Delete Your Notes

• John

Note-taking is inherently messy, and that’s okay. That’s because notes aren’t the goal themselves. The objective of notes is to help you remember something or develop an idea. Sometimes it’s a trivial and short-term task like remembering to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Other times, notes help you learn or build something completely new. In both cases, the mere act of writing information and your ideas down is often more important than the note itself because it’s the focus and organization of ideas on the page that helps you remember, learn, or create something.

Notes also serve as longer-term reference materials for the information you don’t want to lose track of but don’t need often. With web search always at my fingertips, I don’t find this sort of note-taking as necessary as it once was, but it still has its place from time to time. However, the vast majority of notes I (and I suspect most others) take are disposable. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but probably sooner than you realize your notes are obsolete and should be deleted or at least archived where they won’t interfere with your current work.