There comes a point in your life when you’re looking for something… and you can’t find it. And the reason is, there’s just too much stuff. You just accumulate and accumulate, and it all starts getting in the way of everything else.

I like to take lots of notes. I like to write things down. And over the years, I’ve made notebooks full of coaching notes and planning notes, mind maps, work notes, you name it.

Sure, it’s interesting to look at. There’s history there. It’s interesting to see what I was thinking three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago.

It was a lot of my own writing and thinking. But I realized something. I was never reading any of it. I wasn’t all that interested in what I wrote 10 years ago. Somee of it was embarrassing. I had no interest in rehashing the past. And now it was all just in the way.

It was time to let it go.

I glanced at some of the notes and noticed recurring themes, mostly related to my multipotentiality. Why am I always finding something new to think about? A new rabbit hole to go down? Reading those notes was actually kind of uncomfortable. If there was a drawing or a doodle or something that felt special, I kept those pages. I kept a few just as a reminder that I did this coaching, and I had these feelings.

For a moment there was a part of me that thought, What if I could feed all of this into AI? Then I could ask it questions about my past thoughts. And sure, that’s becoming possible. But it would still take time. I mean, we’re talking about hundreds, even thousands of pages. How do you get that all scanned? And is it worth it?

No, I don’t think so. I’ve made peace with the way mind mind shifts from one thing to another. I’ve realized I don’t need to go back in time to see how I was thinking. It’s not particularly useful anymore.

Getting rid of all this stuff was very cathartic. It was literally two or three garbage bins worth of notes and papers and things I had saved, and didn’t need anymore.

What I like about making space, is that now the stuff that’s valuable to me is easily accessible. I don’t have to move piles of paper to get to things. My bookshelves aren’t blocked anymore.

And that’s more important to me than anything else right now. When I have an idea and I want to work on a project, I can go and find what I need.