Fleeting — 03 Mar
attention as a budget
what if focus isn't a state but a currency you spend? link to the willpower note & the cost-of-context note.
Marginalia
No. 01 — The Slip-Box
A second brain, the old way
Every idea you've ever had,
on a card.
Marginalia is a digital slip-box. Write thoughts as atomic notes, drop them in the box, and let the links do the remembering. Your mind stays free for the thinking.
Start your slip-boxThe method, in three cards
Fleeting
Catch the thought before it leaves. A scratch note, undated, unpolished — good enough to recognize later is enough.
Permanent
Rewrite it in your own words. One idea per card, self-contained, so it still makes sense a year from now.
Connect
Link it to what you already know. The box finds the patterns you'd forget — that's the whole point.
Niklas Luhmann wrote 90,000 cards in a wooden box and published 70 books. The system, not the genius, did the work.
From the slip-box, 1952–1998