Main idea

Two gestures look alike and don't play the same role. Documentary capture keeps a complete source — an article, a white paper, a video, a document — or at least a trace sufficient for traceability to hold the day you pick it up again. It follows a logic of source: what matters is being able to go back to the original rather than to an isolated fragment.

The personal log is another space and another form. It receives a question, a quote, an intuition, a remark that crosses a day. One file per month, in chronological order, is enough. It follows a logic of thinking in progress: what matters is the sequence, not the unit.

Pouring both into the same box makes the system confused. A quote you come across during the day doesn't need to join the queue of whole articles to be processed, and a personal question doesn't have the form of an external source.

Why it matters

This gives a filing criterion that depends on no tool: you separate according to what the item requires next. A source calls for distillation, a fragment of thinking calls for rereading — two treatments, therefore two places.

It also defuses part of the false organizational problems. A queue of captures that looks unmanageable often contains two mixed populations, one of which never had anything to process.

Nuances and limits

The boundary blurs when the thinking is born of the source: a remark written in the margin of an article belongs to both. The practical rule is to attach it where the next piece of work will happen.

And two spaces instead of one presuppose that the second is reread. A log never reopened isn't thinking in progress, it's one more repository.

Open questions

• Does a personal log reread late keep its value, or does it lose what made it something other than an archive?