I take a lot of notes. I also have quite a lot of thoughts about note-taking. I could probably keep going.

I also have a lot of thoughts about vocabulary.

The word “note” is from Latin “notare”, “nota” – mark, sign, character, letter, notus, gno–

close enough that I feel like that we can smush them. Things get smushed, we suggest that they should be, and if enough people agree, we’ve memed it into a Thing

do I want to encourage people to notice things? the art of noticing? what do you see? what do you care about?

everything comes from noticing. selene had a thread about how noticing things and sharing her noticings changed her life.

you can change behavior just by describing things. i think in thinking about this substack i’ve often spent a lot of time overtheorizing things in abstract terms, and it suffers from a lack of groundedness, a lack of noticings.

i’ve been meaning to do a post about desire paths, which is very funny because it’s like a part of me is trying to force the thing to happen from a top down way, which is antithetical to the spirit of desire paths in the first place. a desire path is a path that forms because people keep walking it, walk to where they want to go. there’s a certain follow-the-leader aspect where you vote with your feet. i’ve been like “write a post about desire paths!” and there’s another part of me that’s like “i dont wanna!” and i’m trying to err on the side of respecting the latter. so the next thing to do is really to ask, well why don’t you want to? isn’t it a good idea? yes. so why not write about a good idea? something doesn’t feel right. can we figure out what’s wrong together? maybe it’s something meant to be mentioned in passing? would you be ok writing about it in passing? I think yes. so okay for now let’s merge it.

// desire paths

What do I want to do with this essay?

• Introduce you to the concept of a desire path, if you aren’t familiar
• Desire paths can form in all sorts of contexts, not just physical spaces. You can learn to pave your own desire paths to make life easier for yourself. I want to encourage you to think about your desires, and other people’s desires, and to think about paths, pathways, obstacles and so on. I’d also like to geek out a little bit about things like lightning, trade networks, brain cells.
• stuff to make sure to talk about: it’s about being led by emotion, you remember how you felt. so why not use how you felt as the underlying thing? it’s slightly awkward, I guess. it can feel dramatic, theatrical,
• desire path tweets

// magic junkyard, info architecture, how to scope things?

Sometimes I gotta pause and ask myself, what am I doing here? What do I want to be doing, really? Right now I’m in this text editor for a couple of reasons. One is that I love writing, always have, and I’m trying to find a way to enjoy myself in my writing. Another is that I do feel some sense of obligation to publish. An obligation to myself, to my process, to my craft, whatever you wanna call it. And as I covered in I Don’t Wanna!, there’s a part of me that resents that.

I have a lot of “stuff”. Loads of notes.

I’m internally conflicted in lots of ways all the time. I could further joke that I’m internally conflicted about whether or not that’s a good thing. It can be good, it can be bad, it depends on how I’m managing the conflict. Conflicts can be interesting, productive.

I generally try not to wade too much into “productivity discourse”. There’s a lot of talk about apps and routines and other minutae that I generally…