I was writing faster than we could work through it

For a year I kept notes between coaching sessions, and I assumed the problem was that nobody had time to read them. It took me much longer to work out that wasn't really the problem.

I was generating more than we could get through.

There was always more than we could get to. Something would hit on a Tuesday and I'd write it down, then something else on Thursday, and by Monday there was more in front of me than forty-five minutes could hold. That kept happening, week after week, and the session never got any longer to match.

I tried to solve it with logistics

At one point I found an export function in the app. That felt like the answer — I could send everything over ahead of the session, he'd have it in advance, and we'd start further in.

So I exported it and texted it to him. Then I did it again. It took me a bit to work out he wasn't reading it, which in hindsight was obvious, and I've written about why that was a fair call on his part.

But the export wasn't a bad idea because of his time. It was a bad idea because of what I sent him. It was one long block. Everything I'd written, in the order I'd written it, with no way in.

The stuff doesn't come apart

That's the part I didn't understand at the time. I thought I had fifteen entries and a selection problem — work out which three matter, bring those.

They weren't fifteen things. The house thing was tangled up in the money thing, which was really the leaving thing, and none of it separated cleanly enough to pick from. I couldn't bring three of fifteen because there weren't fifteen. There was one mass with fifteen entry points into it.

So there was no clean way to pull three things out of it and leave the rest, and no way to hand the whole thing to someone else and expect them to find the shape.

Organising it first doesn't work

The obvious answer is to sort it as you go. Tag things, file them, keep it tidy so that by the time you sit down it's already in order.

Sorting as you write means deciding what something is at the moment you're least able to judge it — you're in the middle of the thing. Everything I wrote felt important when I wrote it. That feeling is what got me into the pile in the first place, so using it as the filing system would just have produced a well-organised pile.

The other answer is to reread it all before the session. That's worse. Now I'm reading fifteen entries that all still feel important, with the same blind spot I had when I wrote them, and I've spent an hour before the hour.

What actually has to happen

Something has to cross the gap between what I wrote and the room. It can't be all of it, because that's the mass. It can't be my pick, because my picker is the thing that's broken.

What I wanted was one page.

Not a summary of the week, which is just the mass compressed. One thing, chosen by something that wasn't me, that I could carry in.

That's what Unfogged does today. It works on one piece of writing and gives you a brief — one page, once. If there isn't enough there to say something honest, it says nothing.

It doesn't solve the accumulation. I don't think anything does. The writing will always outpace the hour, and it should — that's the clarity arriving, and I'd rather have it than not. What changes is what makes it across.