> "I do not trust my own notes from last year — half the links are dead and I cannot remember which entries are still accurate." ^pain A personal decay pain. Past notes exist and can be found, but the worker cannot tell whether they still reflect reality. Each failed-trust event pushes the worker back to redoing research from scratch, which makes the existing notes even less referenced and even less maintained — until the vault becomes a write-only archive the author no longer reads. ## Discovery questions - "When you open a note you wrote a year ago, what does it take to figure out whether it's still accurate?" - "How many notes do you have that you suspect are out of date but haven't gone back to fix?" - "When you're researching something you've worked on before, do you reuse your old notes or start fresh?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Andy Matuschak writes about why most people's note archives become "cold storage" they stop trusting, driving them to restart systems.[^1] - Productivity writer Tiago Forte describes how his old Evernote second brain became untrusted, leading him to rebuild and migrate.[^2] - Consultant Francesco D'Alessio documents migrating thousands of Evernote notes to Notion due to clutter and decay in his old setup.[^3] [^1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Zettelkasten [^2]: https://fortelabs.com/blog/how-to-take-smart-notes [^3]: https://francescodalessio.notion.site/Moving-from-Evernote-to-Notion-52a96d945d6b4e3bb1f2e93b8703c5f2