When I worked for a Fortune 100 company, it was customary to be assigned a workstation. Each came with an official name plate, a standard office supply kit, and some branded comforts: a mug, business cards, and paper pads. I later learned the pads were called bucks. “You jot the note, issue, request. Whatever. And then you ‘pass the buck,’” I was told. The explanation seemed too convenient, too tidy a strategy for offloading responsibility. But in hindsight, it was also a way to retain credit while others did the work. I’m still suspicious of the etymology, but not the workflow.

Years later, when I set up my first official studio—not a desk in a bedroom, but a real site with a door and a key—I wanted my own comforts. Not entirely like the corporate ones. I called my first version briefs—little white forms for recording what I was doing, what I thought I was doing, what I told myself I was doing. Studio activities became documented tasks, paralleling business work, but with the self and studio transcribed into task and record. Not passed along, but kept close. The briefs offered support, not for efficiency, but for memory. There are now stacks of them. They corroborate my presence.

Cataloguing Briefs is a loose system for keeping track of gestures, thoughts, half-formed projects, and finished ones too. It’s not quite record-keeping, nor is it a public workflow. Maybe something closer to a private uniform, a subtle reminder to stay organized while in motion.