Open the recorder on your phone.
Ninety four files.
Recording 12.
Recording 13.
New Recording 47.
Somewhere in there
are four things worth finishing,
and you will never find them.
Play one at random.
Eighteen seconds.
Humming, over a chord,
with a television
in the next room.
You do not know the key.
You do not know the tempo.
You do not know
what came before it
or what you thought
it was going to become.
And you certainly do not know
why you liked it enough
to press the button.
Capture was free.
That is the part you got right,
and it is the easy part.
Getting back in is not free,
and you never paid for it,
so the recording is not
an idea you have.
It is an idea you had.
Now count the cost properly.
You stopped opening the folder,
because opening it
is ninety four decisions
and no reward,
so the habit produces nothing.
You write the same figure
twice a year
and feel it as new
both times.
And you tell people
you are short of ideas,
standing on top of ninety of them.
Fix it at the moment of capture,
because that is the only moment
you will ever have the context.
Before you stop the recording,
say it out loud into the recording.
The key.
Where you think it goes.
The one thing you liked,
in six words.
Play four bars of it clean
after the humming,
so the next you
has something to catch.
And if there are words,
say the words,
even badly.
A mumble you can decode
is worth an hour later.
Then name the file
with the first line you sang,
not with a number.
And once a month,
sit down and listen through,
keep five,
throw the rest away
without sentiment.
A pile you never open
is not an archive.
It is a place
where your ideas go to be safe
from you.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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