I Counted How Many of My Notes I Had Ever Reopened. It Was Nine Percent.

I had been taking notes carefully for four years and had never asked whether I used them. The question occurred to me while reorganising folders for the third time, which in retrospect was the tell. So I exported my notes with their last-opened timestamps and counted: of 1,340 notes, 121 had been opened more than once. Nine percent.

My first reaction was that the system had failed. My second, better one, was to look at which nine percent, because a system that produces 121 genuinely useful notes in four years is not obviously failing — it might just be that the other 1,219 were never going to be useful and the effort of making them was the waste, not the organising.

The reopened notes fell into three groups with almost no exceptions. Procedures I do rarely: how to run the quarterly roster export, how to reset a specific badge reader, the wording of a form I fill in twice a year. Decisions and their reasons: why we moved a handover to 07:15, what we tried before. And people: what someone told me they preferred, what went wrong last time we worked together.

What almost never got reopened was the largest category by far — things I had read and found interesting. Article summaries, book notes, quotes, ideas. Four years of those, and the reopen rate within that group was under two percent. I had been operating on a model where capturing an interesting idea builds a resource I will draw on later, and the log says I do not draw on it. I think what actually happens is that the useful part of reading something is absorbed at the time, and the note is a receipt for an experience rather than an asset.

So I changed what I capture, not how I file it. I stopped taking notes on things I read, entirely, unless there is a specific thing I intend to do. And I got much more deliberate about the three categories that do get reopened, particularly the second one — decisions and their reasons — because that is the category where the information genuinely is not recoverable any other way. Nobody remembers why the handover moved. The reasoning is gone in a fortnight and the decision outlives it by years.

The practical form this takes is a template with three fields I fill in when something is decided: what we chose, what we rejected, and what would make us revisit. That third field is the one that has surprised me. Twice now it has triggered an actual reconsideration, because the condition I had written down — “if two people ask for the old time” — occurred, and without the note the change would have felt like drift rather than a trigger being met.

My note count over the last eight months is 84, against a previous run rate of about 340 a year. The reopen rate on those 84 is 38 percent. I am spending a fraction of the time and getting roughly four times the retrieval, and the difference is entirely in what goes in, not in tags, folders, or links.

The thing I would tell my earlier self is that reorganising is what note systems offer you instead of asking the harder question. Every time I felt my notes were not working, I restructured them, and restructuring feels like progress and produces a tidier version of the same nine percent. The access log took eleven minutes to produce and told me more than four years of folder design.