Monday Mastery: Thought Central
The life of a creative dust bunny begins in the in-between spaces.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
If you’re anything like me, you have random notes scattered everywhere.
Personally, I keep notes in …
The native notes app on my phone
Notion
Roam Research
Evernote (though this app has gotten so glitchy, slow and overdeveloped in the last few years, I’m weaning off of it)
A small traveler’s notebook I carry with me
Notebooks and notepads in my home office
And I’m probably forgetting some locations. 😬
It’s great that I have access to so many places to land my thoughts and ideas — so many “second brains.” And for the most part, I’m specific about what notes I keep where. But random flickers of ideas can be hard to categorize — and when I needed to find those scraps again … it was a problem.
Until I created Thought Central.
(Disclosure: I can’t remember where I first came across this concept, but it was most likely from Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Ness Labs.)
Essentially, Thought Central is a folder or file I have created across all my notetaking locations. I give it the same name everywhere, and its only purpose is to capture those scraps of ideas.
Once a month or so, I go through each Thought Central and clear things out. I move the strong notes to more permanent locations, and delete the ones I can’t remember why I even wrote.
Some notes I leave alone, because I’m just not sure about them yet. For example, I have a line written down that I came up with in a liminal state between sleep and wakefulness — and I have no idea what I’ll ever use it for, but it’s too good to toss: The past is a warm black cloak that I shed upon entering the door to the present.
There are a lot of strict “personal knowledge management” practitioners out there that would shame me for keeping these things for no purpose, but I’m of the belief that tools and processes should work for me — not make me work for them.
And to me, sometimes those beautiful little snippets are worthy even if they don’t have an immediate use.
Now if I need to find something I wrote down, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t go anywhere beyond a quick note, I start by checking Thought Central. Yes, I might have to check a few places, but it’s fast because Notion, Roam, my physical notebook, etc. all have a Thought Central.
Here’s the really delicious part, though:
Sometimes, the randomness that is Thought Central spurs a deep piece of writing because that note is not neatly filed and categorized.
Its very free-floating nature means it picks up creative dust and builds miraculously into something tangible.
Like a glorious dust bunny.