wouldn\u2019t say I\u2019m great at it. But I\u2019m moderately functional. And I think what\u2019s 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\u2019m sitting at my computer, and there are two books on the desk next to me \u2013 Marshall McLuhan\u2019s Understanding Media<\/em>, and Gillette and Moore\u2019s King Warrior Magician Lover<\/em>, both of which I\u2019ve been meaning to write overviews of. <\/em>Above my computer monitors is a shelf with several more books, and perhaps more importantly, a tall stack of notebooks and journals that I\u2019ve accumulated over the years, many of them half-full of \u2018false starts\u2019. Wait. Even the phrase \u2018false starts\u2019 is an interesting tell here. A false start is a concept from athletics \u2013 when someone goes off before the starting pistol is fired. That\u2019s 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\u2019ve been subtly beating myself up about this for years and it\u2019s completely the wrong frame!<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s just the physical stuff, which I feel would probably take about a month for me to really properly index, revisit and review. Then there\u2019s the digital stuff, which is so sprawling and overwhelming sometimes I get anxious just trying to conceive of it. Just one of my blogs<\/a> 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 \u201cebook drafts\u201d in Google docs. I have a page on my Roam that has almost 28,000<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I write this now, I realize this is a project management issue<\/strong>. When faced with something obviously unmanageable, after you\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been trying isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A thing I often do is\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n I noticed myself getting tired and distracted. Lately I\u2019ve been wanting to experiment with the idea that I don\u2019t really believe in \u201cdistraction\u201d as a concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was thinking earlier when helping someone with their struggle with writing fiction, about how I\u2019m good at being dynamic, right-sizing\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2013, I wrote a post about productivity apps that was #1 on Hacker News<\/a>. It was titled \u201cproductivity apps fill buckets when they should be lighting fires<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n i\u2019ve changed my perspective over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n resonance, interestingness, earnestness, desire paths, yeet yourself, constraints\u2013 the common theme in all of these essays, the quality without a name\u2026 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\u2019m still putting stuff off, still teasing<\/p>\n\n\n\n michelle akin talking about eroticism\u2026 yes. how do we bring aliveness, zest, gusto to our being? how do we be honest with ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n information architecture\u2026 delivery, on-time delivery, on-demand, what is important and relevant at some moment in time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n mcluhan on artists<\/p>\n\n\n\n my practical problem of having written so much and also there\u2019s so much more to read every day\u2026 this is not a technical problem or a technological problem, though it could be framed as such\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n i can imagine a hypothetical system that\u2019s beautiful in its elegance\u2026 when I used to work a proper job, content calendars\u2026 i\u2019ve resisted this for a long time and maybe it\u2019s time i reconsider that<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n i believe in indexes, meta indexes, good reply game between notes<\/p>\n\n\n\n scaffolding\u2026 everything is scaffolding<\/p>\n\n\n\n past versions\u2026 version control\u2026 partitioning\u2026 referencing\u2026 threading\u2026 highlighting\u2026 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\u2026 i like having standalone links<\/p>\n\n\n\n twitter, tumblr, reddit, how much of it can you really rely on? ideally it shouldn\u2019t be necessary. ideally i should be able to recreate everything i need from scratch. truth is i\u2019m still torn up and sad about stuff I\u2019ve lost over the years. but\u2026 i can address that now, no? i can save some things that feel like they ought to be saved?<\/p>\n\n\n\n i find myself repeatedly thinking that i want to write my memoirs\u2026 what about a first draft? a table of contents?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 some of my favorite people were on it, and it had great templates, and so on.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[698],"class_list":["post-11670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-memoir"],"yoast_head":"\n\n