Wednesday night.

I went into my notes system to look for something small, a line that I thought I wrote last month.

Instead I found a pattern I didn’t notice before.

The files from the early issues feel dense. Full of raw capture. Lots of tags. Lots of speculative ideas.

The more recent ones feel quieter. Fewer lines. More decisive.

Nothing about this was intentional.

I didn’t set a goal to refine my process.

Writing in public did the refining for me.

After writing fifty issues of Gav’s Note, my note-taking is not the same.

Not because I “optimized” something. It was because writing publicly forces clarity the way private tinkering never does.

I used to capture everything that felt interesting.

Quotes. Highlights. Frameworks. Screenshots.

I thought more capture meant more potential ideas later. But fifty newsletters taught me something subtle & uncomfortable:

most of what I captured didn’t matter enough to be written into a newsletter.

The things that survived into publishable work were always the ideas that stayed with me, not the things I aggressively highlighted.

So the system changed itself.

Not through a deliberate rebuild.

Through use.
Through friction with deadlines.
Through the reality of having to turn notes into paragraphs, not just lists.

When I wrote the early issues, I would export entire reading notes and start slicing them.

Now I usually write from the “already-warm” notes, the things I’ve revisited multiple times.

I trust memory more.
Because if an idea only matters once, it’s not worth keeping.

A few habits disappeared without me noticing.

I tag less.
I review more.
I process less aggressively.
I delete more frequently.
I spend more time in the few pages that I return to again and again.

Writing in public did this.

Writing in public is a test environment that exposes what actually matters.

It rewards reality, not structure.
It rewards what’s been lived, not what’s been collected.

Some ideas from the notes system have been carried through multiple issues and those are the ones I now treat as “signal threads.”

They become anchors for future issues.
They pull new observations toward them. They shape topics.

Those didn’t come from tags.
Those came from repeated encounter.
From writing.
From testing ideas in the field.

An unexpected change happened around Week 34.

I noticed I no longer wrote newsletters to “explain” my notes.

I wrote newsletters to understand them.

That flipped my workflow.

Instead of doing thinking in notes, then transferring to the newsletter…
…I started thinking through the newsletter draft itself.

The notes system became less like a library.
More like a set of mirrors.

Reflection points.
Checkpoints.
Places I re-enter to see if an idea is still alive.

Writing fifty issues taught me this:

note-taking becomes valuable only when it supports expression.
Expression is the stress test.

When I read now, I don’t highlight everything that feels “insightful.”

I wait.

I let the idea simmer.

If it’s still with me next morning, then it enters the notes system.

If I need to search for it, it wasn’t important enough.

When I get an idea during a walk, I don’t write a long note anymore.

I drop a single line.

Then I see if I return to it again in the next few days.

If I don’t, I archive it.

Before fifty issues, I used to maintain a long list of “potential newsletter topics.”

Now I only record the ones I can already speak about.

If I can’t talk about it today, it’s not ready.

I used to use tags to “remember.”

Now I rely on resurfacing instead of categorization.

I used to trust the system to store everything.
Now I trust that what matters will come back.

I used to think the goal of note-taking was to make a permanent memory.
Now I think the goal is to have a reliable conversation with myself across time.

I used to think writing was the output of the notes.
Now I see that writing is the engine that powers them.

Writing in public was the catalyst.

It revealed what my note-taking was actually doing.

It forced me to choose what to keep alive.

It showed which ideas could withstand real usage.

Fifty newsletters gave me this principle:

Practice refines process.

Not the other way around.

I sometimes wonder what my notes system will look like after a hundred issues.

I don’t think it will look more “optimized.”

I think it will look more honest.

Less storage.
More reuse.
More of what actually matters and nothing extra.

Writing in public continues to teach me how to see my own ideas more clearly.

Not by adding.

By removing what never proves itself.

A final thought before I finish up today’s letter:

I didn’t sharpen my note-taking by designing a smarter notes system.

Writing sharpened it for me.

If you’ve noticed a similar shift , reply and tell me what changed for you.

Until next time,
From the desk of Gav.