Notes on temporary things
Why some writing should be allowed to expire — and how that changes the way you put words down.
Most of what we write is meant to outlast the day we wrote it. Emails, docs, posts with carefully chosen titles — all of it is built for permanence, or at least the illusion of it.
Temp is the opposite idea. A place for notes that are allowed to be provisional. Half-formed. Slightly wrong. Useful today, forgettable next week.
The cost of permanence
When every draft is a public artifact, drafting becomes performance. You edit before you think. You sand the edges off anything that might age poorly. The result is clean, and often empty.
Temporary writing removes the audience from the first pass. You can say the obvious thing, the boring thing, the thing you’ll delete later. That is where the useful sentence usually hides.
Rules for a temp notebook
- Date everything. Context is half the value of a temporary note.
- Prefer unfinished. A sharp fragment beats a polished void.
- Delete freely. The point of temporary storage is that it can go away.
- Link out, don’t archive. If something deserves to live, promote it elsewhere.
What belongs here
- Working titles for projects you haven’t started
- Quotes you want to sit with for a day
- Meeting leftovers that will be irrelevant by Friday
- The first three paragraphs of something better
What doesn’t: legal records, passwords, or anything you’d mind losing when you clear site data. This is a notebook, not a vault.
Closing
Temporary doesn’t mean careless. It means honest about lifespan. Write as if the page will be recycled — and occasionally, save the one line that shouldn’t be.