Questions for

Not answers. Sixteen questions per situation, in the order that gets you somewhere: where you actually are, what you actually want, what is in the way, what happens next.

Questions for

Starred questions are kept on this device and nowhere else.

Questions you
kept

What this
is

Everything on the internet is answers. You search a problem and get nine hundred confident words from somebody who does not know your situation, and you close the tab knowing slightly less about what you actually want.

The useful thing is almost always a question — what would you be quitting toward? — and nobody had bothered to write those down properly, by situation, in an order that goes somewhere. So: nineteen stacks, sixteen questions each, hand-written.

Why a stack and not a list

The order is the whole point. Every stack runs through four movements of four questions: where you actually are (describe reality before improving it), what you actually want (in your own words, not the ones you would use at work), what is in the way (including the part that is you), and what happens next (dated, small, and somebody else knows about it). The thirteenth question only works because you answered the first twelve. A flat pile of three hundred deep questions is worth nothing, which is why the ones you find are free.

How to use it

Read a stack whole, or run it — one question at a time, full screen, nothing else on the page, at whatever speed you think. Star the ones that bit; they collect under Kept and copy out as plain text you can paste into your notes, or into a chat with a person or a model. Every stack has its own link, so you can send somebody questions for when it went wrong instead of advice.

The physical version of this is a box of categorised card stacks, so it prints as one: a stack comes out as sixteen cards on cut lines.

Where anything goes

Nowhere. It is a static page. No account, no server, nothing to sign up for; the only thing stored is which questions you starred, in this browser. It works with no network at all once you have opened it, which is the point of a reference.

One of a list of ideas, built end to end. The rest of them. The talking version is Only Questions; the one for a table of people is Closest.