🌱 incremental note-taking
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools
Using notes as memory. Log ideas and don’t edit them make new ones. Build connections to the old ones if necessary. Don’t just curate some of them.
Tools don’t appear to have support this like pencil and paper.
Small notebooks a page a day with the date. You have immutable history that you can browse.
We don’t remember things by modifying our past memories – we simply accumulate more, as if adding entries to a log or a journal
We search through them by traversing time, looking for links between ideas and experiences
Time is essential to how we remember
This makes me think this archive.bsteph.com is going about things the wrong way.
Time is a mental anchor for our brain.
designed less like a place you must “move into” with all your past notes slung behind your shoulders, and more like an extra layer of memory you grow around yourself, incrementally and gradually over time.
If my favorite color was red and now it’s blue, we don’t go back and change the fact that my favorite color was red to be blue – that’s wrong. Instead, we add a new, updated fact that my favorite color is now blue, but the old fact remains historically true.
Principles
- Captured ideas are better than missed ones.
- Adding new ideas is better than updating old ones
- Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless
The concept of a log or immutable history feels like how files and projects move forward in my experience. Seems like accepting that and having tools work to help you find connections and see into that mess is what is missing.
I know having data stamps on things has been invaluable to me in my work.