Item — HN Reader

I've been using this method for 25 years, but ruthlessly delete completed tasks and things I decided I don't want to do after all. Kind of like inbox 0, but for my _todo.txt

I would probably keep my notes if I had to report to anybody or needed to keep a track of what I was doing, but luckily I haven't needed to do that for a long time.

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Same, I have one living document that is constantly being updated with TODOs, questions, notes, but once they are done or irrelevant, I delete them. I am actually surprised how many people here use append-only approaches.

Usually my experience is stuff just slowly drifts into irrelevance. Sometimes people ask me for performance numbers or error messages that are 3 months old and I can find them with a backsearch. On the other hand there's implementation ideas that are years old which are perfectly decent and would probably be improvements, but nobody has ever gotten around to them. Letting them gradually slide upwards out of mind seems appropriate. The only thing I do is archive the old file once a year at new-years to prevent any editor slowdown.