I’m writing this in an email draft right now. I love Gmail’s auto-saving drafts a lot. Putting stuff in drafts makes it easily accessible and searchable. I know I’m not alone in compulsively saving things in “drafts” that aren’t emails. What’s the strangest thing you’ve got saved?
For years I’ve used this repository to keep hold of things that don’t seem to have another place. But Kaila, you might ask, why not use Google Docs? Well, all that blank white space looks intimidating when you’re trying to remember a random idea or save a cool link.
Going back through my pages and pages of drafts feels like time travelling. These documents are often the closest I come to a diary — there, an idea a friend told me over a delicious dinner that I’d forgotten about; here, notes for a story I abandoned that I once thought would be a novel; buried deep, snippets of a text conversation with someone I don’t talk to much anymore.
But I think the strangest stuff I have in drafts come from using the feature — gasp — correctly. As I scroll through my drafts, I’m finding many emails that went unsent. Probably for good reason — some of them were angry, and a night’s sleep proved they should go unsent. Others are heartbroken, written without the intent to ever send at all. Still others lurk unfinished, a testament to my attention wandering elsewhere and never following through with the desire to reconnect with an old friend. These actual drafts are like snapshots of my mentality at the time, and it’s bizarre to look at what might have been sent but now never will be.
My oldest gmail account contains 2102 drafts. What do you have saved in yours? What’s the weirdest thing you can dig up?