I have a shoebox, an actual shoebox, sitting on the shelf by the window in the spare room, and every time I finish a book or a game campaign I pull an index card and write one line on it, dated, no more editing than that. Started this maybe four years ago after I finished a book and realized a week later I couldn’t remember a single specific thing about how I’d felt reading it, just a vague positive impression, which for someone whose whole job is supposed to be precision felt like a small personal failure.

The rule is one line, written the day I finish, no revising later even if I think of something better after. That constraint turns out to matter more than I expected going in. If I let myself edit, I’d polish the line into something that sounds smart, and the whole point was capturing what I actually thought in the moment, not what I wish I’d thought. Some of the cards are embarrassing to reread. My card for a book I now consider one of my favorites just says “confusing, DNF risk, staying up anyway,” which tells you exactly nothing about why it ended up on my favorites shelf a year later, but it’s honest about where I was on page sixty.

Marcus thinks this is a little unhinged, which is fair, he’s watched me stop mid-sentence at the end of a Thursday game night to go write a card before I forget the specific thing that happened, some absurd alliance collapse or a card draw that changed the whole board. I’ve tried to explain that the writing is the point, not the archive, and he’s tried to explain that nobody needs three hundred index cards in a shoebox, and we’ve settled into a permanent stalemate about it that I don’t expect to resolve.

What I didn’t predict is how much the cards have changed how I read and play in the moment. Knowing I’ll have to distill the whole experience into one sentence later makes me pay closer attention while it’s happening, which sounds like it should be exhausting and instead is closer to the opposite, it’s given me a reason to actually notice things instead of letting an evening pass in a blur the way a lot of my twenties did.

I went looking for the box last month for a specific card, something about a game I wanted to reference, and ended up sitting on the floor for forty minutes reading through two years of cards instead of finding the one I needed. Some habits you keep because they’re useful. This one I keep because I like who I am while I’m doing it, distracted searches and all.