How to avoid the frustration of keeping what you don’t need and getting rid of what you do
The “Energy Principle” and a helpful table to guide our decisions.
As writers, we collect various types of information — articles, memes, quotes, pictures, diagrams, references — that serve as sources of inspiration for our own writing. We weave quotes into our writing. We support our arguments with reasons, and back them up with evidence. But with the incredible volume of information that confronts us every day, how do we decide what to keep, and what to discard?
In general, I tend to over-index when it comes to keeping information, having been burned one too many times in the past. I would land on a website, read an article that seemed irrelevant at the time, and then move on, deciding not to bookmark the page. Then, maybe 1 or 2 days later, a seemingly random idea would pop into my head and suddenly that previously “unimportant” article became very relevant and even necessary! In order to find that website URL, I would end up on a digital “safari”; searching through my browser history, and combing through every past entry, until I eventually (phew!) located the website. These frustrating scavenger hunts sometimes take a few minutes, sometimes a few hours; always time spent in what just feels like pure frustration. If you, like me, struggle with deciding what information to save and what to chuck, then let me tell you about the “Energy Principle”, and how it helps you, whether you choose to save the information or not, and how to consider the trade-offs involved with each of those decisions.
The “Energy Principle”
In the early days of the internet, when I was very young, I developed the habit of saving information on my computer while surfing the web. I would save memes, bookmark quirky websites, download technical literature — basically anything that sparked my interest or caught my eye. In fact, over the last couple of years, as I stepped more into my writing identity and refined my cultivation of the craft, I started saving and collecting more often, especially after discovering the late Gerald Weinberg’s “Fieldstone” method.
The core concept of the fieldstone method is that, as writers, our job is to construct “walls”. These walls are constructed from fieldstones — writing, photos, diagrams, quotations, pictures, references — of different shapes and sizes. Fieldstones form the foundation, the bedrock, of your writing. No fieldstones... no walls. If you’ve ever faced writer’s block, it might be because you don’t have enough material to work with, so you might want to shift your attention back to collecting information. And yet, with all the digital fieldstones we encounter every day, how do we know which ones to save?
According to Gerald Weinberg, just follow what he called the “Energy Principle”: When stumbling on a stone, he suggests that you “turn inward and raise awareness of your inner response.” If you feel joy or sadness (or any emotion, really), then the stone is a good candidate for adding to your collection. Letting your emotions guide you is a concept that I think Marie Kondo, the tidying and organizing expert, would agree with. In deciding whether to keep or trash a household item, she suggests holding onto it, pausing for a moment, and then asking yourself, “does it spark joy?” If the answer is no, then let it go. While her techniques and methodology target physical objects in the context of home organization, I think both her and Gerald Weinberg align philosophically on taking an inside out approach, letting your emotions guide your decision to keep or discard something.
If you want to take less of an emotional approach and tackle this problem more practically, then understanding the trade-offs of keeping and discarding will definitely be of interest.
The Decision Matrix
Did you make the right decision when you saved information? How about when you discarded it?
In “Finders, keepers?,” William Jones states that digital information can be viewed as either a signal (information is useful) or noise (information is not useful), and combines these with two possible actions we can take — keep or discard — to form a table with four outcomes:
Earlier I mentioned that I gravitate towards keeping information, which is driven by the pain I’ve felt in the past due to a “miss”, the top right quadrant. This over-indexing tends to correlate with an uptick in false positives, the bottom left quadrant, when useless information is kept, which comes at a cost; essentially “an overall increase in clutter, and an increased likelihood that other useful information will be obscured and overlooked.” So I try my best to avoid making decisions that land me in either the bottom left (false positive) or top right (a miss) quadrants.
At the same time I strive to keep useful information and reject useless information; the top left (hit) and bottom right (correction rejection) quadrants. With “hits”, we keep useful information and we will thank ourselves for this down the road — the information is easily retrieved in the future. But even with a “hit” and its benefits, there’s always a cost for keeping information, including “a person’s time, energy and the potential interruption of a current activity.” In contrast, with a “correction rejection,” when we ignore useless information, there’s no contribution to the clutter and therefore no cost.
Realistically our decisions won’t always land in the desirable quadrants. There will be times when we save information that we end up needing in the future and there will be times when we keep information that we don’t need, adding to the clutter. There will be times when we discarded something we should’ve kept, a frustrating experience, and there will be times when we discard useless information, which saves us the cost of keeping it in error.
Ultimately, the solution boils down to this: We should “keep (or commit) [information] when the expected value of doing so exceeds the value of not doing so”, says William Jones. The key is to be a little more conscious whenever you are deciding to keep something, or not. Just that split second mindful effort will save you a lot of time and grief. Period.
And there you have it — the ”Energy Principle” to help you make good, useful decisions and the decision table, to help you evaluate the trade-offs and costs. Use one or both approaches, and you will become far more effective and efficient (and a lot less frustrated!). Oh and by the way, never start writing with a blank piece of paper! ;)
References
Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2014.
Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.
Jones, William. “Finders, keepers?” Text. First Monday, ISSN 1396-0466. Valauskas, Edward J., March 1, 2004. 1996 - 2004. https://cybra.lodz.pl/Content/1081/issues/issue9_3/jones/index.html.