.txt
I have a bad memory. If I don’t jot something down then I’m going to forget it. Even if it’s a task that I need to do in just ten minutes time I still jot it down.
And I’ve used a plethora of tools for this task. But several years ago I just settled upon individual text files for each task. Simple. But this turned my plain text folder into an out of control, bloated monster. It became so unwieldy that my usual digitally tidy self just gave up and left it be. I was no longer concerned with tagging, naming, and filing. And as a result fairly soon it morphed from a to-do list into an everything-bucket. Any piece of digital text got put into an individual .txt file. Recipes, book highlights, web articles, diary entries, cockney slang, album reviews, wine inventory, places visited, etc.
And it’s been this way for quite a while. A 12.59 MB pile of 5000+ plain text files. But it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my digital life. Suffocated by my need for things to be organised I rarely actually just got stuff down. Now everything gets written down, no matter how obviously inconsequential it may seem at the time.
Everything gets written down. Nothing gets forgotten.