My big plan to use the Google Recorder app on my phone to take notes more often has not really worked out. Generally I just take notes and save links into Google Keep and that is like a staging area for topics that sometimes make it into my writing backlog. Some writing projects like the Lindahl Letter have a topic specific backlog and I have a general backlog document for everything else. The idea of introducing the Google Recorded was to not have to capture a little bit longer type of note. Almost all the notes in Google Keep are very short sort of topic slugs or maybe two sentences at most. I thought maybe in Google Recorder I might capture a little bit more about the thing that I was interested in at the time. Taking notes in real time is an important component of the process. You have to capture those gems when they show up otherwise they simply wink out of existence. They may or may not come back depending on what inspired them in the first place. 

We will see what shakes out in 2025 if the Google Recorder app becomes a part of my process or if I end up just using Google Keep. My plan for 2025 is to continue the routine of writing for the weblog or blogging every day either in the morning or evening depending on how my time shakes out during the day. On the weekends when I have that longer block of time in the early hours of the day I’m going to work on producing research notes. During the course of 2025 I’m going to make sure that some of those research notes get expanded into full papers. That has to be a part of the writing journey next year. My output has to be focused on those longer forms of prose that deliver solid research. 

I could probably spend days or even weeks just sorting out the huge number of Google Keep notes that have piled up within my collection of observations or links. Some of it is just links to things like a USB-C cable tester or an article about the next wave of AI use cases. Some of those notes are about a writing project or something to consider researching. The common theme connecting all of it is generally that it is about learning and moving forward. It’s that constant effort to strive toward the perfect possible future that unites a lot of people. Some people might rally around the banner of science to describe that group. I’m willing to say it’s a bit more than that and it encompasses the people striving to move forward and that could include theorists that are wholesale post theory and willing to use proofs that are solved outside the scientific method. Those people who follow that banner of progress toward the perfect possible future tend to work independently and come together within the grand academy of academic research. It’s a system based on standing on the shoulders of giants or more to the point of building toward advancing our collective knowledge. 

You can infer from the previous point made in the last paragraph full of statements that I think that this collectively shared academic effort will help us progress toward a perfect possible future. That is a hopeful and optimistic assessment of where we are going. 

Dr. Nels Lindahl