I have a confession: I’m a digital hoarder of half-formed ideas.
I journal everyday. I capture my thoughts, experiences, and lessons learned. While many journals are private, some are actually cool. They explore my emotions, connect my inner world with outer experiences, and wrestle with ideas that feel worth expanding. These are the ones I mark as potential content pieces in my note-taking app. And I tell myself that someday — when I have more time, more clarity, more something — I’ll transform those notes into polished blog posts and share them with the world.
But in reality: I rarely do.
The pressure of “blog posts”
Then I realized my content idea backlog is filled with fragments labeled TODO > Blog posts that never move to In progress. My note-taking app has become a digital graveyard where good ideas die.
The problem isn’t the quality of my ideas — it’s the heavy weight of the word “blog post” itself. The moment I think, “I’ll write a blog post from this note,” it becomes burdened with expectations. Suddenly, every half-formed idea needs a content brief, a target audience, a clear purpose, an outline, and so on… It must fit into one of my “content pillars” and serve my personal brand.
I paralyze myself with those expectations. My overthinking thinks of the million ways to bake messy journals into perfect blog posts. I open my notes, stare at an idea, feel the weight of blog posts, and then close the app without writing anything. Perfectionism becomes procrastination disguised as “waiting for the right moment.”
In trying to create perfect content, I end up creating no content at all.
The social media dilemma
“Just share them on social media,” my brain helpfully suggests. Sounds good? If my ideas are not yet full-form blog posts, I could’ve turned them into social media posts. But that solution comes with its own problems – I’ve never felt comfortable doing so.
Social media is now a calculated performance space for personal branding and lead generation. Experts advise to “Stick to a few consistent content pillars,” “You have to maintain a cohesive personal brand,” and “Post strategically for maximum engagement.”
But my thoughts don’t work in content pillars. They wander. They explore. They branch out randomly. They refuse to be contained in the tidy categories or character limits of the platforms.
Social media feels too crowded and noisy for the authentic thinking I want to share. As I wrote in Build my internet corner:
…it [social media] could feel as if renting space in a crowded apartment building — you’re constantly competing for attention, subject to algorithm changes, and living by someone else’s rules.
The cost of keeping thoughts private
Every time I lock potentially useful thoughts in private, I’m also depriving someone else of a perspective that might spark their own thinking. Like the way I do from others. I set out to learn in public, yet my most genuine reflections — the messy, human moments — never see daylight.
If a thought remains hidden behind the wall, how does it make an impact? How does it contribute to the larger conversation? How does it help anyone else who might be wrestling with similar questions?
Finding the digital suburbs
What I need is a space that exists somewhere between the crowded city center of social media and the isolated cabin of my private notes. Think of it as the digital suburbs — quieter than downtown but not as lonely as my own backyard.
So I’m creating what I’m calling “Unpolished Notes” — an imperfect space for thoughts in progress. Not a blog, because that word carries too much baggage. Not social media posts, because they demand too much engagement. Something entirely different: a living collection of messy, incomplete, and exploratory ideas.
Unpolished Notes is now live! I chose Craft as my publishing platform because I already use it as a note-taking app, and its beautiful UI is perfect to showcase my notes. The entries come directly from my journals. I do minimal editing: use AI to fix typos, clarify a confusing sentence, and separate sections for readability. But I resist the urge to over-polish. The goal is to preserve the authentic moment while making it readable for others.
In this space, I can share random observations that don’t fit neat categories. I can document what I’m learning, even when I don’t have all the answers. I can describe experiments I’m running without knowing how they’ll turn out. I can explore half-formed ideas that might lead somewhere interesting — or might not.
The beauty of unpolished notes is that they’re freed from any marketing purpose. They don’t need to serve a content strategy or build a personal brand. They don’t need to generate leads or drive engagement. They just need to exist, to capture a moment of thinking that might otherwise be lost.
Sometimes the perfect solution isn’t finding the right existing platform — it’s creating the space you need for your particular way of thinking and sharing. For me, that space is between polished and private, where thoughts can exist in their natural state.
P.S. I created Unpolished Notes to let my thoughts breathe in public, then I will pick some to further polish. Think of them as seeds. Some will grow into full articles. (This blog post, for example, came from this note.) Others will crystallize into clearer ideas. Many will remain unpolished.