🌲 Heuristics for Hanging on to Things

On deciding what to save: recording thoughts, retaining references, & purging without regret

People love to argue about collector’s fallacy — on social media, in real life, and in chat rooms — though these days I guess we call them Discord servers. Shows likes Hoarders, shots-fired takedowns of excessive Evernote clipping, snooty snark about how collecting things isn’t really learning — it’s a topic that has, truthfully, annoyed me as much as the folders vs. tags debates that inspired my most popular rant of all time.

I remember sitting in an airport back in April, getting ready to head to Norway for a company offsite and leave my daughter for what was at the time the longest I’d ever been away from her. It was the first time I’d opened my notes app — Obsidian — in months, and the first time I’d seriously used it since my pregnancy went off the rails and I quit teaching.

Flipping through my files, I was so glad I had all those old notes at my fingertips. I’d barely touched the app in roughly a year — I still don’t use it as much as I used to, when I was home for 2 (pandemic-laden) years’ worth of maternity leave with my eldest, who actually took reliable naps. But there, waiting for me with all the patience of a simple text file, were a bevy of half-finished articles and neatly (ish) tagged notes. It was surprisingly easy to pick back up where I’d left off — a fair number of articles that have gone out over the last year were originally conceived of well over two years ago. I first started my reflections about muad’dib Paul’s attempted suicide in 2021, when the first Dune movie came out — it wasn’t until 2024 that I finally managed to get it all coherent enough to share in essay format.

When I got home from Norway and decided it was time to organize my physical notebooks with an eye toward making sure there’s always something handy to read or write on, I ran across a lot of things that made me smile in those old notebooks — even simple to-do lists had a lot of sentimental value. Remember when I had to pick up oranges for the turkey that one Thanksgiving where I decided to be fancy? Super useful to know right about now that it’s mid-November again!

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I haven’t had time to make notes as often as I used to, or as much of a use-case: most of the notes I touch often have been things like medicine logs for the family, shared reflections on getaways with my husband, databases on contact information for the parents of kids my son goes to daycare with, or ordered lists of bugs & app builds I need to investigate. And Notion is, frankly, better for that stuff — it was enough of a struggle getting my husband to use a note-taking app more sophisticated than gmail drafts or google docs. Markdown-based notes backed by git was a nonstarter… and he’s a software developer. A lot of my colleagues and friends are not.

A different person might have considered abandoning Obsidian altogether, but not me. I like to hold onto my notes. I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, though — in general, I’m actually quite good at purging and traveling light.

Storing data may be cheaper than storing real life objects, but even in real life, the main problem with figuring out what to keep isn’t expense in terms of space — even when traveling with only carry-on luggage, I usually have some unused space to work with. Text files don’t take up much room, and even a decade’s worth of dead tree notebooks aren’t that big — certainly not bigger than the bookshelves upon bookshelves of old books I’ve got decorating my walls. Still, sometimes it can get to be too much.

“Too much” isn't a complete thought, though. The problem with collecting too much can be:

• too much money to store (never thought I’d see the day I paid for Google photos storage, then I had kids…)

• too much overhead to maintain (backups can get pretty complicated!)

• too much to sort through (though AI makes finding relevant notes easier)

The bedrock of my note-taking is nonfiction texts, whether they be twitter threads, pop history books, email discussions with experts, journal articles or press releases. There is an impulse sometimes to avoid reading more until all the notes from the previously read text are properly processed and nearly organized. An urge toward avoiding taking notes on anything I won’t necessarily use. This is, I think, a mistake.

For one, the mere act of “actively reading” is beneficial. Underlining, highlighting and annotating a text is a handy way to tell your brain to meaningfully engage with the bit you are interacting with. Second, for most of us, it is not possible to “use” notes every moment of every day; even the most productive people cannot literally write novels essays nonstop. Guys like Gwern and Craid Mod read stupendous amounts; it defies belief that they then also write more than they read, or affirmatively “use” everything they put into their brains — or that they would be better off if they did so. Thirdly, it’s hard to anticipate in advance what you will or won’t use!

Sometimes just having things kicking around in the primordial soup is more valuable than trying super hard to learn everything real well. It takes time to do things “right” and time is the thing that most of us experience as being absolutely limited on.

But when there is too much cruft in the metaphorical soup of our notes, it can be hard to find things. Search relies on matching, and if you have one good set of notes on how to potty train and a thousand half-complete thoughts about how potty training was going on any particular day four years ago, it makes sense to archive those daily reflections somewhere they won’t get in the way. But knowing what to archive — or even throw away entirely — can be tricky. Not least of which because common heuristics like “have you touched it in the last six months” or whatever tend to not be terribly useful for me!

For example, I was ten years out of college before I had an urge to go back and re-read my capstone project. Sure am glad they had an archived copy of it to send me via email when I asked, because boy did I really regret letting the file get corrupted.

I only really need my notes about Thanksgiving hosting once a year. I only want to look at my early novels every couple of years. I went roughly 18 months — while pregnant and intensely nursing my infant — without looking at a single note about the ancient world. One of my notes is focused on considerations for building a custom house on the off chance I get to build my dream home after the kids go to college. Even as a best case scenario, it will be years before those notes are useful.

My interests tend to come in waves, and my life has taken strange turns. It’s really hard to anticipate what I’m going to want to look back on.

So my heuristic for hanging onto files is this: archive everything I can’t imagine a use for, keep leveling up my organization game, and err on the side of avoiding regrets. For my digital life, I’ve always regretted things I lost, not things I kept around too long.

My Google photos are not impossible to download and back up — but I’d lose access to Google’s excellent search, it would be harder to order hardcopy, and the family members who enjoy the albums would be bummed. So I pay a small fee to maintain my access. If it were a large fee, I’d figure something else out — but it would be a hassle. Organizing photos is a lot more complicated (for me, at least) than organizing text files. The overhead would be too much, so I pay the money rather than (functionally) lose my access. Data hoarder? Maybe. But I love being able to easily search up old photos of my son’s bike when it comes up in conversation with a friend.

In the physical world, though? Where space is at a premium, it’s harder to maintain indexes of what-is-where, and my body changes a lot more than my mind? I get rid of stuff all the time. Rarely do I regret giving away (or selling!) old clothes that barely fit, bulky furniture I no longer have a good spot for, or cooking appliances I’ve grown out of. The critical difference is not the physicality, though — it’s convenience, it’s replaceability. I hold onto mementos like an old yearbook, a childhood photo, my ASVAB scores — but the truth is I don’t have very many things like that. It all fits into a single file cabinet, even if I include the snowglobe my grandma got me or my great-aunt Norma’s decorative iron. I don’t keep reams and reams of old photos because I never had that much in the way of physical artifacts. I don’t need every single card my anyone ever gave me — one or two notes for each valued childhood memory is enough.

It’s easy to get a new food dehydrator (my air fryer is surprisingly good at it!) — it’s much harder to re-create the really cool novella about bat-winged lactating egglayers escaping an oppressive regime I wrote a few years back. I really hope it is archived somewhere in my private cloud storage center… because it’s definitely not where I thought I put it a few years back. Good thing I keep good backups!