I’ve been playing around with some note taking software and techniques lately. There will probably be a post specifically about that eventually. A lot of the value in notes is simply in the process of consolidating the information in order to write it down. But the other half of what notes are for is to be something to refer back to later. Notes are made to be reread.
By contrast, I realized, I don’t often reread my blog posts. I don’t tend to do much revision either. There’s more than one post on here that hasn’t even gotten a proper first read.
Yes, you can write something without reading it. When you get into a flow state the words drop out of your attention and you only see the ideas. It’s nice, but the catch is that then there can be a difference between what you thought you said and what you actually said.
I’ve added ways to create links to my older posts , but those are automatic. They don’t any attention—or even awareness—on my part (though I certainly hope that you find them interesting). I do manually link old posts, but really that just requires remembereing that I said something about a topic; reading and thinking about what exactly I said is not necessary. In general, I like Jedda’s approach better. I just know that the more effort it takes the less likely I am to do it, and the threshold of not doing it at all is very low for me.
I’m sure than sooner than later I’ll write a post and have no idea at all that I’ve written about the same topic before. There are worse things than that. And there is value in having a record of what you were thinking about a thing at multiple points in time.
I can also beg off looking at my old posts by saying that most of them are barely one year old, with a small handful two years old. I just don’t have a very deep backlog yet. I’ve changed over the last year, sure, probably mostly in ways I don’t even realize. I can’t remember which post I said it in, and it may have been several, but I see blogging as a long term “project” and I hope to keep doing it for a good, long while.
Many of my posts are just casual thoughts tossed out onto the internet. But a few will age well. I don’t know which ones they are. I don’t know which ones they will be. Just the same as the pages of my journals . Most are rather boring even as I write them. But I try to remember that I do not know what I will be interested in getting from them years from now.
All of which rambling leads me to the question I want to finish this off with. Do you ever reread your own posts? Do you look back at what you have written? How often and how deeply?
If you live an interesting enough life, you can become a fascinating subject of study even to yourself.