gilest
Collecting things for me
I spend a lot of time encouraging teams and work places to “collect things” - pictures, screenshots, quotes, etc - that they can use as raw material for communicating about their work in future.
But it’s been years since I thought about collecting things for me, for the sake of having them collected. This post from Christopher Butler renewed lots of those thoughts:
“You might be thinking ‘cool cool cool so what are you going to do with all these pictures?’ which is very reasonable. I don’t know! Look at them? But I HAVE THEM THEY ARE MINE NOW.”
I used to collect a few things - images, PDFs to read, audio files to listen to - but got into the habit of ruthlessly deleting them after use. I’m not sure why. Maybe because those were the days when storage was expensive. But as Christopher points out, storage is cheap now.
I’m a strong proponent of archives, of the value of museums. It’s time I invested some time in one that reflects my interests, so that in years to come I also have a bunch of pictures (and audio files, and quotes, etc) I can, I don’t know, look at. Because I have them, and they are mine now.