Random notes on paper

One of the things that happens when you start to go through your old stuff is that you realize how much things have changed. How much you have changed, and how much the world has changed (as if there is a difference!).

I’ve been noticing that many years ago I used to make lots of little notes to myself on 8.5″x11″ pieces of paper. Usually on the back of paper where I had printed something or other.

These were notes about things to do, phone numbers, random addresses, little diagrams, or just some thought or other that had occurred to me. And usually many of these things were crowded together on the same place until there was no more room.

It occurs to me now how inefficient this was, from the perspective of today, because none of it was searchable. Unless I happened to come upon that particular piece of paper again, it would be gone — until now, many years later, when most of that information is utterly useless.

But back then I didn’t have any good way of searching through stuff on a computer, so there wasn’t some other way of doing things. Thinking back on it now, I suspect that the major use of these little scribbles was to focus my thoughts.

I could lose the physical paper, but that act of writing it down fixed it in my mind, at least for a while. It was an imperfect system, but back then it was pretty much the only game in town.

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