At the beginning of every day, I create a note titled "Scratchpad YYYY.MM.DD". I have had this process since around 2019 in early high school and it has spanned several platforms including Apple Notes, Google Keep, Day One, Obsidian, Kortex, and Notion. These notes hold a wealth of information from book, film, music recommendations from friends, project ideas, ideas for blog posts, essays, or other works, and the occasional event I might not want to miss. These notes become overwhelming fast and I don't intend on implementing everything on the note in a day, sometimes not in a month. Now I can, every once in a while, have these filtered in batches because cheap intelligence enables retroactive idea mining. Scratchpad notes are also at the end of the day converted into a checklist format by gpt which enables my review of notes the next morning and in the future to clarify which contents have already been extracted, vs. which are actively ready for pruning.

They are held in the main slipbox with all my other notes, and are greppable by the yaml which allows for easy identification of past scratchpad notes. It's convenient to have these in the main git repo for easy versioning even though notes are usually only touched on the day they are created. These notes are also filtered out at build time so they never make it to the production build.

• ideas are extracted into long-term places
  • films --> watchlist
  • books --> reading list
  • ideas, companies, people are extracted into specified note types based on the taxonomy of notes.