@kaa I’m a pack rat, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’d keep them if I had the room. The physicality of those notes feels important.
@Bruce I hear you. Like you say it feels important to me...but my Marie Kondo brain is saying, 'What for?' You've got the stuff in another format, and you've benefited from having written them down' :)
@kaa True. Though if it’s a mindful choice to keep them, I hope Marie Kondo would approve. I feel the brain reacts differently if one is paging through experiences than it does when scrolling through them on a screen. One way is not better than the other; they’re just different. As writing with a pen is different than typing. Our consciousness is distributed through our body. :)
@kaa With that many to deal with, would it make sense to only keep a handful of them and scan the rest? That way you can satisfy the nolstalgia urge occasionally, without excessive storage requirements.
@kaa I completely agree with Bruce. Keep them!! I haven't read her book, so I'm not swayed by whatever arguments she makes in it. I've never been a journaler, but I am an old guy and so have some experience with what has gotten important to me, as I've gotten older. For example, I have a diary my mother kept during the last year of her life when she was dying of cancer. It is extremely valuable to me, far more valuable than other things I could sell for a lot of money that I inherited from her. Her words are the closest thing I have to HER. She held that diary in her hands and wrote in it in her handwriting, that I recognize as only hers. I could scan it, but it wouldn't be the same at all. You have scanned some of your notebooks, but then you have to back those up as digital is verrrry fragile and the best backups by far are the original paper books. They feel important to you because they ARE important to you. That's all that matters. Listen to yourself, it's not a crazy voice you're hearing. You don't have to justify your choice to Kondo or anyone else. The "stuff" in another format, is NOT the same "stuff" by a long way. I would even recommend that you get a fireproof cabinet to put them in, as they are part of YOU.
@kaa oh boy is this a hard one, I personally keep all my A6 notebooks because I keep all my thoughts and journal in them. However Field Notes are harder, most are filled with shopping list and random numbers and things I jotted down, but on some random page is a note about my mother’s passing. So do I keep that whole note book for that one page or throw it out and lose that moment. Yeah I realize this is not helping but I sympathize with your problem so much
@klandwehr The completed A5s I am going to keep. Thinking about this it's the half finished project that filled half a book that I'm having the most trouble with, do I keep them or just abandon them like the project itself? The Field Notes are much harder. Like you say they are random, but every once in a while there's a gem of a thought in there.
@jack Ha :). I'm just extrapolating 5 years from now, I'll have another 10 A5s and likely another 60 Field Notes....where does the madness end? :)
@Ron I hear you there. The my journals, which are down in Tomoe river paper I keep. They are not very big and totally worthwhile. It's the half finished project notebooks (that have say 80 pages of notes, sketches, ideas, thoughts in them), or all the Field Notes, that are a mixture of everything and nothing.