afraid to delete notes | obsidian
I’m afraid of deleting my notes. Not all of them obviously. Only some of them. But somehow I assign them this special yet imaginary value. Is it only me or does deleting notes feel wrong? I wrote them, I collected them with all this effort. It is just sad to think about having to delete a few.
why do I want to delete notes?
I’m tired of the chaos and mess my notes have become. They are all in one Zettelkasten folder and at this point, I’m just mindlessly adding more and more notes to it. Connecting them here and there. Hoping it will lead somewhere. But honestly, it is just unsatisfying.
I want my notes to be connected with a sense of directionality instead of being dominated by chaos. Notes and ideas don’t have to be connected all over the place. The flow of ideas and the logic behind it is much more valuable.
Note A and B are the base and both lead to note C which in turn leads to notes D and E.
To accomplish this flow and to maintain the flow of ideas, we have to delete notes from time to time. Maybe a new insight doesn’t fit well into the existing structure. Or maybe a new insight disrupts our mental model and forces us to rethink it. We might have to restructure and rewrite a few notes to avoid falling into chaos.
I also want to chunk and categorize insights if necessary. So that single notes are not floating around mindlessly but are bound and grouped meaningfully. For example, instead of having a note on all neuromodulators floating around and being connected randomly, I want to have a main note with a list of all neuromodulators. This hub note then points to all single neuromodulator notes. They in turn can point to specific notes about their function or accessibility.
what is the purpose of deleting notes?
Instead of a chaotic mess, I want to have a structured way of thinking and understanding. We take notes to learn and learning is recursive. So taking notes should also be recursive.
We think we understood a concept but find a gap in our understanding. We discover a new insight which gets us all confused about what we learned until this point. We doubt our understanding and want to go back to refresh or reframe it.
To overcome these obstacles, we have to restructure, reorganise and even delete our understanding or in our case our notes. It helps us simplify concepts, combine them meaningfully, think more clearly, and work through the confusion.
I try to remember this every time I have too many notes of the same idea which are only formulated slightly differently. I look for a way to simplify my notes and make connections more meaningful.
