The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hi everyone,
There are possibilities all around you all the time. The trick is learning how to notice them.
Everything in your life, every experience and conversation that you have, everything you notice, every thought that you think, everything that has ever sparked your curiosity and interest, that’s all material that is available to you. Material that you can remix and combine and play with, that you can use to create with. The better your material, the more possibilities you’ll be able to create.
Thoughts and ideas are like butterflies. They’re flowing constantly around in your mind. They float in, sometimes they bask in the sun of your awareness for a moment, and they flutter away. Where do they go?
What do you do with your thoughts? Do you jot them down or do you let them drift away on the wind?
One of the simplest and easiest ways to organize your thoughts is to stack them in piles. Every time you have something to add, just add it to the top of the pile. So the most recent thing is always going to be on the top of the pile, and the oldest thing will be at the bottom.
Some people get pretty geeky about their note taking systems. They have special tools and databases and tags, and there are a ton of really, really useful and interesting methods for keeping notes. But any system is only ever going to be as good as what you put into it.
Anyway, the point being, what's important is not the tool or the method, it’s the habit of noticing thoughts and catching them before they slip away.
I have a handwritten journal where I write down thoughts as they occur to me. I'll write down quotes, things that I read, things that I hear people say.
I also have a digital piling cabinet, which is just a bunch of Google docs that I paste things into as I find them. Each Google doc is a pile of ideas, links, and things that I’ve come across that I find interesting. The title of the doc is the name of the category.
Here’s how it works. When I come across something new, something interesting, I try to think of a label or tag for it. What category would I put it in? If I already have a pile for that, I add it to that doc, and drop it at the top of the stack. If not, I start a new doc with that title, which becomes a new pile.
When I post or leave a comment on social media, or answer a question by email, sometimes I think, hey, that’s a useful thought, I might be able to use that later. So I add it to the piling cabinet.
I have a pile called Problems of Our Time. There’s a lot of stuff in there. I've got a pile called Creative Work. I've got a pile called Journaling. One called Writing. I have a ton of piles. I have a pile of TV shows and movies I want to watch, a pile for places I want to go, a pile of ideas for weekend getaways. I even have a pile of things that I haven't labeled or put into a pile yet.
Each pile is a doc that contains ideas and links to things on the web, but they also link across to each other. Some docs are just indexes, with links to other docs in the piling cabinet.
And every once in a while, when I’m looking for ideas, I'll go through them. It’s really not a coherent, organized, logical system. Honestly, it’s a mess. But it’s a mess that represents the actual mess of my life.
To me, the idea of one logical organization to rule them all, a perfect system, is a dream, an illusion, a fantasy. Everything can be organized in a million different ways or connected in a million different ways.
The most important thing is learning to notice the things that interest you. The second most important thing is capturing them.
The nice thing about Google docs is that I don’t have to worry too much about how they’re organized, because I can search the whole piling cabinet any time I want.
I like serendipity. I like things bubbling up. I like that I can delve through my piles and find connections that surprise me. I like that I can search a space where literally everything in it is — or once was — interesting to me. And so that's the reason I do it in that way.
Exercise.
Here’s your exercise for the week. Start a piling cabinet. If you have had trouble developing a system for yourself that’s logical and organized, think about making a piling cabinet for yourself. See what happens.
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