Archive fever

Notes on notetaking and my writing process

Hello friend, it’s been a while —

This entry turned out longer than I expected, and I go into quite a bit of detail into my personal organizational tools which may be painfully boring to read — unless, like me, the thought of new stationery, well-designed spreadsheets, or productivity tools excite you, in which case this post might be insightful.

Either way — thank you for continuing to support my work.

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My mind is fast — and I say that neither as a brag nor confession of fault, but simply as fact.

Others may experience thought similarly, but are better at mentally organizing them, or are skilled in determining which of the ideas and images are valuable to them at the moment. I’m usually overwhelmed. I am still developing the mental sharpness I observe in people I admire — their capacity to accurately cite information on a whim or concisely explain a concept. Unfortunately, it’s not something that comes naturally to me (I truly believe it does for some extraordinary people out there), so in cultivating this skill I must turn to systems that help me collect, navigate, and analyze information.

Over the years I have tried many tools for data organization: various store-bought planners ranging from whimsical to minimalist, bullet journals, a custom Google Sheets template, productivity applications like ClickUp, Rock, and Notion, strategically placed notepads in my room. The problem is that I overhaul my system before it’s had sufficient time to be truly effective.

Right now, I employ two tools to give my daily life structure: a bullet journal on a B6 slim Midori dotted notebook — for their value, the quality of Midori notebooks is, in my opinion, simply unmatched — and my newly designed Notion dashboards.

Infinitely customizable without sacrificing clarity and efficiency, the bullet journal system has stayed with me since I first adopted it in college. It works wonderfully as the system’s flexibility can accommodate with ease the frequent changes in my mental processing. One way I allow space for reinvention is by creating my pages one month at a time. Before a new month begins, I turn to the next blank sheet of my notebook and evaluate what pages I want to keep moving forward. The monthly and daily spreads are essential, so those are a given, and right now I only have three other pages: a health log, which tracks my sleep and nutrition; a growth log, where I record notable milestones in different areas of my life like relationships, fitness, and writing; and a monthly scratch pad where I jot down goals or ideas I may want to keep in mind for the month. I have followed this system so far, though admittedly there were months when I had logged poorly, leaving the system unused.

Because the bullet journal is analog, maintaining this organization system also serves a meditative purpose. Sitting down every month to draw my pages is a strangely therapeutic practice: with a ruler, pencil, and two colored pens, it takes about twenty minutes to complete, as I write down dates and titles by hand. At the beginning of the year I attempted to draft more ornate pages with a complicated color-coding system, but I’ve had to accept that the format that works best with my mental processing is something minimalist and unrestrictive. (When I forget to bring a colored pen, the log falls apart!) Meanwhile, the (imperfect) habit of logging in the morning also reminds me to slow down and, even if only for a moment, be attentive. There’s a certain pleasure in this act, and I think it is primarily for this reason that the bullet journal system, out of the many I have tried, has stayed with me so long.

That it is analog is, functionally, also its weakness. My bullet journal is not something I like to update when I am on the go, so it is usually during particularly busy weeks that I neglect to fill in my daily logs. While I’m not extremely strict about the journal’s aesthetic, I also tend to avoid writing in it when I don’t have the right pen, or when there isn’t an opportunity to properly lay the notebook out flat on a table.

To augment these gaps in my system, I turn to my phone, something that, for better or worse, I have with me at all times. In it is an application I’ve only recently fully appreciated: Notion. I’ve had Notion on my devices for a while now, but until last week I used it mostly for simple notetaking, blissfully unaware of the application’s full potential. But during a lull period in my day, I decided to watch videos on how to maximize Notion, and I was quickly won over by its possibilities.

Like the bullet journal, Notion is wonderfully flexible (and, for personal use, unbelievably free). It isn’t the most intuitive tool, but after grasping the fundamentals — think in blocks and pages — Notion’s secrets quickly reveal themselves. Using blocks, I can build virtually any kind of page I want without knowing a thing about coding: a dashboard, a simple database, a checklist, a plain note, and, apparently, even a website. Visually, Notion has an abundance of features for personalization — text formatting, icons, page covers, and plenty of widgets — that bring fun and entertainment to organization.

Over the course of a few days, I developed a structure that seems to fit my needs at the moment. It is centered on a homepage I like to call Nest which follows the PARA method I learned about through my dear friend and data manager extraordinaire, Kirsten. For aesthetic and quick reference, I also added weather and moon phase widgets.

For information I encounter on the go that I can’t quickly organize, I file into a temporary space I call my Scratch Pad — an idea dump. Ideally, whatever I add here should be soon migrated into the proper categories.

By far, however, Notion’s greatest value to me is its capability to capture, display, and link data in multiple ways. This has been particularly invaluable in developing my craft. As it is, I am not a student or “professional writer”, and by this I mean that my practice is currently not subject to the external structure of compulsory deadlines or quotas that, at the very least, ensures that a writer keeps writing. Writing has always been a solitary art, but writing outside of institutions is doubly challenging in that there isn’t a clear path towards publication or “becoming a writer”. All I know is that if I am serious about sustaining this practice — and I am — then I must regard it as work. I must write; but that desire, that impulse, goes nowhere without structure.

Before Notion, I had kept all of my writing in another Midori notebook. In it are drafts, scribbles, and sketches penned with no order or structure in mind, which is wonderfully liberating, as the point is simply to record with little censorship or interference. Fragments with the potential to become a complete piece are then transcribed digitally for easy revision. Combing through my messy entries when I am working on a project can be thrilling, as though I were digging through old archives for research, but the missing information, the ghosts of thoughts and ideas I remember having, is evident. The archive fever kicks in.

There were two main things in my writing system I wanted to improve: the documentation of interesting excerpts, lines, images, or sounds encountered in everyday life, and the linking of various pieces of information, such as those snippets, with one another. Through Notion, I was able to develop those improvements.

First, the overview: I designed a Writing page as if it were my office. On the imagined desk, there is a calendar filled out with my deadlines; to the side, a stack of books I am re/reading or citing; my notebooks and papers in a drawer; my current project sitting at the center. Then, within each writing project, which is contained in one of the notebook databases, is a subpage called Sources, which is where I collect everything that I think would be of interest or relevance to that work.

The constant search for an organization system may seem exhausting and frivolous, but over the years it has become apparent to me that finding and having such a system — an archival medium — is vital to my personhood. In externalizing memory, in making my mark through the archive, I make a form of pledge, which Jacques Derrida, in his lecture “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, says is “a token of the future”. What life do I project — and thus create — by what I archive, and how? What do I choose to document and remember, and, implicitly, what do I leave out? What do my journal and dashboards reveal about my psyche, and, in turn, how is it shaped by the finitude of my chosen tools? (How does thinking in blocks and pages, for instance, alter the internal processing of my thoughts? Surely it does. Another conversation about how new technologies shape our thinking can be had elsewhere.) More eloquently:

This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.
— from “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Jacques Derrida

There is, of course, the simple impulse to remember — to resist losing memory — that is familiar to anyone engaging in some form of archiving, like journaling, posting on social media, collecting, or making art. The insignificance of my boring daily routine to the grand scheme of things doesn’t stop me from wanting to record the time I had coffee, the hours of sleep I had, my mood on that particular afternoon. That essay or film that moved me may be useful later on for research or conversation. Partly for mere posterity and partly in anticipation of future use that I am yet to discover, I enjoy making a record of my life. Tracing the breadcrumbs of my thoughts and habits is an insightful exercise that has, in the past, actually revealed to me obvious patterns I missed. I’d notice a recurring word or feeling across different entries and realize I have been trying to say the same thing all along that, perhaps, is worth looking deeper into. During dark days, a happy piece from my archive can illuminate, or an even darker one can remind me of my resilience. In this remembrance is not just nostalgia, but a way forward; survival.