I did the same thing recently, excluding quotes from books. Every other note, How To, and To Do gone. It provided tremendous relief. The vast majority of the stuff may as well have been written by a complete stranger. But, again, I kept my book quotes and notes as that is something I reference regularly. I guess the main thing was the realization that I literally don’t access 90% of my notes and they were of no value other than making me feel something about myself.

I understand the burden that too much notes may take on you. I am a software troubleshooter and I used to keep my raw notes of all the interesting cases I encountered. However, with time, this set became hard to navigate. Additionally, when I was rereading my notes, they seemed chaotic and hard to follow. I now prefer to create a succinct summary of a closed case, explaining the taken steps, my thinking, and the solution, so that my future self could understand it :)

I regularly create a new folder with current date and work in it until it gets overbloated and then create a new one. Past ones remain until they are still relevant. If something is generally (evergreen) relevant, it gets placed in a text "longnotes.md" where they can also be searched and also found roughly by its date. Do whatever works for you.

I've been sober for over 19 years, the first few years are the most difficult transition if I remember. I think the author is overreacting.

You can't really deny the past, it's part of you.

When people discard something and Chesterton's fence doesn't come around to bite them in the back, I assume that the something was a bunch of rubbish in the first place.

I understand this and I have done similar a few times (e.g. deleting all old emails, deleting all notes, deleting a tonne of old files etc.). It's quite freeing. We do hoard a lot of digital stuff that we really don't need. Saying that, there are a few times over the years I've needed somethings, realised I deleted it and regretted it. That feeling passed quickly though and I soon realised it probably didn't matter.

Why not just start a new notebook/vault? Notetaking systems are all imperfect and it's best not to throw a fit every time you run into those imperfections.

Word of advice: don't do what the author has done. He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).

The answer, as usual, is in the middle: keep all notes, archived. Feel free to restart old projects/ideas by archiving old projects to old/2024/legacy, and starting with a fresh page/folder, occasionally looking back at archived notes, if needed.

I think the speed at which you can open previous notes matters.

If it takes you 1 minute of scrambling in a GUI to find a previous note, you are less likely to read previous notes.

And also less likely to write new ones as you know you’ll never visit it again.

I have an app built on the fzy CLI and Ghostty terminal for Apple Notes. It is working well for me:

https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes

Having went through similar deletions before the important takeaway is that the reason the author felt relief is that deleted things that were weighing them down.

A common mistake is to keep stuff you won't need (or worse stuff actively keeping up mental space). If you're really worried about losing something you can still keep those old notes somewhere where it doesn't bother you, but the real useful notes.