The Paper Log, One Line at a Time

The log is a plain notebook, the kind you’d buy for a grocery list, and every entry is one line: date, title, a rating, occasionally a single word if something demanded it. No categories, no tags, no star breakdown by subcategory the way some of the apps do. Dana is the one who actually got this started, years ago now, pointing out that I’d finish something with a hundred thoughts running through my head about it, rate it out loud with total conviction, and then two months later completely misremember what I’d said. The notebook fixed that. It also, I’ve noticed, changed how I rate things, though it took me a while to notice why.

An app wants you to rate immediately, the moment you close the book or the box goes back on the shelf, while the feeling is freshest. My notebook sits on the same shelf as the games, which means the actual act of writing something down requires walking over there, which takes maybe forty seconds, and in that forty seconds I’ve talked myself out of a first-impression five more than once. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it, except to say the friction is doing something real. It’s not laziness dressed up as a system. The gap between finishing something and writing it down is where the rating actually settles.

I keep telling myself I should digitize it, back it up somehow, because a notebook is a single point of failure in a way that would bother me professionally if it were anyone else’s important record. I have not done this. Part of it is that typing the log into a spreadsheet would mean re-reading years of my own one-line judgments in a row, and I’m not sure I want to see the pattern of what I actually rate high laid out that plainly. Part of it is just that the physical act, pen on paper, standing at the shelf, has become the ritual that closes out whatever I just finished, and a spreadsheet entry on a laptop doesn’t do the same work.

It’s a small, slightly absurd habit for someone whose actual job is reading precise documents for a living, that I’d choose the least precise possible tool for my own private record. Dana finds this very funny. I’ve stopped trying to explain it and just let the notebook keep doing what it does.