I think that's a really valuable mental tool. Sometimes past baggage is a hindrance to current goals. As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even ke

I think that's a really valuable mental tool. Sometimes past baggage is a hindrance to current goals. As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even keep them version controlled, which leaves me a little more free to just delete things or "refactor" stuff. A lot of the value I get is going back through things and synthesizing them into clearer and more useful notes. TODOs in particular are dangerous -- I try to treat files of that nature as extensions of my long term memory, rather than a curriculum which I feel obligated to follow. That being said, there is an element of this project where I feel like a am building a piece of "my life's work". I've built a number of software projects, and part of building them over time and organizing them leaves them in a state where I am proud to have built them -- I can point out a piece of the system, and understand why it works that way, and remember the choices that led to its current state. At one point, I realized that I had no such project for my life, and it was a little weird that I had so clearly documented software systems that were hardly used, whereas my life and action and ideas and knowledge were, for the most part, just in my head. So in a way it's more than the practicality of having notes, although in the practice of it I have found it to be practical. It's a way of adding meaning to the course of my life -- now the ten minutes I spent reading an article can also become a gift to my future self due to the one choice quote I grab from it.