Closing Open Loops

This week has been a very reflective week.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the things I'm trying to achieve, how I manage my time and some of the areas I want to improve.

My process of building up a collection of good notes that can fuel my writing is one of the areas that I've been trying to refine every year. One of the big missing pieces was the actual output--the writing.

This morning, I was revisiting Andy Matuschak’s working note and came across the idea of not leaving any closed loops. Which is essentially what I had started to do. This open-ended note-taking practice had a final output; I had closed that loop.

One of the loops I haven’t closed is the reading loop. What often happens is I collect lots of articles, websites, research papers and videos. Then I stockpile these sources and maybe get around to reading a portion of them. The rest often sit there and are eventually forgotten about.

Instead, the advice is to make sure that you read the sources that are still of interest while taking notes to be refined into more permanent notes later (see evergreen notes and/or Zettlekasten). The rest should be discarded or archived somewhere else where they don't require any action.

I'm so guilty of this and have been working on finding the right tools to funnel my reading and make it more manageable and that it results in an output that feeds into my writing.

The internet is like a firehose of information and I think tools and processes like these are just good hygiene. The alternative is always feeling overloaded and overwhelmed.