Hey there, welcome to this week’s Gav’s Note.

I sat at my desk this Tuesday and just stared at the screen. My coffee was warm. The room was quiet. My notes system was open in front of me. It looked pristine. The graph was connected. The folders were tidy.

But I felt stuck.

I realized I wasn't looking at a blank page. I was looking at a system that was waiting for me to be efficient. It was waiting for me to file something. To tag something. To give a name to the vague, shapeless thought in my head.

That pressure to define the idea before I had even finished thinking it made me close the laptop. I pulled out a sheet of scrap paper instead.

And that is what I want to explore this week.

I stopped looking at my plugins this week and started looking at my behavior. I realized that for all the tweaking I’ve done, I hadn’t asked the most basic question. What kind of thinking is this environment actually designed to support?

I noticed my system has a bias.
It is incredibly good at retrieval. If I need to find a fact, a quote, or a link, I can do it in seconds. It is built for speed and accuracy. It is a machine for recalling things I have already decided are important.

But when I tried to sit with a messy, undeveloped idea, the system felt impatient. The structure wanted me to file it. It wanted a tag. It wanted a title. It didn't want me to just look at it.

Tools are not neutral containers. They have opinions on how we should work.
A task manager wants you to close loops. A timeline wants you to move forward. My notes system, I realized, was designed for a librarian, not a writer.

The librarian in me loves the notes system.
The librarian wants everything in its place. The librarian gets a hit of dopamine when a note is linked and filed away.

But the writer in me was suffocating.
The writer needs mess. The writer needs to put two unrelated things next to each other and stare at them for three days without being asked to categorize the relationship.

This friction explained why I often do my best thinking on scrap paper, away from the screen. The paper has no opinion. It doesn't demand a tag. It allows the thinking to be slow, circular, and inefficient. It forgives me for not knowing what I am saying yet.

The change I’m making now is away from optimization. I don’t need a faster way to input data. I need a space that encourages a different state of mind.

I am trying to build pockets of "slow space" within the digital tool. Places where an idea can sit untagged and unfiled. Just waiting to be turned over in my hand.

I used to think a good system was one that let me move fast. Now I think a good system is one that knows when to help me slow down.

I made a small, practical change to my notes system structure this week. I created a folder simply called "Workbench."

The rule for this folder is strict in its looseness.
No tags allowed. No links required. No templates.
I treat it exactly like the scrap paper on my desk. I put a thought inside and I leave it alone. I am not allowed to "process" it until I have opened the file three times on three different days. It felt uncomfortable at first to leave things so messy, but it also felt like the pressure lifted.

I caught myself in a "quick capture" loop on Wednesday.
I had an idea while walking and immediately tried to figure out where it belonged in my project hierarchy. I stopped. I realized I was trying to do the filing work before the thinking work. I put it in the Workbench instead.

Later, I was reading a difficult article. Usually, I highlight as I go, extracting the value immediately. This time, I read the whole thing without touching the keyboard. I waited until the end to write one single sentence about what shifted in my perspective. It was harder, but the insight felt earned.

I looked at my physical desk yesterday. It is covered in index cards and open books. It looks chaotic to anyone else. But I know exactly where everything is. I realized that my digital hygiene was actually destroying the context I need to create. I am trying to let my digital space get a little messier.

That feels enough for now.

I am still figuring out how to balance the librarian and the writer. The librarian is useful, but he shouldn't be running the meeting. I want to spend more time in the mess this week.

I’ve been re-reading Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning this week.
He talks about "Investment in Loss", the idea that to internalize a superior mechanic, you have to be willing to look clumsy for a while.

This week’s deep dive is about why we are so terrified of this regression, and how a private notes system can serve as a "dojo", a safe place to be messy and wrong without judgment, so we can eventually be clear publicly.

Follow me on Meta Threads (@gavin.create) for the upcoming full deep dive.

I realized this week that a blank page is actually a terrible place to think.

I’ve been trying to solve the friction between "having an idea" and "developing it." So I stripped the Thinking Note structure out of my personal system and turned it into a standalone template.

I added specific "ghost text" prompts to guide the process so you aren't just staring at a cursor.

It’s a free download. If you want to try thinking with a bit more structure, you can [grab the template here].

That’s all from me this week.

Until next time,
From the desk of Gav.