The list of questions I can't answer yet
I keep one plain text file that I've never deleted a line from. It isn't a journal and it isn't a to-do list. It's a list of questions I don't have answers to, and after four years it's the only document I own that gets more interesting the longer it gets. Everything else I write shrinks with time.
I've been asked how it works a few times, usually by people who suspect they'd like something similar and don't want to invent it from scratch. So here it is, in more words than a note deserves.
How it started
Badly, and by accident. I was reading through old notes looking for something else and noticed that most of what I'd written down was answers — decisions I'd already made, restated so I'd feel settled about them. The questions had gone unrecorded, which meant I had no way of knowing which ones I'd actually resolved and which ones I'd just gotten tired of.
So I started a file. One question per line, no dates, no tags, no app with a nice icon. Adding a line takes about eight seconds, which is the only reason the habit survived.
A question you're willing to write down is a question you've stopped pretending you've settled.
What earns a place on it
Not everything. A question goes on the list if it meets roughly four conditions, which I only worked out in hindsight:
- I can state it in one sentence without a preamble.
- Nobody I've asked has given me an answer that closed it.
- It would change something about how I work or live if it were answered.
- I'm still slightly embarrassed not to know.
The last one does most of the filtering. Embarrassment is a reliable signal that a question is close to something I care about, and unreliable at almost everything else.
On not organising it
I've tried sorting the list by theme twice and abandoned it both times. The value is in the collisions: a question about work sitting directly above a question about a friendship, with no category to keep them apart. Sorting removes exactly the thing I keep the file for.
The part that surprised me
Questions don't get answered so much as they stop applying. I went back through the first year expecting to find resolutions and instead found abandonment: perhaps a fifth were answered outright, and the rest had quietly become irrelevant because I'd changed jobs, or changed my mind, or the situation that produced them had dissolved on its own.
That's the argument for keeping the file in something dumb and durable. Mine is one line per question in a folder that syncs, and appending happens from wherever I am:
q() {
echo "$*" >> ~/notes/questions.txt
}
# q why does reviewing my own writing feel like a chore
Four lines of shell, no schema, and the whole thing is greppable with grep -n when I want to see what I was worried about in a given stretch. If I'd built something nicer I'd have stopped using it by spring.
The list is at 212 lines. I don't expect to finish it, and I'd be suspicious of myself if I ever did.