Phthursday Musings: Notes on Notes

I have a text file on my desktop. For a while now it has been named notes go here.txt but it has had many different names over time. It collects notes.

I also usually have notes in other text files, some of which are named and some of which are ad hoc.

I also have notes on my phone. And on paper. The paper notes can sometimes wind up all over the place.

Over the last couple of weeks I have consolidated many notes. I have followed up on them, I have just sort of de-cluttered the notes. But, as always seems to be the case, de-cluttering leads to brainstorming, leads to replacement notes.

Are notes a form of clutter? Are they a weapon against clutter? Is the clutter actually in the mind? What about how it seems like things which get taken down as notes are not actually as important as some other things, and so when all of these things invevitably are out of sight, out of mind, the notes are serving to emphasize the wrong things?

A common note generating event is when I have some reason to reboot the laptop. There’s a good chance that I have 324802 browser tabs open, and since I’m going to lost them all, I copy and paste the URLs into a note. (My standard software here is Notepad++ which I suspect is the case for many of you.)

Often these URLs are articles. I’ll go through morning email, click on an article or two, leave them open until I can get back to them, and that’ll be six days later, something like that. I imagine other people do things like this, but I don’t know that. For all I know I alone do crazy shit like have a text file with links to 17 articles sitting around for months on end.

My notes also tend to include a lot of books. I am notoriously difficult to shop for, and yet, it’s dawned on me in the last week that I pretty much always have a backlog of books or albums that I’ve noted that I want to get. But they’re buried in notes. I can’t remember when I’m asked. It seems I can’t even remember the existence of the notes when I’m asked.

Often these notes feel like some sort of advanced conversation with myself. It’s sort of past me leaving an instruction for future me. But then there can also be this element of accessing data for myself. When I get to thinking about these processes… I’ve long wondered if this is how it works for other people. Because no matter how many movies we’ve seen where a character is doing some sort of a voiceover, we can’t really know what it’s like for someone else to communicate with themselves.

I think though that I do a lot more of this sort of thing than most people. My wife, the only other person with any real sense for how many notes might be scattered around, never seems to act as though what she’s seeing strikes her as especially normal behavior.

Nobody ever talks about things like this. People use the expression “compare notes” all the time, but who would actually compare note-taking?

Yes, this is probably all neurosis at work. But how common is it? Does it matter how common it is? Is there something meaningful to be gleaned?

We are at that time of year when people do make notes to themselves. We call these things New Year’s Resolutions. Not everyone does this, certainly not all the time, but the flipping of the calendar year is often a good time for both reflection and forward thinking, and I would argue that resolutions are just a particular subset of notes-to-self that people might create.

Does the form of the note matter? In other words, not the actual substance of the resolution, but the way it is noted? If you put it down on a pad of paper and bury that paper, does the resolution still exist? What if you blow it up into 144 point font and print it out and staple it to your arm? I mean, that would be one hell of a note. But would it work? Or would you just be standing there like a schmuck, bleeding?

As the pandemic persists, while some people seem like maybe they’re handling things alright, I think others just get to weirder and weirder places, and I wonder about things like resolutions, about the way we are self-communicating, the things we are prioritizing, and how we are or aren’t seeing those things through.

I work in software, and by and large I’d say that my company’s work has managed to persist fairly well, all things considered. But I have to believe that there are people I work with, even people who work for me, for whom the process is much harder than the norm. Different people learn in different ways, so it only makes sense that different people cope with all of the elements of the pandemic in different ways, and some of those ways are no doubt worse than others in practice. One thing I think my company may have pivoted to is taking erstwhile notes and turning them increasingly into tickets because we felt it necessary to formalize some work pathways which used to be more successfully informal.

What if this sort of thing isn’t just a workplace kind of phenomenon? What if a lot of people have, consciously or otherwise, relied on a form of note-taking which was more oral in nature, more collaborative generally, and have found themselves over the last two years having to keep track of things in very different ways than they’re used to? What if for some of those people it’s worked better, while for others it’s been a miserable failure?

Funnily some of my remaining notes are based on responses I’ve gotten from previous Musings. I have a note to listen to Alice Cooper’s Killer. I have a note to spend time on the website inkie.org and I had other similar notes but I actually managed to follow through on some of them in the last week!

So my notes aren’t all self-conversations. They’re also, um, META-conversations.

I don’t write partial notes, by the way. Any note I have is complete.

Whole.

{ ducks }

anyway

Happy New Year!

NOTE: please let 2022 be better for Planet Earth than 2020 & 2021