Re: Dealing with growing backlog (was: next-error for agenda searches)

[Ihor Radchenko]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> I've also learnt to be quite ruthless in making decisions about what to
> archive and what to simply delete. This is possibly the hardest
> behaviour to learn. In a digital age, it is way too easy to keep
> everything. However, this has a hidden cost - the quality of material
> degrades and results from searching etc become less productive because
> there is too much 'noise' in your data. Data, like many other things,
> degrades over time. It is important to learn how to recognise when
> things have passed their 'use by date' and just get rid of them.
>
> I'm often stunned by people who boast about the fact they still have all
> their emails boing back to 1990 and are somewhat proud about having an
> email archive with over 50Gb of messages. Reality is, the vast majority
> of those email messages will never be read again and are of little or no
> actual value.
>
> Knowing when to just delete old data is almost as important as gathering
> it, but a much harder skill to master.

I disagree about this. Sometimes, you may find yourself in a situation
when you remember some link/idea because it suddenly become relevant to
what you are doing now, though it looked interesting but irrelevant in
the past. Then, you may try to find that link and there will be nothing
to find if you deleted it. So, I prefer to keep things that caught my
attention in the past saved somewhere in searchable location.

On the other hand, it is not very useful to keep every single saved link
in "active" search location. In daily workflows, the things you search
for usually belong to the currently active areas and search results
must not be polluted by links you discarded years back.

So, I maintain the main notes file with the important links I search
relatively regularly; and an archive where the notes/links are not
searchable by default, but can be searched any time I wish so (e.g. see
org-agenda-archive-mode). The archive is just like having a backup. It
is usually useless until you suddenly need it.

Best,
Ihor