emacs-orgmode@gnu.org archives
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>
To: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Dealing with growing backlog (was: next-error for agenda searches)
Date: Sun, 15 May 2022 15:22:37 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87czgf2rb6.fsf@localhost> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87mtkqxlfm.fsf@gmail.com>

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


      reply	other threads:[~2022-05-15  7:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-12-15  1:34 next-error for agenda searches Samuel Wales
2021-12-18  8:44 ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-18 10:09   ` Ihor Radchenko
2021-12-19  1:10 ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-19  1:14   ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-19 13:31   ` Ihor Radchenko
2021-12-20  1:45     ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-20  1:58       ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-20  2:01         ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-20 14:57       ` Ihor Radchenko
2021-12-20 22:15         ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-20 22:16           ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-24  1:15             ` Samuel Wales
2021-12-24 11:14               ` Dealing with growing backlog (was: next-error for agenda searches) Ihor Radchenko
2021-12-24 11:51                 ` Tim Cross
2022-05-15  7:22                   ` Ihor Radchenko [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://www.orgmode.org/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=87czgf2rb6.fsf@localhost \
    --to=yantar92@gmail.com \
    --cc=emacs-orgmode@gnu.org \
    --cc=theophilusx@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox

	https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).