Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

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A personal reflection on deleting 10,000 notes and 7 years of accumulated knowledge from personal knowledge management systems like Obsidian. The author argues that PKM tools can become digital hoarding systems that replace actual thinking with filing, leading to cognitive overload rather than clarity. After achieving sobriety, they realized their extensive note-taking archive had become a burden rather than a tool, prompting them to delete everything and adopt a minimalist approach focused on living knowledge rather than storing it.

I Deleted My Second Brain

Even the mentioned “mausoleum” needs to be managed and maintained. If you just create that “second brain” to store stuff you don’t want to forget, but don’t prioritize and evaluate it from time to time (this can wait, that can wait, oh, this… I’m not interested in that anymore), it will become your mental anchor. 😑
I kind of manage my knowledge based similarly to how Java manages objects in memory (more or less, but it’s really similar):
<ul>
<li>new, shiny concepts remain on the “first layer”, which I have fast access to and iterate over frequently,</li>
<li>when something survives that process and is not discarded, nor completed yet, it goes to the “second layer” of things to do in a later period - these aren’t that much visible and iterated over less frequently,</li>
<li>concepts that remain valid in the “second layer” stay there, while the ones that I don’t think I’ll actually do, go to the “third layer” which is kind of an “archive” or “graveyard” - I know I probably won’t be doing them, I seldom look in there or interate over it.</li>
</ul>
I takes some mental exercise to let go of a concept when moving it to lower layers (that’s the crux of the whole approach, actually). We all have our “new shiny stuff” vs “things I want to do” vs “a pile of unfinished/not started things” syndrome, so managing and maintaining those things can help you save a lot of ideas in your personal database/second brain, while prioritizing things you actually want to to. A “test of time” for your ideas, if you prefer to call it that way.
If you fail at finding the right balance, you’ll end up frustrated and either go through burnout (of course it’s combined with the frustrations of daily/current tasks - trust me on this, I’ve been there, still recovering 😶‍🌫️) or end up doing a self-imposed “katharsis” by deleting your “second brain”.
Lastly, I’m no psychologist and everything here I gained through personal experience, but remember to take care of your mental health regularly. It’s something that is often disregarded. When it starts to break, though, it doesn’t give any clear symptoms… until it’s well into the “too late” territory. You can always recover, but the longer you don’t care for it, the longer the recovery. 🤗

Interesting, I have always had the same problem, turning notes into useful things, its been hard but i just know there is some AI solution

Finally something refreshing to read.

That’s very real. My obsidian documents were becoming harder and harder to maintain and I dumping information “for later” and “that I might forget but not that important” there more often as time went on.
In the end, I encoded most of what I needed to know on my scripts and created tools and documentation around them. As a programmer, it was a better approach then treating my notes as researches with linked references.

For me, these notes have three functions:
<ol>
<li>Keep meetings-notes. That can be very helpful if anything is referenced later in a project.</li>
<li>Force myself to think about a topic again and then rephrase it in my own words.</li>
<li>Storing information.</li>
</ol>
The third point is actually the least important for me and more a result of the other two.
I can very much recommend the first one! 
In one of my projects (I am a freelance web-developer), one of the customer’s departments suddenly tried to shit-talk about our team out of the blue. I don’t know exactly why, because we were actually trying to help them out of the mess they created for themselves. 
I guess they felt threatened by us because we suddenly made everything possible that they said before that it couldn’t be done. 
No matter the reasons, we could easily defend ourselves by just going through our notes where we had documented almost everything essential that had been said in the meetings before.
But the second point is actually what is most important for myself. It is mostly a method to deepen my understanding.
I really like that method when reading technical literature. I recently went to a meetup where the presenter mainly talked about a book I had read a while ago. I could just read quickly through the notes I made while reading it to refresh my memory about its content.
I would not recommend just reading compact notes like these for themselves (like reading a summary instead of the real book), but individually creating these summaries. And try avoiding direct quotes as much as possible! Always try creating your own interpretation. That forces the brain to really think about the content you read instead of just looking at the words. 
And when you then need that knowledge a few years later, you can just have a glance at your notes to help your brain to remember the rest.