One Thread Per Thing

Every chat interface I use starts the same way. A blank box, a cursor blinking, no memory of yesterday. I describe what I'm working on, paste the context, frame the problem. Then I make some progress. Then I close the window. The next day I open a new blank box and do it again.

This is fine for one-off questions. It is terrible for serious creative work.

Last week I made a small architectural decision in the tool I use to manage my own drafts. Each published article now gets exactly one conversation. When I open the article, the same thread reopens, with the same history, the same proposals I've been turning over, the same decisions I've already made. There is no "new chat" button. The conversation belongs to the article, not to me, not to the session.

It is a stupidly small change. It changed how I work on the pieces.

The friction in serious creative work is rarely producing new material. It's holding the thread. When you come back to a piece of writing after a day away, you have to relocate where you were, what you were trying to do, what you'd already rejected, what you were planning to try next. Most tools force you to do that relocation from scratch every time you sit down. The blank cursor is asking you to brief yourself before you can begin.

A continuous container does that briefing for you, because it remembers.

Writers used to do this with notebooks. You'd open the notebook to where you left off and the page would have your last attempt on it, with words crossed out, an arrow drawn to a margin note, three rejected first lines. You didn't need to remember any of that consciously, because it was right there in front of you. The notebook held the state.

Then the notebook became the file, and the file became the document, and the document became one of many documents in a folder, and the editor opens fresh each time, and the conversation about the document happens somewhere else entirely, in a chat window that doesn't know which document you mean.

The state has dispersed. The work doesn't have a place to live anymore.

You can feel this in your tools if you look. The text editor has a list of recent files but no notion of which one you're working on right now. The chat interface starts fresh every time. The bookmarks bar fills with research that's loosely related but uncoupled from any specific piece. The note-taking app, which is supposed to hold continuity, ends up as the same junk drawer as everything else.

This is fixable. The pattern is just: one thread per thing.

Pick the object that matters in your work. For me it's the article. For a novelist it might be the chapter. For a screenwriter it might be the scene. For a researcher it might be the open question. Whatever the unit is, every tool that touches that unit should remember it. The conversation about it, the notes you took on it, the references you pulled for it, the version you abandoned and the version you kept.

When you reopen the unit, all of that should be there. Not in a sidebar you have to dig for. Not in a search you have to perform. There, present, like the page in the notebook.

The hard part isn't building this. It's deciding what the unit is.

If you pick too large a unit, like "my novel," the thread becomes a junk drawer of its own. If you pick too small a unit, like "this paragraph," you fragment your thinking and lose the ability to see the piece. The right unit is the one that matches the scope of your actual decisions. If you regularly think about a chapter as a thing, the unit is the chapter. If you think about an essay as a thing, the unit is the essay. Watch what you actually return to.

Once you have the unit, defend it. The conversation about the chapter doesn't get to drift into a conversation about the novel. The notes on the article stay anchored to the article, not the topic. The decisions you make get made in one place, where they accumulate over time and start to look like a position rather than a series of impressions.

The accumulation is the point.

A writer who has been thinking about the same chapter for three months has a different relationship with that chapter than one who's encountering it fresh each session. The thinking compounds. You can see what you used to believe and how you've moved off it. You can spot patterns in what you keep rejecting. You start to know the piece in a way that a single sitting can't produce.

This is what the tools we use are usually not built for, because they were built for transactions and not for relationships. Every blank cursor is asking for a transaction. A continuous thread is asking for a relationship.

The work you care about deserves a relationship.

Pick the unit. Give it one place to live. Let the thinking accumulate there. Watch how differently you work on something when its history is still in the room with you.