Delete Your Notes
Ease of Capture 🕸
People love to capture their thoughts and store them away in a note. Trusty pen and paper work as well as ever but now you can capture on your phone or laptop. Recent advances in technology have made note-taking ridiculously simple. Everything syncs magically to every device you have.
The ease of note-taking has resulted in a growing problem. The sheer volume of notes we collect requires some type of organization. How will we find our notes again?
Some will tell you to file them away in folders or label them with tags. Others will tell you to let them free range with little more than a tenuous link to other notes. When the time is right, they'll find each other.
Some clever folks have made a distinction between note-takers and note-makers. Note taking is easy. What matters is note *making*. What can you do with all those notes you've taken? How can you unlock their value?
Fear of Missing Out 😬
I'm all for saving your notes and thoughts, but do you really believe all these notes have such value?
Look through your notes, your hundreds of notes, maybe thousands of notes. Are you going to tell me all of them are worth keeping? Face it. We suffer from FOMO.
We fear that if we delete a note it might be the one that will combine with some other note to create that wonderful new idea. At the moment I need it most, it will be gone. Deleted forever.
A New Way 🌅
I propose a new method, a third option in addition to note-takers and note-makers.
*Be a note killer*
Like a prospector sifting through a pile of dirt, look for the gold nuggets and discard the rest. Don't stuff it in a folder, tag it or link it. Toss it.
Stop living in fear.
Culling your notes regularly will not only reduce digital clutter, it will make you better at taking notes. You'll be more discerning. You'll be able to more readily recognize when something is of limited value. Often times you may choose not to save it at all.
Make it part of your daily review or weekly review. Don't just process your inbox, review notes you've already saved. If you've got hundreds or thousands, go through a section at a time.
Just because our systems can hold an unlimited amount of notes doesn't mean we should. Become the curator of your collection.