Merry Christmas.
Welcome to the last Gav's Note of 2025.
We have spent December auditing the system. We cleared the noise and made space for the mess.
But cleaning is just preparation.
This week, I want to look at what happens when the organizing stops and the "Living Note" begins.
I sat down on Tuesday with a strange feeling. I had run out of excuses.
Over the last two weeks, I have audited my folders, deleted the dead weight, and set up a "Workbench" for messy thinking. The system was clean. The noise was gone.
Now I had to use it.
There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you finish organizing. It is the silence of an empty stage. The cleaning is satisfying because it feels like work, but it is just preparation.
The real work was staring at me from a blank cursor inside that new Workbench folder.
I realized I had spent so much energy curating the space that I had forgotten what it felt like to fill it.
Main Note
I opened a new note. I didn't add a tag. I didn't link it to a project. I just started typing about a problem that has been bothering me: the difference between "speed" and "velocity" in creative work.
Usually, my instinct is to find a quote, paste it in, cite the source, and feel productive. I capture the artifact and move on.
This time, I forced myself to stay.
I wrote a paragraph. Then I deleted it. I asked myself a question in bold text. I answered it. I argued with myself. I pulled in a concept from an old book, but instead of just linking it, I wrote out why it mattered to this specific problem.
Half an hour passed.
When I looked at the note, it looked different than 90% of my vault.
Most of my notes are static. They are reference points. Things I found and saved. They are frozen in the moment of capture.
This note looked alive. It was messy. It had unfinished sentences. It had a counter-argument I hadn't resolved yet. It wasn't a record of something I read. It was a record of something I was processing.
I realized that for a long time, I have been building a museum. I wandered through the halls, admiring the exhibits and rearranging the displays.
But I wasn't painting.
This week marked a shift from collecting to cultivating.
A living note feels different. It isn't precious. It changes shape every time you touch it. It doesn't aim for accuracy. It aims for clarity.
The clean system I built earlier this month is nice. But the messy, arguing, evolving text I wrote this week is the first thing that felt like value.
Lab Log
The "So What?" Header. I added a simple rule to my Workbench notes. Before I close a file, I have to write a header called "So What?" and write two sentences on why this idea matters to me personally. If I can't answer, I delete the note.
The 48-Hour Open Tab. I tried leaving one difficult note open on my desktop for two days straight. I didn't close it when I finished a session. Seeing it there every time I sat down forced me to add one more sentence, one more tweak. It kept the thinking active.
Rewriting, not highlighting. I read a great newsletter on Wednesday. Instead of highlighting the text, I opened a note and tried to rewrite the core argument from memory. I got it wrong at first, but the struggle to recall it made the idea stick.
Everyday Scenarios
I was in a meeting last week where someone mentioned a "scarcity mindset." My usual habit would be to write "Look up scarcity mindset" in my task manager.
Instead, I opened a note and wrote: "I noticed he used scarcity to describe time, not money. That feels important. Does that apply to how I view my writing hours?"
I didn't capture the definition. I captured the friction.
Later, I went back to a note I wrote three years ago. It was a rigid outline. I pressed enter a few times and started typing at the top, arguing with my past self. I didn't preserve the old version. I let the new thought cannibalize the old one. It felt disrespectful to the archive, but honest to the work.
This transition is harder than the cleaning was.
Cleaning is binary. It is either messy or it is tidy. Thinking is murky. You can sit with a note for an hour and feel like you went backward.
But that "backward" feeling is usually where the insight is hiding.
I am learning to trust the messiness of the Workbench. The goal isn't to have a perfect vault. The goal is to have a few notes that are moving.
That feels enough for now.
Creator Block
I have been revisiting Antifragile by Nassim Taleb this week.
It gave me the language for what I was feeling in the Workbench. We usually build systems to be robust. We try to keep them safe from the chaos.
But Taleb argues we should build systems that feed on the chaos.
A clean archive is fragile. If you stop organizing, it breaks. A "Living Note" is antifragile. It gets better the more you argue with it. The friction feeds the idea.
Follow me on Meta Threads (@gavin.create) for the full deep dive this Saturday.
Until next time,
From the desk of Gav.
P.S. I stripped the "Thinking Frame" out of my personal system this week to share as a standalone tool. It’s the exact template (with prompts) that I use to turn vague hunches into clear concepts. You can get the free Notion page here.
