---
title: "The notes shelf — a drawer, not a filing cabinet"
date: 2026-08-01T11:00:00
draft: false
categories: ["Notes"]
tags: ["flove", "notes", "blog", "shelf"]
---

Some rooms have filing cabinets: everything indexed, everything in its place,
alphabetical, perfect, and — let's be honest — a little dead. Other rooms have a
drawer. You throw things in it while you're working, pull them out when you need
them, and every so often the drawer gives you back something you'd forgotten you
had. The notes shelf is flove's drawer.

## What's on it

The notes shelf holds the short things from the workbench: a small fix that took
an hour, a decision that deserves a sentence of remembering, a thought that's not
a whole essay yet. It's where the earliest voices of the blog actually arrived —
the [welcome](https://flove.org/development/blog/categories/notes/) note and the first hello
that told you what flove believes: *relate, don't extract.* Those were notes
before the shelf had a name, and they still live here.

This is the shelf where the blog's older vocabulary is slowly being translated,
too — the posts that arrived before the blog had its five shelves get tidied and
re-homed so the drawer stays coherent.

## How it got here

Notes came first, naturally. Before there were standards, before the pipeline,
there were the little written-down things that turned into flove's voice. When
the blog launched, those fragments got a home; when the blog grew from three
shelves to five, the notes got theirs. The rule of the drawer is simple and it
was decided on day one: **short, honest, as they happen** — nothing filed for
posterity's sake.

## What's ahead

- **As they come** — the drawer doesn't keep a schedule. Notes land when the
  workbench produces them.
- **A little organizing** — old posts that predate the five shelves get tidy,
  readable homes without losing their original voice.
- **Cross-fertilization** — a note that grows up gets promoted to a full post on
  the shelf it belongs to; a note that stays a note stays a note.

A filing cabinet tells you where everything is. A drawer tells you what you were
actually doing. flove would rather know the second one.

_slow it · flow it · love it._
