SnowflaKs

After watching The Unknown Known I started questioning a lab behavior of compulsive record keeping. There's a fine line between data management/archiving and recording information to a fault. Record keeping was not a friend to Rumsfeld; look what compulsive archiving did for Nixon.

While working at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld
became infamous for his excessive memos called
Snowflakes (in reference to a "blizzard" effect).
Many of which were presented in
The Unknown Known as self contradicting
or to be eponymously nonsensical.

Not just the tape recordings but also
the archived notes with which Nixon's
deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield
absconded, that now reveal the level
of maliciousness and contradiction in
Nixon governance behaviors. 

The archiving can be so tedious and I start to question how much of the information ever gets used again. But when I get going, I can't stop thinking of all the pieces of today's story that may come in handy to know sometime in the future. Idea hoarding. Detail pack rat.

Maybe Errol Morris is right, maybe anything more than brief self expression inevitably reveals something regrettable. And maybe all these notebooks, notes, records of meeting, data, ideas, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly to-do lists...maybe it's self indulgent and nothing but a record of how crazy I am.

So I've been going through the collection of notebooks:


Pro: Once I started using them, people noticed and often gifted them to me. Some of them that I've purchased remind me of the people I was with at the time. Some of them are peppered with directions from visiting friends. It's nice to have these utilitarian mementos of friends and family.

I don't know if this is a Pro or a Con: clearly these records are less useful after getting wet, but some entries remind me of when I do good doodling. Now that doodling has been shown to help focus one's attention and improve memory, I want to recognize the positive impact some of the really good looking notes may play in organizing thoughts and helping me move forward on work loads.

Clearly they help me dump some weird thoughts before I need to say them out loud.

Pro: They've been amazing help when structuring data management schemes. I mean, generally speaking, these tedious notes help organize a lot of abstract information.


Con: Risk of incrimination
There's always the thoughts you would like to have left to impermanence...

Dear 1997 Kim, you end up living in
Chicago for 13 years so far...

Con: Even after organizing thoughts in a journal, you still have to do something. Something digital probably like a shared google doc or an email...why not just skip the notebook step and go right to the task...

Any thoughts out there? 

I'm torn