Martin Hähnel

Don't Delete, Abandon

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

I Deleted My Second Brain by Joan Westenberg.

There may be juicier quotes in this article by an author I respect a lot. But I think this captures a central challenge in using a notes system: It's supposed to be used by an author, not by an archivist. Be an author with a workspace. Having a place for your notes doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop being alive.

The rest of the article - to me - is a well written[1], emotionally honest, but ultimately flawed justification for destroying a lot of notes. Well, that's fine, I guess. And the way the text is written, I can imagine how other note takers with a similar emotional make-up to me may wish to not only abandon their note systems[2] but to destroy them after reading this. The rest of this post is meant to maybe suggest to not do that.

As somebody who has done similar things in the past - with my music collection, my photo collection, my notes - I urge you to consider abandonment and archiving over deletion. Put the old stuff aside and start fresh. That's enough.

The thing is: Life is short and long. Even if some of our time is not that great, we may still want to look back - even if only to recognize how far we've come. If present you can change their opinion so dramatically as to wanting to destroy years of work in an instant, do not presume that future you will never feel regret about this. Digital notes are cheap to store. In 5, 10 years, you'll be happy some of this stuff still exists. In 20 years, you'll be happy if anything survived. Or not. Either way it's no skin off your nose.

It is freeing, yes, to destroy your shit. But please reconsider and abandon instead.

  1. The weakest part is mentioning DHH, who is a shithead. ↩︎

  2. I am not going to use "second brain" as this is a brand name. ↩︎