Happy New Year! Welcome to the first Gav’s Note of 2026.

For a long time, I treated my notes system like a bunker.

I wrote in private. I connected ideas in private. I only opened the door when something felt finished, polished, and defensible.

I thought I was protecting the work. I thought I was keeping the fragile early stages of a thought safe from criticism or misunderstanding. It felt like the responsible thing to do. If I wasn't sure yet, why would I burden anyone else with it?

But what I was really doing was cutting the work off from oxygen.

Ideas do not get stronger in isolation. They tighten. They loop back on themselves.
Without fresh air, a note system becomes an echo chamber where I just repeat my own biases back to myself until they sound like truth.

I realized I was spending too much time guessing in a vacuum. I was trying to decide, alone, which ideas were worth developing. I was trying to predict what would resonate without ever testing the frequency.

Often, I would lose momentum before anything ever left the system. The distance between "private thought" and "public work" became too great to cross.

That silence felt like safety, but it acted like stagnation.

The real change happened when I stopped treating my notes system as storage and started treating it like a lab with the door open.

The system didn't suddenly become public. I didn't publish my entire Obsidian vault to the web. The messy middle is still mine. But I began sharing from the edges much earlier than I was comfortable with.

Instead of waiting for conclusions, I started sharing fragments.

When I share work in progress now, I am not presenting finished thinking. I am not trying to impress anyone with a completed theory. I am letting ideas meet resistance.

This is a terrifying shift at first.
We are trained to hide the rough drafts. We want to appear competent. We want to show the solution, not the confusion.

But confusion is where the work happens.

When I put a half-formed thought out into the world as a short thread, a note, or a conversation, I am looking for friction. I want to see where the idea holds up and where it softens.

Public space adds a specific kind of pressure that private writing cannot replicate.

If I write a note to myself, I can be lazy with my definitions. I know what I mean. But if I have to explain that concept to a stranger in three sentences, the lazy parts collapse. I am forced to clarify.

Confusion from a reader shows me where a note lacks shape. A good question from a skeptic exposes what I haven't understood yet. Even silence is useful data. Silence tells me an idea isn't clear enough to move, or perhaps that it matters only to me.

That friction changes how the system works.

Notes become things I refine through contact. The feedback loop tightens. Instead of spending weeks writing an essay based on a flawed premise, I find out the premise is flawed in twenty minutes.

This turns the notes system into a creative lab.

It becomes a place where ideas move back and forth between private thinking and public testing. A thought starts in the journal. It moves to a public note. The feedback helps me see the holes. I take it back to the journal to patch them.

Learning continues after publishing, not before it ends.

This approach requires a quieter ego. You have to be okay with being wrong in public. You have to be okay with saying, "I don't know yet, but this is what I'm seeing."

But the trade-off is worth it. The work moves. The stagnation breaks. You start building a conversation rather than a bunker

Here is how this looked in practice this week.

I have been wrestling with the concept of "digital debt." My notes on it were spiraling into a massive, philosophical rant. It was too heavy.

Instead of trying to finish the "perfect" article on it, I pulled out one specific observation: "A full reading list feels like wealth, but acts like debt."

I shared just that one piece.

The response was immediate. People didn't need the philosophical rant. They resonated with the specific feeling of the reading list.

I took that signal back into the notes system. I archived the long, heavy draft. I started a new note focused entirely on "Input Fatigue." The public friction saved me hours of writing the wrong essay.

I noticed this dynamic during a conversation with a friend about productivity. I tried to explain a complex tagging system I was designing. As I spoke, I watched their eyes glaze over.

In the bunker, that tagging system looked genius. In the sunlight of a real conversation, it looked ridiculous. I went home and deleted the folder. The air outside the vault clarified what the silence inside could not.

Later, I was writing a thread about consistency. I felt stuck on the ending. I posted the first half as a "thinking out loud" note. someone replied with a better metaphor than the one I was grasping for.

I didn't steal their idea. I let their perspective unlock my own. I went back to my notes and finished the thought, giving credit to the interaction. The note is now better than anything I could have written alone.

What I share publicly is never the whole thing.

It is a slice. A probe. A moment in motion.

The deep connections, the personal archives, the slow-baking ideas. Those remain private until they are ready.

But without the public layer, the thinking stays quieter. It stays safer. And it stays far less alive.

That is why I learn in public now.

I do this to keep the thinking moving. Audience growth is just a side effect.

This week I am reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

It connects to this idea of the "bunker." We often delay living because we are waiting to "get on top of things." We think if we just work faster, we will finally clear the decks.

Burkeman argues that the deck isn't a bucket, but a conveyor belt. Faster work just generates more work.

I am breaking down his concept of the "Efficiency Trap" and how it changed my relationship with my backlog. That will be out this Saturday. Follow me on Meta Threads (@gavin.create) for the full deep dive.

I’ll leave it there.

Are you holding your ideas too tightly? What would happen if you opened the door just a crack this week?

I’d love to hear what happens if you do.

Until next time,
From the desk of Gav.

In case you missed it last week: I released a free Thinking Frame template to help you develop ideas in Notion. You can grab it here.