What I keep in the margins

I write in books. Not neatly, and not in a system — just a line down the side of a paragraph that made me stop, and occasionally a word in the margin, usually a question.

It started as a way to find things again, and it turned out to be a way of reading. Marking a passage requires deciding that it matters, and deciding takes about four seconds, which is four seconds longer than I would otherwise have spent.

The transfer

Every few months I go back through what I marked and copy the survivors somewhere permanent. Most do not survive. A line that felt essential in February reads as merely well-phrased in June, and that filter is the actual value of the practice. What is left is small and has earned it.

The same thing works for interfaces. I keep a running file of screenshots of things that made me stop — an empty state that was funny, a transition that explained a hierarchy, an error message that told me exactly what to do. Most of them do not survive the second look either.

Why not a tool

I have tried the tools. They are good, and they all fail in the same way: capture becomes frictionless, so I capture everything, so the filter disappears, so the archive becomes a second internet that I also do not read.

A pencil is rate-limited. That turns out to be the feature.