How to Escape From Drowning in Notes

Notes notes notes.

They can drown you.

Pages and pages of thinking, observing, ideating, realizing.

What do you do with your notes when they're done?

Do you take what you need, then abandon the rest? Do you archive the mental carnage from your meetings and readings and ideatings to look back at one day when you have time?

What do you hope to find in your notes at some later date? A reminder of all the things you forgot to do, of the ideas you never pursued, of the principles that could have been guiding you?

How much raw material do you have to wade through when you need to remember what you decided, what the plan was, or what your thinking was about something?

Like technical debt, notes are a debt. And to pay the debt, notes need to be sorted, labeled, processed, distilled, and mined for what's important.

With the gems in hand, why keep the rest? Discard them, delete them. Don't leave anything behind to lure you back into looking for what's no longer there.

I am a destroyer of notes. I aim to make my notes disappear as quickly as I can. I transform them into articulated and organized principles, processes, assumptions, requirements, tasks, and anything that can be easily found and put to work for me later.

Nothing gets left behind when all is done. I can make a hundred lines of notes reduce to just a few useful aspects that get sorted where I can find them and use them again.

It's not always easy. Definitely not. But it's a skill that can be honed and a practice that can be prioritized.

And for what? Well, for the clarity, for the speed of thought, and for freedom from a backlog that can slow you down when trying to build and grow something you care about.

Let me know what you think of this. How do you deal with your notes?