Joan Westenberg deleted all 10'007 notes. You won't believe what happened next!!!1

ctietze

Clickbait added for humor, sorry

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted-my-second-brain

Deleting 10k notes must've been quite the effort, emotionally.

Andy

I believe it! Joan Westenberg wrote:

The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

"Capture everything, forget nothing" is definitely not the right premise!

Reading through these remnants, I felt a tightening in my chest. Not sadness, not nostalgia – a kind of existential lag. I could see how each iteration of my self was trying so earnestly to build a roadmap to something better. But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years – none of it was in those notes.

"None of it was in those notes" seems like a bizarre mistake. In my notes, the important stuff is there. Not having the right knowledge isn't my challenge. I've got the right knowledge in my note system. Maintaining the practice is the challenge.

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure.

I see! Total deletion of your notes sounds like a reasonable remedy when you have been doing it totally wrong (if your goal is knowledge synthesis and reflective action)!

My new system is, simply, no system at all.

Her old system was vanishingly close to being no system as well! So perhaps she has improved her system less than she thinks?

As David Allen said, "An unused system is not a system":¹

Getting something out of your head does not mean eliminating your responsibility to yourself to manage it appropriately. [...] But once you have externalized your inventory of commitments and interests into a structure for your extended mind, it will only provide its benefit of ongoing freedom and productive engagement with the multiple aspects of your life if it receives proper care and feeding. You have to engage with it—and not just in a cursory manner, but with sufficient focus to absorb the information in a way consistent with what the data mean to you. [...] The dual function of reflection: Reviewing your system serves two distinct but equally critical purposes: (a) to update its contents and (b) to provide trusted perspective. Though these are conceptually different objectives, they almost invariably take place together.

Thanks for sharing Joan's blog post, which is a good story about how not to make and use a note system!

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1. David Allen (2008). "An Unused System Is Not A System". In: Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (pp. 162–163). New York: Viking. ↩︎

Sascha

I quote myself:

Many people have a toxic relationship with information overload: They let themselves being force-fed by all their feeds and subscriptions. Their brains try to deal with this information overload by committing less and less to each source of information. Their brain starts to reduce attention commitment. We can observe this reduction in attention commitment even short-term. We all know how it feels if we get sucked into a feed on the various social media platforms. We might start with something interesting, but within minutes of scrolling the feed, we stop reading and merely glaze over the headlines. And we all know, how it feels: Awful. The more we expose ourselves to the toxic information environment online, the more the bad habits flow to other areas of life: Your ability to pay attention will suffer to a point at which you can't read a book for a couple of hours or focus on a single topic for a couple of weeks.

Rather than addressing their toxic relationship with information, many people instead seek note-taking systems to compensate for this intoxication. They gravitate toward tools promising effortless capture. The word “effortlessly” seems harmless, but it reveals a deeper issue: clinging to coping mechanisms rather than tackling the root problem of information overload. This avoidance fuels a downward spiral, skimming sources with less attention, jumping to the next, and fostering shallowness, emptiness, and anxiety.

I can assure you that no system, the Zettelkasten Method included, can compensate for your self-toxification through a bad information diet. And if you suffer from this problem, a better method to capture stuff will only exacerbate your problem by reinforcing bad habits.

But this:

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. (Joan)

is an additional tell sign of delegating something to a system that the system never can provide. Or, if it could provide it, would make you a redundant part of an overarching system.

zettelsan

I suppose that information overload is not a new problem, but the degree to which information technology has accelerated the trend in this century is something we really don't know how to effectively deal with yet. It's akin to the obesity epidemic in a sense. We have to actively train ourselves to limit calorie intake. Many people may need a systematic guidance in this regard.

wjenkins81

When I first started my ZK, I felt some pressure to add things, because my ZK felt quite empty at the beginning.

But this could easily have turned into 'hoarding' notes and related materials. This doesn't just happen with information, there is a natural human tendency to hoard things, like squirrels hoarding nuts for the winter.

Fortunately I realized early on what I was doing and deleted a lot. I do this regularly now, revising my entire ZK and choosing what to remove.

I think part of her problem was that she was putting everything in there. Some things are better placed in a personal diary/journal, where they are meant to be resigned to history, reflecting who someone was at one time, but who they no longer are.

JasperMcFly

A wonderful read, thanks for posting. Agree with everyone above.

"In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking."

Another example of the danger and uselessness of collecting too much information without an overall purpose or without the intent to make it useful for your life. Reminded me of building a Memex machine to store the media you have consumed and your memory trails through that media without taking that extra step to make selective, meaningful main notes that get nurtured over time.

Sascha

I contacted Joan for a call, like I had with Nori.

amahabal

I don't know if anyone needs to hear my rambling note to myself today triggered by this thread, but I will put it here in case someone finds it interesting or useful.

TL;DR: I am thinking through how I should be engaging with my notes, the benefits they have had, and my train of thought led me to a specific writing project I can do aided by notes from last year.

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14.1d3c3 Top of Mind, June 29, 2025

I have been somewhat bothered by my obsession with note-taking at the moment and sometimes question why I do that. [...]

I think I get two different benefits from my note-taking. The first benefit arises from the very act of taking some idea and putting it in words, perhaps visually. And this makes me understand the material somewhat deeper. The second benefit is that when I go over some of my earlier notes, I can recollect what I was thinking of and how I had understood a particular idea and this is useful. Most recently, this happened with the following note: 1.1bm2 Frequentist vs Baysian Inference [[20240613224218]], where I had captured not just the differences in the two systems, but the shortcomings of both and how neither can fully live up to the promises it makes, notes from 1.1bm Computer Age Statistical Inference: Algorithms, Evidence, and Data Science by Bradley Efron et al., 2016 [[20240613220036]]. It has also happened frequently with all my notes about 17.1 ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [[20250426095721]].

Regardless, it is still the case that I should not be looking at my note system as a way of merely capturing while I'm reading, but engaging with the notes and expanding on them and making connections, especially in the process of thinking through some topic.

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Why do I want to study physics? What do I hope to get out of it? One of my triggers for wanting to get into this more deeply was when this month I listened to Sean Carroll's course about time in the great courses series. There was a lot of discussion about entropy and the work of Boltzmann, and statistical mechanics in general, given that a lot of what I do with Pincepts is also statistical, I thought it important that I get a deeper understanding into statistical mechanics and maybe even an understanding the math of quantum mechanics at least somewhat. And then when I started reading the second book of Feynman's lectures in physics (1.1cj The Feynman lectures on physics, Vol. II: mainly electromagnetism and matter by Richard P. Feynman, 1964 [[20250623205327]]), I was not happy with my level of understanding of such basic things as divergence and curl (though I hope my grasp was sharper when I studied it 30 years ago), and that was partly what goaded me on to wanting to know that deeper. This is thus at least partly my OCD playing into things but I cannot deny that I also enjoy doing this quite a bit for its own sake.

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I have spent a fair amount of time configuring and reconfiguring my note-taking system to make it as smooth as possible, and it definitely seems to have worked and my ability to take notes quickly has definitely improved. Not just that, but the quality of my notes has also improved in the process. And the long term utility of my notes as well.

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[... some thinking about what to blog about next ...] Is my project that I am attempting here perhaps to look at the limits on human knowledge and why those limits apply to large language models as well and reinforces their hallucinations? 8.1a1b The Dozen Challenges to Knowledge [[20241001193001]], from 1.1ak The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Know About Science, History and the Mind by A.C. Grayling, 2021 [[20241001183701]]. Those may be an excellent set of notes to interrogate and dig deeper into.