Someone asked me about my process of making Bits and Bobs.

I take live notes during conversations, of little snippets of assertions, observations, principles.

(If you've ever been in a small group meeting with me, you've seen me do this… it's a bit unnerving if you don't know what I'm doing, and seems like I'm distracted)

These I send to an inbox for me to process later, and often have typos, missing words, only make sense in context, etc

These rough notes will only really make sense to me for the next few days.

Every few days, I process each of those snippets into its own private working notes card in The Compendium.

At this stage I correct typos and add just a bit more color to make it so the idea would stand on its own (perhaps with some study) to myself in the future.

At this stage for some ideas I might add 30% more context or framing as I reflect more on the idea and try to make it more general.

At this stage, the ideas are ones that should make sense to me even arbitrarily far into the future.

At the end of the week I go through the notes from the last week and collect the ones that still strike my fancy as interesting or potentially valuable; something I want to have access to in the future or want to be able to point others to.

Often ideas come up multiple times over the course of a week as I implicitly "workshopped" an idea in different conversations; I paste all of the near duplicates next to each other so I can synthesize the strongest / most compelling formulation.

I then comb through the extracted snippets.

For each I develop them a bit, adding framing questions, breaking into bullets and sub-bullets, perhaps adding a bit of motivation--work that helps fix them and make them stand on their own to a motivated audience that is not me.

At this stage I drop out up to 30% of ideas that no longer strike me as being worth developing.

Monday mornings I comb through the Bits and Bobs again, making small tweaks, and moving various bits and bobs up or down in the list to make them hang together more thematically.

After I publish them, I import them as final working notes into the Compendium and label them; in the future I might publish them within the Compendium.

I find that the act of freezing the ideas in amber, of developing them enough to make them stand on their own, makes the strongest formulation of the thought significantly more stable in my head, and much easier for me to naturally recall in the future.

I also randomly read a few working notes each day, which helps jog my memory and allow me to particle-collide old ideas, helping generate something new.

Every so often I feel the itch to factor out a specific stand-alone essay that hopefully will stand on its own to a less-motivated audience.