You cannot ask a notebook a question

I have never been able to walk past a notebook.

Not a particular kind, either. Moleskines, yellow legal pads, white memo pads, whatever is sitting by the register. I'm not fussy. They just have to be notebooks.

Meeting notes went in them. Ideas that arrived at inconvenient times. Task lists, mostly task lists, because what I loved was crossing things off. I know people who write everything down and actually go back to it, who can find a decision they made in 2019. That was never me. I wasn't keeping it to look at later.

I did hold on to a couple anyway, once they were full, because I was convinced there was something in there I'd need later. Something I figured out once and would want again.

But I never went back. Not once.

A notebook holds everything and hands back nothing. You cannot ask a notebook a question, and it has no opinion about your week.

So I started writing all of it into Claude instead, the AI I use, so that I could ask about it later. When I need something from a call three months ago, I ask, and the answer comes back. What I didn't expect is that it pushes back. It brings up the thing I said I'd do and didn't. The opinion was the part I was missing.

Here's what I do now, once a week. I call it my sweep.

I ask it to go back through everything from the week. Meeting notes, my calendar, my email. And it comes back with three things: what got finished, what's still open, and what's coming.

The first list is the one I thought I wanted. The middle one is the reason I keep doing it, because the good stuff tells you about itself and the rest doesn't.

A while back it pointed at somebody I'd been mildly annoyed with for not getting back to me. They had gotten back to me. The answer had just landed somewhere I wasn't looking. I was the one who'd gone quiet.

Connecting it to my email and calendar was easier than I expected.

You don't need any of that, though. The useful part is being asked. You can get most of this by just telling it your week out loud, as messily as it comes. You hear what you've been avoiding while you're saying it.

Here's something to try. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, whichever one you use. It works whether you use one every day or opened one once to find a recipe.

I want help seeing what I'm missing. Start by asking me three questions, in plain language, about what I've been working on and worrying about lately. Ask them one at a time and wait for each answer before the next one. Then tell me what I mentioned once and stopped mentioning, what I keep circling without deciding, and what I'm probably waiting on somebody else for. If one of those doesn't apply to me, say so instead of forcing it. Don't reassure me, and don't turn it into a to-do list.

Copy prompt

It won't flatter you.

There's something the sweep keeps putting in front of me that's harder to look at than a reply I missed. I don't really know what I don't know. So I've started a list of the things I lean on every single day without actually understanding them, which is a strange document to write about yourself. The list isn't finished. I'll tell you what ends up on it.

Hit reply and tell me what came back. Last time I put something like this at the bottom, somebody ran it and wrote to tell me, which genuinely made my week.

And if this would land for someone, send it on. That's how people find it.