Daniel Tan's Shortform

Daniel Tan

This is a special post for quick takes by Daniel Tan. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Capture thoughts quickly.

Thoughts are ephemeral. Like butterflies or bubbles. Your mind is capricious, and thoughts can vanish at any instant unless you capture them in something more permanent.

Also, you usually get less excited about a thought after a while, simply because the novelty wears off. The strongest advocate for a thought is you, at the exact moment you had the thought.

I think this is valuable because making a strong positive case for something is a lot harder than raising an objection. If the ability to make this strong positive case is a highly time-sensitive thing then you should prioritise it while you can.

Of course it's also true that reflecting on thoughts may lead you to update positively or negatively on the original thought - in which case you should also capture those subsequent thoughts quickly, and let some broader pattern emerge.

1CstineSublime2y

That is helpful, thank you. [...] This doesn't match up with my experience. For example, I have hundreds, HUNDREDS of film ideas. And sometimes I'll be looking through and be surprised by how good one was - as in I think "I'd actually like to see that film but I don't remember writing this". But they are all horrendously impractical in terms of resources. I don't really have a reliable method of going through and managing 100s of film ideas, and need a system for evaluating them. Reviewing weekly seems good for new notes, but what about old notes from years ago? That's probably two separate problems, the point I'm trying to make is that even non-film ideas, I have a lot of notes that just sit in documents unvisted and unused. Is there any way to resurrect them, or at least stop adding more notes to the pile awaiting a similar fate? Weekly Review doesn't seem enough because not enough changes in a week that an idea on Monday suddenly becomes actionable on Sunday. Not all my notes pertain to film ideas, but this is perhaps the best kept, most organized and complete note system I have hence why I mention it. [...] Yeah but nothing is working for me, forget a perfect model, a working model would be nice. A "good enough" model would be nice.

2Daniel Tan2y

Note that I think some amount of this is inevitable, and I think aiming for 100% retention is impractical (and also not necessary). If you try to do it you'll probably spend more time optimising your knowledge system than actually... doing stuff with the knowledge. It's also possible you could benefit from writing better handles. I guess for film, good handles could look like a compelling title, or some motivating theme / question you wanted to explore in the film. Basically, 'what makes the film good?' Why did it resonate with you when you re-read it? That'll probably tell you how to give a handle. Also, you can have multiple handles. The more ways you can reframe something to yourself the more likely you are to have one of the framings pull you back later.

Thanks for preserving with my questions and trying to help me find an implementation. I'm going to try and reverse engineer my current approach to handles.

Oh of course, 100% retention is impossible. As ridiculous and arbitrary as it is, I'm using Sturgeon's law as a guide for now.