Formats›An admission to a sanctuary, in five lines

An admission to a sanctuary, in five lines

A reusable format for keeping ideas. Take it, fill it, use it again — one page per idea you want to keep and have no intention of developing.

Download sanctuary-format.md The file you fill in. Plain text — open it in any editor, or hand it to an agent.

What this is for

A sanctuary is a place where ideas are allowed to stay alive without having to justify themselves. Not a list of things to do, not a backlog, not a folder of somedays. A place where an idea can sit for years, unworked, and not be thrown out for failing to prove itself.

This format is how one gets admitted. Every other format here ends in something being done; this one ends in something being left alone, deliberately, and written down so that leaving it alone is a decision rather than a lapse.

I keep mine at the Museum of Vestigial Desire, and it has been running since 2016 — you can read what is in it at museumofvestigialdesire.net/sanctuary. This page is the shape rather than the contents: yours will hold different things, and the point is that it holds them without asking them for anything.

Some ideas should be allowed to persist without any evidence that they are worth anything. Not because they will turn out to be valuable later — that is the argument people reach for, and it is a way of developing an idea while claiming not to. The reason is narrower. An idea that asks for nothing costs nothing to keep, and an arrangement that only holds what it can justify holding will lose everything that has not yet found a way to argue for itself.

So the test is not is this good and not will this pay off. It is: does this idea ask for anything? Attention, money, people to work on it, someone to say it is worthwhile — if it asks for none of those, there is no reason to refuse it a place, and the question of its value can be left open indefinitely.

The one thing that disqualifies an idea is not weakness. It is that you have already become cynical about it, in which case it is not resting, it is stuck: unable to be dropped and unable to go anywhere.

The format

THE IDEA        what it is, in one sentence, with no case made for it

ASKS FOR        what it wants from you, if anything — and the entry
                depends on this being close to nothing
THE CYNICISM    whether you have already soured on it, honestly
WHAT IT NEEDS   what it would need only if it ever caught, and nothing
                that has to happen before then

NOT THIS        what developing it would cost, and why that is a refusal

An idea above, a refusal below, and three lines between.

What each line is asking

THE IDEA. What it is, in one sentence, and the sentence makes no case. This is harder than it sounds: the instinct on writing down an idea is to justify it in the same breath, and a justified idea has already entered the economy this format is trying to keep it out of. Say what it is. Stop.

ASKS FOR. What it wants from you. Attention, money, other people, validation — take them one at a time and answer each. Something that wants all four is not a candidate, and saying so is the format working rather than failing. Most ideas want at least one, and the ones that want none are rarer and stranger than you would expect.

THE CYNICISM. Whether you have already soured on it. The only honest test here is instinctive and you already know the answer: an idea you have become cynical about feels tired when you write it down, and one that has not feels quiet. If it is tired, it is not resting — it is stuck, and a sanctuary is the wrong place for it. Say so and let it go.

WHAT IT NEEDS. What it would need only if it ever caught. A room, a year, a collaborator, a particular machine. The conditional is the whole line: this is not a plan and nothing here is to be arranged. Writing it down is what stops the question recurring every time the idea surfaces.

NOT THIS. What developing it would cost. Not what it would take — what would be lost. Usually the answer is that it would have to start asking for things, and that the asking would change it into something with an obligation attached. Naming that is how the refusal stays a refusal rather than a delay.

A worked one

THE IDEA        A room where the light changes at the speed the day
                actually changes, which is far slower than anyone
                builds for.

ASKS FOR        Attention: no. Money: no. People: no. Somebody to
                agree it is worthwhile: no, and this is the one it
                would have failed a year ago.
THE CYNICISM    None yet. It has not been described to anybody, which
                is probably why.
WHAT IT NEEDS   A room with one window and a year. Only if. Nothing
                is to be looked for.

NOT THIS        Building it would require saying what it is for, and
                the only true answer is that it is not for anything.
                That answer does not survive a proposal.

Note that the fourth line names a room and a year and commits to neither. That is the format holding: the need is recorded so it stops being an open question, and recording it is not the same as intending to meet it.

How to use it

  1. Write THE IDEA without an argument, then check the sentence for one. Words like could, might eventually, and there is something in this are the argument sneaking back in. Cut them and see whether the sentence survives.
  2. Answer ASKS FOR one item at a time. Four separate answers, not an impression. The impression is always more generous than the four.
  3. Be honest about the cynicism, because nobody else can check it. This is the only line in any of these formats that has no external evidence at all. It also decides the outcome.
  4. Keep WHAT IT NEEDS conditional in the wording, not only in the intention. Only if it ever catches belongs in the line. An intention that is not written down is reread as a plan within a year.
  5. Do not revisit it on a schedule. A sanctuary you audit quarterly is a backlog.

Three ways it goes wrong

It becomes a list of things to do later. The moment two of these are read together as a queue, the format has been converted into a backlog with unusual wording. They are not ranked, they are not reviewed, and nothing in here is waiting.

The case gets made anyway. The idea line stays clean and the justification moves into WHAT IT NEEDS, which quietly becomes a description of how feasible it all is. Watch for feasibility appearing anywhere on the page; it belongs to a different format.

A tired idea is admitted out of loyalty. The cynicism line is the one people fill in generously about their own ideas, and the cost is real: a sanctuary holding things you have already given up on stops being a place where anything is resting.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: sanctuary-format.md. Yours to alter.