Too many notes

February 17, 2024

The problem is not having too many notes, but rather not having a system to review them for relevance. What does this mean? Does it matter? What do we mean by relevant?

In this situation, notes means a folder full of plain text files without any other type of organization. I have been a long time user of Notational Velocity, but more recently nvALT. For a long time (10+ years) I created notes as soon as I thought up an idea or a snippet of something I wanted to remember.

Without any regular review effort, these notes accumulate like tumbleweeds. There is no pressing need to delete them since they are all just plain text, but if something isn’t relevant, then why should you keep it around?

My solution is to move these notes into their own nv-archive folder. If something bit of information is really so important, they are still accessible. Reviewing these spontaneous notes is far from exciting, but it is relieving.

P.S.

There is now an RSS Feed. It is bare bones and each update is manual, but it works well enough for me. I use Luke Smith’s sup script, then upload the rss.xml file.