What is how to declutter digital notes?

How to declutter digital notes is a concept in personal epistemology: Set expiration dates on time-sensitive information so it does not clutter your system.

Example: You saved a competitor pricing analysis six months ago. At the time it informed a real decision — whether to adjust your own pricing for Q3. The decision was made. Q3 ended. The competitor has since changed their pricing twice. But the analysis is still in your notes, still appearing in searches, still sitting alongside current material as if it were equally valid. When you prepare for a new pricing discussion in Q4, you open your notes and find three pricing-related items: the stale competitor analysis from six months ago, a current market report from last week, and your own pricing principles note (which is timeless). Without expiration metadata, all three look identical in your system — just notes about pricing. You read the old analysis, half-remember that it was once important, and spend eight minutes re-establishing that it is now outdated before discarding it mentally and moving to the current report. Multiply this by every stale item in your system. Across hundreds of stored items with no expiration marker, you are spending hours per month re-evaluating information you have already determined is time-bound, rediscovering that it has expired, and then ignoring it again. An expiration date set at the moment of capture — "valid through Q3 2025" — would have flagged the analysis for archival or deletion automatically. You would never have re-encountered it. Your search results would have been cleaner. Your Q4 preparation would have started with the two items that actually mattered.

This concept is part of Phase 43 (Information Processing) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for information processing.