Typically, if you make lists, you probably make lists so that you don’t forget something. You make a shopping list so you don’t have to run back to the store for the basil leaves you forgot. You make a to-read list so that when you are looking for something to read, you can remember the name of the book your friend recommended. Because I play traditional Irish music, I know a lot of people who keep a list of the tunes they want to learn. I used to do this, too.
The problem I find myself running into with lists is that they just keep growing. When I finally gave up on Goodreads, my to-read list had grown so large that I’d stopped using it. I couldn’t find anything to read because there were too many titles to peruse (and the Goodreads user interface did not make perusing particularly enjoyable). Now I keep my to-read list in my bullet journal. A few years ago I wrote about how the low tech nature of a bullet journal forces me to do regular reviews of my lists and my to-read list is no exception. It’s still growing faster than I’m reading, but I’m not going to transfer more than two pages worth of books to read, so once I hit that limit — if not before — some of these titles will get nixed during a migration.
While these forced reviews are nice, and introducing a cost in the form of having to rewrite — long hand — every item on a list that I want to keep does provide some incentive to be honest about whether something really is worth keeping on the list, it’s still very easy to continue holding on to things because I might want to get around to it some day. This is just a problem I have. Things that once seemed interesting to me probably still seem interesting at least a little bit, so I’m more inclined to keep them on my list rather than remove them — it’s true for books, and to-dos, and tunes.
Enter: forgetful tools. Signal, the secure messaging service, has a feature that lets you set a self-destruct timer on messages. It also has a ‘note to self’ feature — which is basically just you texting yourself, but in the interface it names the chat ‘Note to Self.’ I have my note to self chat set to delete messages after seven days just because I don’t want an infinitely growing list of notes polluting my preferred chat app. This started out as a way for me to capture things when I didn’t have my bullet journal on me, so anything that needed a longer life would have been transferred to my journal, and the self-destructing messages was just a way to clean up after myself.
A few weeks ago, I began using it to write down names of tunes that came up in my regular Wednesday night Irish session. Originally I’d planned to move these to the more permanent list I keep of tunes to learn.
But I didn’t. Instead, what I started doing was pulling out my phone while I was practicing and checking the list of tunes from the last session; there would usually not be more than half a dozen tunes. I’d pick a tune and work on that, and it would probably be the only tune I worked on for the next week. By the next session, I’d probably have that tune down well enough to start it. And by the end of the night, Signal would have deleted all of the tunes from the previous week, and I’d have added new ones (or re-added old ones, as the case may be), and I’d be all set for the next week.
Some weeks I wouldn’t get around to working on any of the tunes I’d written down. Who cares! Next session I’ll get some more.
This has worked out so well for me because I no longer have this endless list of tunes I ‘need’ to learn. I’m managing to increase my repertoire most weeks with tunes I know my friends play, but I don’t have this pressure to Learn All the Tunes because Signal is helping me forget. Surprisingly, knowing that the tunes on the list will be gone in a few days is a relief, rather than added pressure to hurry up and learn them all.
I think one of the curses of computers is that storage is so cheap it’s easy to hoard things. Your lists can grow and grow and you’ll never reach the limits of your storage devices in most cases. And these lists become so overwhelming they stop being useful. I find that knowing something will be deleted after a period of time is a relief. It means that the act of writing something down — whether it’s a tune to learn, or a toot on social media — is not a huge commitment; it won’t haunt me forever.
I wonder what it would like if more software gave you the ability to configure how frequently it forgets things for you. What might this look like in a note-taking app like Obsidian or Notion? What might this look like for photo managers? I’m not saying I think these are applications that should indiscriminately delete your files after some period of time — at least, not necessarily. But I know these are applications where I tend to accumulate extra stuff like mediocre photos or random thoughts that seemed important at the time, but turned out not to be.
I know the next place I’m going to try set up some automatic forgetting: my read later app, Omnivore. Talk about a list that just keeps growing and rarely gets read. I think if something has been in there for two weeks and I haven’t looked at it, it can probably get deleted. That would be a relief.