Graveyard for Thoughts

The Notepad on My Phone is Where Ideas Go to Die

There are few tools in the history of mankind that have been used less appropriately than the Notepad tool on my phone. It’s not a matter of simply ignoring it; that would be far less ridiculous.

There have got to be around two dozen separate notes on that notepad, and that’s after I deleted a few. I discovered them the way that I always do and the only way I ever do — I was adding another note.

It’s not the adding of the notes that makes this so wildly embarrassing. It’s my understanding that I do this part correctly. I use it to make grocery lists, to jot down writing ideas, to keep track of books and movies people recommend to me, to make to do lists, and to capture a quote or a moment that was so rich that I want to revisit it later.

Ah, but therein lies the rub. I never revisit any of those notes. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it’s not. If I remembered to visit that notepad for a note every once in awhile, it might keep it present enough in my mind, that I’d remember to look at it more often. The notes wouldn’t pile up, and the stray one here or there may even get used for its originally intended purpose.

You know when you put an important item in a special place and then you forget where you put it because you chose an abnormal spot? That’s a similar type of failure to my inability to use my Notepad tool. I type things into my Notepad so that I won’t forget those things, and then I forget to look at my Notepad when I need to. More precisely, I forget that the Notepad exists at all.

That would be bad enough, but in my classic extreme flake fashion, I also somehow almost always write my notes so that they’re completely incomprehensible when I do eventually find them. I have one note that only says “zebra feet”. I have another that’s just a series of numbers.