Your SME Is a Time Machine
Playing the Longest Game With Your Past Self
This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.
Two years ago, in a piece called Free To Collect + Allowed To Keep It, I argued that, while hoarding atoms can have dire consequences, the same idea does not apply to the world of bits. Digital gluttony, just-in-case-storage, or the collector’s fallacy are straw men pushed hardest by the minimalist productivity crowd. These ideas are utterly silly.
In digital space, there’s no hoarding. There’s only bad organization.
Yes, people can suffer from too much consumption and too little production. Yes, they certainly can suffer from too much imitation and too little critical thinking. But telling someone to save fewer links is like telling an insomniac to buy a better pillow. It sounds good in theory, but it won’t help much in practice. It certainly won’t change what actually matters.
People who feel overwhelmed by their digital possessions don’t have a capture problem. They lack basic digital literacy. They’re trying to run before they’ve learned to walk.
At a bare minimum, before you can start collecting to your heart’s desire, you should master two core skills:
Separating stuff by action potential — task artifacts, for instance, can go in a dedicated task manager, while all other, less timely notes, reside in a notes app.1
Pushing low-priority material to the periphery of the system, where it costs the least.2
Once that foundation is in place, “death by a thousand captures” stops being a problem. That’s why, two years ago, I proclaimed: Go ahead. Feed your SME (pronounced “smeh” — short for Someday/Maybe Empire).
Today, I’m going one step further. Not only are you free to collect, you should collect.
There are four reasons for this.
1️⃣ A SME saves energy.
In digital space, where things weigh nothing, the willpower math is simple: you can either capture now and sort later (energy cost: close to zero) or resist and lose forever (energy cost: low but perceptible and accumulating quickly). If I encounter an interesting quote, an intriguing reference, a link, or an enticing post, I simply keep it. I have capture mechanics in place to do so within 2 seconds. Then I’m ready to move on. If, instead, I were to stop to consider whether I really should keep something, that would take some resistance. I could also easily go off into the weeds, because to properly answer whether something is worth keeping, I would need more context; so I’d peek inside and then— maybe—I’d skim the whole thing. And so, either I lose 10+ minutes, or I end up capturing it anyway. Defaulting to always capture wins on both ends.3
2️⃣ Some parts of your SME will be useful.
The Japanese have a word for the habit of accumulating unread books: tsundoku. Umberto Eco called his vast personal library of unread books his antilibrary. With a SME, you apply the same logic to many other places. For instance, I keep Goodreads lists, IMDB watchlists, YouTube queues, and—for over a decade now—articles saved to Readwise Reader. My read-later list currently sits at 3,568 items. Many people see that as failure and want to "clean up" or start over. But why? As long as it sits at the periphery of your system and doesn't drown out things with higher action potential, it costs you nothing. Quite the contrary. When I recently decided to read more articles, I had a perfect place to start—especially now that my feeds are hijacked by AI discourse and I simply don’t want to read about AI all the time. My SME saved the day.
3️⃣ Your saves are votes.
Every time you save something, you’re casting a vote about what matters to you — often before you know why. Over time, those votes stack up into patterns you never planned for. My iPhone photo library is a good example: I’ve been photographing my life for over a decade, and the daily flashbacks Apple surfaces are pure resonance — a signal from your past self about what was worth keeping. Apple’s resurfaced photos sparked the title images for this very series. The SME returns things on its own schedule, not mine — and that schedule is often better.
4️⃣ Never start from zero.
A SME is a long-term memory prosthetic that lets different versions of you collaborate across time. Without a SME, every effort begins with partial amnesia. With one, curiosity compounds across decades — what once seemed like a dead end reveals itself as a foundation. With a SME, you rarely start from scratch; you have sediment to draw from. For example, I recently rediscovered the first draft of a science fiction novel called Savant, which I wrote at 21 and abandoned at exactly page three. Back then, the idea outpaced the skill. Reading it now, I can see the potential I couldn’t see then — as though past-me had left something on the doorstep for present-me to find.
You are already feeding a SME, at least in some ways. You just tend to forget what you already have. And that means you are not using it to its full potential.
Here are a few practices to tap into it more often:
Before starting any new effort, search your SME for relevant keywords. Maybe you kept something in the past, that is helpful.
Open one random item from your SME every day and see what it sparks. Treat it like a conversation with a previous version of yourself.
Think of your SME as a cross-cutting tool. It includes your read-later app, your Goodreads list, your YouTube queue. The empire is bigger than any single app.
When you’re stuck or blocked, open your SME instead of opening social media. One is a feed designed to distract; the other is a feed you designed yourself.
When something resurfaces unexpectedly — a flashback, a search result, an old note — don't just consume it. Ask: why did past-me keep this? That question is often more useful than the item itself.
If you have five minutes, go spelunking.
When we tell the story of our lives, we draw a straight line. School. Job. Move to another city. Marriage. First child. We prune the detours and keep only the “important” milestones. But lived life doesn’t feel linear. It feels like a tree. There’s a trunk, yes — but also branches in every direction. Detours. Obsessions. Almost-careers. Experiments that never matured. A SME honors that true shape. It’s where the branches can rest until they’re ready to matter.
Within-tool separation of action potentials can be achieved, as shown by influencers who manage their task artifacts in their notes tool (e.g., Notion or Obsidian). But don’t be fooled: it is much harder to keep clean boundaries this way, and I would never recommend that to beginners. So, unless you know what you are doing, it’s best to always opt for dedicated tools. I have a couple of essays on that. See, for instance:
You very likely want to capture stuff into an inbox or another qualification zone, and defer the decision on whether to file and keep something. That’s, in my opinion, where capture criteria like Tiago Forte’s Is it inspiring/useful/personal/surprising come in; not at the point of capture! During qualification, you are already in the mode where you can make such decisions efficiently.