The Screenshot Has Been Filed Without Retrieval
The screenshot was taken so the information would not be lost, and now it cannot be found.
To: Future Self From: Present Self Subject: The screenshots
There are currently 847 screenshots on this device. Of these, approximately twelve were taken for administrative purposes and have been acted on. The remaining 835 were taken for later.
Later has not arrived for most of them.
The practice of screenshot for later serves a clear purpose. Information is encountered that seems worth keeping. The information could be saved in a different way: written down, bookmarked, emailed to oneself, stored in a note. Screenshot for later is faster than all of these. It requires one gesture and produces immediate relief.
The relief is real. The relief is the product.
Under the governing rule, once screenshot for later reduces anxiety once, it becomes eligible for unlimited future use.
The problem is retrieval. The screenshot is filed in chronological order among screenshots of: a recipe, a meme, a confirmation code, an address, a conversation that seemed important, an article headline without the article, and several things that are no longer identifiable as anything.
Finding a specific screenshot requires scrolling through the record of every moment that generated the screenshot feeling.
This is not searched. The threshold for searching is higher than the threshold for taking the screenshot in the first place, which is why the file grows.
There is now a note on the phone titled "things to check screenshots for." The note contains four items. None of them have been checked.
This correspondence will not be followed up on.