Old notes

[cdave]

Bit late for a What I Did At The Weekend (Went to Caption (Oxford small press comics convention) on Saturday, and down south to visit parental units on the Sunday) post, but one of the things I did was clear some of my junk out of a parental loft.

[Poll #1446736]

I found that I had 3 cardboard boxes of "school stuff" and 2 plastic crates of "University stuff". I didn't have much time to go through it, but managed to sling a few bits (such as all my sixth form era invites to University open days). While I do like the odd doodle in the margin, and in joke scrawled on the cover of a notebook, I'm really not sure I need to keep quite this volume of stuff.

Given that I haven't looked at it in years, and am unlikely to do so in the near future, I probably should just sling most of it. But it's so final. This stuff, as useless as it is, is literally irreplaceable. I managed to avoid picking up a "bargin" in IKEA the other day on the basis that I'd rather pay full price when I need it, than hang onto something that just takes up space. But this stuff is my own hand.

Comments

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

The school stuff went out when I went to uni and the uni stuff went out when I moved in to this house. I just didn't have space to store it.

[cdave]

Do you wish you still had it?

I don't think I'd miss my stuff I chucked it all, but want to spend the time going through it one last time first.

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

I've not thought about it in years until you asked just now, to be honest.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I do this with the kids at the end of each year; they bring home a vast acreage of notes and things from school, and we sort it out and keep the odd thing. I also photograph the cute things they make before throwing them away.

[owlfish]

Is the second question counting backwards or forwards? i.e. years ago, or how old I was?

[cdave]

How old you were.

[emmajking.livejournal.com]

I have all my physics/maths notes that could be in any way relevant, even though everything that's in them is also in the text books I have, in a more legible and coherent manner, basically because I don't like throwing stuff out and felt I had a half-way legitimate excuse for keeping those. I threw out all my Chemistry notes, though! ;) And I have a few bits and pieces of random stuff all the way back to primary school.

Never throw anything away, ever - you'll only regret it! That's my motto (and the reason I need a 4-bedroom house with double garage to fit all my junk in....)

If you really, really want to reclaim the space, you could start a mammoth scanning mission, and then keep it all electronically....?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

My plan is to photograph the doodles, and then recycle the rest for any of my old stuff I find while sorting through boxes ... convention flyers and such I intend to scan (or at least photograph) before doing likewise ... I have "inherited" half a dozen boxes of convention publications (the remains of the Memory Hole Annexe I believe) and that's probably a project for next year!

[cdave]

As much as I hate to add to your clutter habbit, I think that paper trumps electrons for casual long term archiving. You need to practice very good back-up regimes, including regular movement of old data, as much electronic media don't last for more than a quarter of a century.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

The doodles have survived unviewed for however long and really should just be thrown out, the digital copy is just a short term echo (and could always be printed off if I wanted a paper copy again) ...

... the idea of the scanning of old convention flyers etc. is to make them available for historical/searching purposes ... I do not intend to be a research library for those ... PRs and Programme books on the other hand I'll try to keep a paper copy as long as I can (or pass it on to a longer term archive if the Foundation or similar is interested).

You're right of course, but I really do need to declutter (and there is a company selling special "DVD_Rs" (need a special writer but read in a normal reader) that claim a 1,000 year readable lifespan ... but I'm not planning on buying one of those ... I do try to keep at least two copies (on different hard disks) plus a DVD+R copy of all my important files (e.g. my photographs, word documents, backups of my websites, my email archive etc.) and every few years I copy it all again onto larger backup drives (my backup drives a few years back were 120Gb or smaller, then are now 320Gb or 500Gb drives, but then currently attached at home I have a 1Tb, a 750Gb and a 300Gb external drive (750Gb is my music drive, 300Gb is my TV drive and is FULL ... 1Tb drive is all sorts of stuff including the music and TV that won't fit on the other drives!) ... the stack of Toshiba external drives are currently awaiting unpacking from my trip back from Cambridge (five drives of 320 to 500Gb) ... I figure the TV stuff can be downloaded again, ditto a lot of the music, so it's really the rare stuff plus my own documents and images of the main C drives that need to be backed up regularly)

[cdave]

"Never throw anything away, ever - you'll only regret it! That's my motto (and the reason I need a 4-bedroom house with double garage to fit all my junk in....)"

I could never afford that in London. So it comes down to how much it's worth it. I'm no longer buying bargains, and storing in case of need. I'd rather pay full price when I do need something.

Plus having a brief flick through it, I'm fairly sure I feel no strong emotional connection to the old dry notes (silly stuff aside), and can't really imagine I'll ever want to do an analysis of what I wrote compared to the Youth of today.

That said, if I had the space, I would hang on to it.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Throw it away, perhaps retaining a few pages of special significance (where you did a doodle exchange with the cute girl next to you, where you did a caricature of your lecturer, or that funny spider diagram!)

I have a 3 bed house in London with an extended garage and conservatory, plus four storage units ... I can't afford that either! So I am decluttering.

Stuff will be available on LJ-Cycle soon!

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

"I could never afford that in London."

Yes you could. You just don't like the area it'd be in!

[cdave]

That's true actually.

Hmm.

[tregenza.livejournal.com]

Throw it all away.

Now.

Don't hesitate in anyway.

If you don't, you will be moving it around from house to house for the rest of your life.

You will not go back to read them, or even to sort them out. You have so many more interesting things to do and will continue to do so for the rest of your life.

Even if you went back to Uni to study exactly the same courses your old notes would be out-dated, useless and unread.

You will notice that none of the people advocating keeping the stuff say that they actually use their notes. They keep them because one day "they may be useful". That day never arrives.

Save space, money and time by just throwing them all away.

[cdave]

Thanks. This is the sort of thing I need to hear.

I would like to keep about 5% of it as a guess. The stuff with doodles on, and old jokes. I could probably sort it out in half a day, which I could do while visiting my Dad, and he watches a Grand Prix. Three brids with one stone.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

I still have much of my University stuff, because it's useful. But I didn't go to university till I was 26, so the range of your second question is insufficient.

[cdave]

Deliberately so. Educational notes acquired after that cut off I was counting as stuff you'd made a deliberate effort to seek out, as you knew it would be useful / entertaining. Whereas up to the end of a Bachelors, you're kind of just guessing what will be useful.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I've kept all my notes and practicals from university (computer generated, but of interest because I wrote my own word processor to create them!), and add selection of school books, generally the pretty geography ones and the English composition. And some published yearbooks from my junior school, where I was unique in getting 2 poems in.

As all know I'm keen on chucking stuff out, but only if its generated by others. If I created it, its unique. I'd not use it to look up facts, but to remind me how clever I once was!

I could just keep a selection, but being typescript the volume isn't great enough for the effort to cull it, perhaps one crate's worth.

I enjoyed looking through my Dad's notebooks he'd kept from when he trained to be a radio repairman during WWII

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Most of my stuff like that had to be abandoned when I was moving between places because there wasn't space to bring it, rather than no space to store it. I do have other paperwork that goes back to when I was 15, and I've got a nearly full set of school reports back to primary school. Things I do regret losing are letters from penfriends and some of the more creative school work - a few bits of art stuff, creative writing and so on.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I do pretty much still have every personal letter of any consequence I have ever been written. Though that too is eventually for the scan-and-discard mill; I don't want my children to have to sort through that sort of thing.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I have a very few representative samples; not of notes, but a couple of childhood essays. The rest has all long since been ditched, along with textbooks (other than a couple of lasting interest).

I have a Really Useful Box full of sentimental claptrap of absolutely no utility or beauty; my rule is that I won't to keep more than will fit in that box. Though much of what is in that box can be scanned and discarded and I do have that as a future plan. I also have a couple of special objects that are not in that box either because they're too precious and live with my jewellery, or because I'm so proud of them they are actually on display.

My equivalent of the school notebooks was a selection of trophies that I won as a child in maths contests. My mum cleared them out, and some years later I gave them to The Year of the Teledu to use as prizes.

Flylady has loads of posts on the stuff people keep. Amazing numbers of human teeth, for one thing.

But my serious clutter problem isn't the utterly useless and ugly, it's the stuff that's marginally useful, or that is decorative but that I don't have space to display it.

[cdave]

The last bit sounds like me and presents.

What's the statute of limitations on a unneeded gift?

[cdave]

To clarify, as much as I may have loved getting a gift, I've got a fair few now that are in a bag with about 20 other things I don't have time to play with.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I think it's worth weeding games and books annually, and critically appraising; if a computer game is more than a couple of years old and you haven't played it, you are most unlikely to ever get round to it, for example.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

For actual rubbish, the stuff only stays in our house for days: I normally spend some of my first day home after Christmas eBaying, for example. My mother gave me a hideous kitchen ornament last year with the words 'please don't sell this or give it away, now, will you?' So I binned it as soon as her back was turned.