Joan Westerberg deleted her entire second brain and found an overwhelming sense of relief. It is a drastic action and that I try to avoid. There is a difference between notes in a Personal knowledge management system that are useful and those which are extraneous. It’s not either/or requiring a slash-and-burn.
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.
Is there a way to learn this beyond experience? There is a pressure to capture everything. Patrick La Roque calls it FONC, the Fear of Not Capturing. I know I’m subject to this. Joan certainly has been. I have the promise of articles captured just in case I need them for that idea ignited in the moment—or because I might want to write about that someday.
Every now and then I will purge the notes I deem not relevant anymore. The problem of capturing everything, beyond the time to capture and file, is that if you do it too quickly relative to a purge, then the only option that seems to make sense is a complete delete.
Off the back of these two articles (linked, not captured—I’m learning) has come a willingness to delete images from Mediabank.1 Today there are 39,000 images mostly tagged with Digital asset metadata. Some 5,000 of them I’ve not tagged at all. I realise it’s ok to clear out images that don’t add anything to my family history or artistically. Last Saturday morning in the fog I took 39 images and deleted 34 of them and it felt good. In PKM terms they didn’t even make my inbox.
I won’t be keeping all the out-of-focus, subject duplicate photos unless they are the only image of an event. Six images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from almost the same angle are five images too many. Choose the best and move on. It will take time to review each years and delete the photographic weeds and stunted images. It’s what digital gardeners (and Marie Kondo) do.
I estimate one-third, to half or even two-thirds of those 39,000 images can be deleted. This will improve the signal to noise ratio, shorten the time taken to catalogue and have technical benefits in terms of database size, storage and backup effort.
Joan took the slash-and-burn approach with her Second brain. She judged it the right thing in this moment. Perhaps my reaction is one of FONC for another’s notes because I hope nothing valuable was lost. Either way, it’s a good reminder that capture alone is an imbalance and gardening along the way is beneficial.
Footnotes
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Patrick is talking about being at peace with the missed opportunities to capture photos in the first instance. ↩