I think it's helpful to think of notes and writing as one part in a flow of ideation. Ideas should be thought of as streams, just like thinking. Notes and writi

I think it's helpful to think of notes and writing as one part in a flow of ideation. Ideas should be thought of as streams, just like thinking. Notes and writing are simply tools which are a part of that flow. Each setting of that flow has different powers of constraint. The best ideas may start with walking, but there's the constraint of development. Writing is best for development, but you're thinking may be less free than walking as you have more focus in development. Then editing the writing requires a different mindset. You may then publish that writing to propogate the idea for feedback. So, notes are streams. You're not saving ideas to forget them. You're saving them to interact with them with different tooling. A relatively small portion of those ideas will ever make it to the end the flow, which is publishing. And they lose relevance to us because our context changes. An idea is important to you in a certain moment, with certain circumstances. The following day, the context has changed. Only the ideas which stick will retain their relevance. Just like only a small number of ideas will widely resonate with others. I don't think there's a need to delete them. You're context later may return to a similar enough state that old ideas become useful again, and you can refactor them.