How do you know if you have a problem? I’m thinking particularly about my notes, but you could also talk about say, a drinking problem, or a shopping problem, etc. Generally speaking I believe the consensus is, it’s a problem when it gets in the way of your life. This can be a bit of a nebulous thing to diagnose. We hear, for example, of high-functioning alcoholics, who drink a lot but their lives seem generally okay. Then it’s only really a problem if they decide that it’s a problem. One approach is, “well, is it affecting other people in your life?” But that can be a matter of who you have in your life. And it’s not a stretch to say that there are people who think they have, say, “an emotional outburst problem”, but it turns out that actually they have a very controlling spouse. And in such a thought experiment it’s common to assume the worst of the spouse, but if we set aside those more “cartoon villain” examples, in the middle we have these more murky instances where maybe the couple just aren’t a good fit for each other, and would each be happier with someone else who’s more “in their range”. But then we get to how unlikely it is that anybody could ever be a perfect fit for anybody else. If you ditch one partner because they’re too boisterous, you might find your next partner to be too dull. Most of us are barely a perfect fit for ourselves.
Where am I going with this? The point is that defining problems can become quite a complex affair. And the nature of problems is: we solve the problems we know how to solve, and we’re thus left with the problems that we have not yet been able to solve. At any given time, it seems probable to me that most people would be dealing with at least one persistent problem that they have not yet figured out how to solve. It’s likely not even diagnosed properly, since we’re likelier to make progress on problems that are diagnosed properly.
One of the chief problems on my mind– I like to reconceptualize them as puzzles, because “problems” can develop rather ominous connotations– is the puzzle of my notes. I don’t 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’m honest with myself, there’s something “off” about it. I can easily envision a version of myself who has 3000 notes that are meticulously kept, and when asked would say “I love my notes, they’re great!” 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’t feel great about my notes.
When I collapse all my folders, they look like this:
‘Notes’ is the default folder where anything goes. ‘cleanup’ 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 ‘Notes’, since I can no longer remember what was going on there. Let’s glance through since there are only 11: there’s a todo list note that goes all the way back to 2019. The latest addition was “expand this thread about attention sovereignty into a blogpost”. A little further down there’s a link to a thread of todos, which includes, funnily enough, at number 6, “cleanup my iOS notes”. (already I notice that I’m tempted to start going in and touching things, doing things– which is something I want to be extra careful not to do too much of right now, because… I’ve 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’s just write one overview one time, alright Visa? Please? Thanks!! ) Ah– the rest of the notes are “cleanup notes”, 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’m hoping that this post itself may be, in a sense, one such document.
After cleanup we have the deceptively small-looking “notes2” with 10 notes in it… until you expand it and see that there’s a whole lot more:
What the hell is going on here? I believe that ‘shortnotes’ was a past attempt to consolidate literal short notes (2-3 lines), into ‘threaded notes’, so that I could have 19 notes instead of 200. What’s the difference between notes2 and notes3? I have no idea– I probably partitioned them just so that I would have to scroll through fewer notes at a time. I’m going to move all of notes3 into notes2, and rename notes4-long into longnotes, and…
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… this stuff is important to me. It’s a bit of a clusterfuck of memoirs and journal entries. I’ve always been slightly obsessive about trying to make sure that I’m spending my years fruitfully, and I have always had this amateur historian impulse to try and… do annual reviews. There’s a whole project here, maybe even two or three. It’s becoming clearer to me that this shouldn’t really be… in my iOS notes. It might make sense to create some google docs for these? I need more of a ‘workspace’ to do something with them, and I don’t really do work in 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… 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’s emblematic of how I used to think more locally. I’ve since cultivated an international network of peers. But I want to remember this particular detail, y’know? If I don’t remember, I might end up claiming that I always had an international focus– there are some notes about that too from earlier on– but the truth is messier than that. Does messy truth require messy note-keeping, though? I want to believe that it doesn’t need to be this messy. It’s this messy because I don’t 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’s 80th birthday:
“There were so many people – probably about 40-50 people in the room, all related to her, most of them carrying her genetic material in their bodies – including young children and little infants who’d have no real concept of how significant that might be. I found myself thinking, that’s 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.
I remember thinking sometimes – 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’re really just a branch on a greater tree, a part of something bigger than themselves. You see that they’re just one note in a greater symphony. There’s something poetic about that – something about how nobody is truly alone, even if you’re an orphan and you don’t realize it, you’re actually part of this tremendous tradition, this tremendous flowering, coming forth of humanity.”
I like this because I didn’t write it for twitter or for substack– I wrote it for myself. As I continue reading these notes I find myself starting to get a little emotional. There’s so much of me in here. For months, maybe years now I’ve been thinking of these notes as a tedious burden, as Something I Have To Deal With, and now I’m thinking I’d like to spend at least a week, maybe a month, just slowly rereading these and really feeling them. And maybe I’ll 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… 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.
Let’s keep moving. After annual reviews we have bookmarks… which contain pages and pages of links that I’ve saved. I’m pretty disciplined about only saving links that I’m very confident that I’d want to reference or revisit– but even so, I think it’s 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’d 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.
A selection here maybe?
next we come to reviews. to be continued.
reviews. here I have 85 notes from books, tv shows, movies, etc. Maybe for fun I’ll list out everything here?
Movies: Aladdin, I Not Stupid, I Not Stupid 2, Godfather 2, Raya, Iron Man 2, Frozen, Thor Ragnarok, EEAAO, Legally Blonde, Pattinson’s Batman, Lost Illusions, Alita: Battle Angel, Greatest Showman, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moana, Monsters Inc, Kung Fu Panda trilogy,
Documentaries: Jeen-Yuhs, AND1, 90s, Clarence Avant, The Minimalists, A Solitary Mann, Arnold, Beckham, Moonage Daydream (Bowie), Five Foot Four (Gaga),
TV: Korra, Futurama, Seinfeld, Arcane, Andor, Burke’s Connections, Star Trek, Paula Scher in Abstract, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Loki, Ramit’s Rich Life, Lion Mums, Cowboy Bebop
Games: God of War, Borderlands 2, Witcher 3, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Mass Effect: Andromeda,
Others: a youtube lecture about the Bhagavad Gita… there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s harder to summarize, where it’s less about some particular piece of media and more about themes, motifs, patterns and so on.
I could spend all day in this folder but I’ma do a little bit of tidying up (down to 77 from 85) and move on.
Next up we have:
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’s a pinned note that has a lot of draft ideas in it, I’ll save that for last maybe.
I found a section of a note that said “this is more for my blog than for my substack” – I cut it out and moved it to the blog folder.
// i fell sick here and didnt check my computer for what feels like days, though probably just one day. but i’ll try to pick back up where I left off. ios notes again
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?
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took a looong break here, long enough that i’ve kind of forgotten what’s going on here. i’ll ignore all of the above for now and start as though this is from scratch
what do i know about what i’m trying to do? reduce total # of notes. reduce # of folders. let’s open everything… “icebox” has 2 notes… published them to /archive/. “bookmarks” had about 7 notes, I’ve moved all of them into a single google doc for triaging
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the baby’s 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’d like to write and publish something on substack, so here we are. lately what i’ve been doing with this time has been “sorting through my notes”.
note-sorting is an infinite game. i will obviously have unsorted notes left behind after I’m dead, and i think i’ve made my peace with that.
imperfect, unfinished notes are a sign of a living process. “perfect notes” are a kind of death. ideally, they “die” 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. so. nothing is absolutely perfect. but there are such things as ‘little perfections’. some things are ‘just right’ for their time and context.
over the past couple of weeks, i’ve made some tremendous (to me) breakthroughs with my notes. i flinch a little from talking about this, i think because there’s a smarmy, corporate, utilitarian voice that people often use when talking about note-taking, and i’ve internalized some of it by osmosis, and i despise that voice so much. but i’ll 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 my notes. people talking about notes in terms of productivity make me a little sick. i don’t 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 to me.
i’ve 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– possessions like fridge magnets and guitar pedals– are notes, in that they are reminders of varying kinds. reminders of what is possible, reminders of our intentions, reminders of who we are.
do you see where i’m going with this? i had a minor breakthrough a while ago while thinking about messes:
looking back, i’d 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.
my iOS notes, which are the notes I’ve 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.
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’d check in on them from time to time, but the time never quite felt ripe to do anything with them.
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.
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<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.
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>
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1 George Orwell said that “every book is a failure”, which was a quote that really helped me when I was struggling to finish Introspect. what does it even mean to finish, when every finish is a failure? well, you hope that your failures are nonetheless interesting, and hopefully useful, and most importantly to me, have heart, have some sort of animating spirit that makes the whole thing worth engaging with. a reader engaging with a work should be able to feel the love that the author put into it.
2 i’m always drawn to media examples. the lord of the rings movies were a ‘perfect’ trilogy. radiohead’s OK computer was a ‘perfect’ album. ‘the office’ was a particular kind of perfect sitcom for its time– one of the ways to support this claim is to notice how it could not have been made + well-received a decade earlier or later. duke nukem 3d was perfect for its time in it’s pixellated bawdiness. the attempts to make a decent sequel all failed miserably. duke was perfect for 1996 and that was that. the matrix was a perfect movie for 1999. there was no way they could have made a good sequel starring keanu reeves and carrie-ann moss that wasn’t going to be awkward or cringe.