My best ideas and other things I don't need anymore

Some of the information might be as obsolete as the storage medium. (Library of Congress photo)

I learned how to file papers from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

It might have been better if I had simply become more effective at throwing things away. Then, I wouldn’t have found myself combing through a box filled with ten-year-old notes and supporting information, all meticulously organized.

On the one hand, it was interesting to see a time capsule of where I was in my work a decade ago — how I saw things and what I was hoping for. But whatever had once seemed precious and memorable and worth saving was gone.

Some of the ideas have been acted upon and others haven’t. And there was a time when I would have wanted to hang on to everything just in case it could be useful. To cling to any possibility and make the most of any insight.

Now, however, I see that ideas are a renewable resource, and that the ones my team and I can come up with today are going to be far more useful than the ones from long ago. I can let go of all of it. I don’t even need to keep the data, painstakingly collected and analyzed, that helped me to see where we had been and guess at where we were going. Ten years on, I know that none of that matters as much as what’s happening today.

Ironically, I’m still coming up with ideas and documenting them. And sometimes, they’re useful, especially if I intend to act on them within days. But a couple of hard drive crashes and a stolen laptop later, with a fundamentally incomplete picture of my past, I know that the good ideas resurface, and the rest are never missed.

This notion is so freeing to someone like me, who spent so many years compulsively hanging on to everything. You know those ads where a woman is sitting at her dining room table in her airy, clutter-free house with nothing but a laptop and a cup of tea on the table? That’s me. That’s how I work now. The fact is, this box o’ memories has been untouched for years. Nothing in it is necessary.

There was a time when I might have been concerned about what I was leaving behind. There was also a time when I would have been interested in seeing how I’ve progressed and how my thinking is changed. But I don’t care anymore. Life is moving fast enough that my thinking can change in just a few months or even weeks. Where I once was is no longer as interesting to me as where I’m headed.

One of the most amusing things I unearthed was a resume from the very start of my career. Had it really been that long since I had opened the file, or did I think I needed it? The outdatedness of that resume is a perfect metaphor for the outdatedness of the rest of the collection, earnestly maintained but ultimately useless.

I took copious notes from the keynote speech of a conference I attended years ago — those were in the box, too. The speaker exhorted us to cultivate a powerful vision. Apparently, I thought that banal sentiment was worthy of jotting down. In order to cultivate that vision, I’ve jettisoned those notes, along with the rest of that stratum of the archeological dig. I can see clearly, with or without them.