Though perhaps not so ecologically sound . . . after holding onto notes for several years and moving them from place to place, I finally burned them all in a nice fire. Very freeing.
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Posted 2 years ago #
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I threw mine away but it was a struggle because it represented so much work. I haven't worked in a dozen years and, yet, my work notes I still have. I kept a spiral notebook on my desk and made notes on everything I did, day by day. It covered my butt many times when people "forgot" something that I did and tried to blame me. Anyhoo, I still can't get rid of them. I did cull them out and kept a few instead of all of them. I do remember my grandfather was a carpenter and he kept a little spiral notebook in his shirt pocket where he kept notes on hours, contract labor hours, supplies for a job and other things. My Dad still does it just like his father did. One day, I was going through a box of Papa's stuff and came across a couple of those little notebooks and saw how much he sold a cow for, how much hay he put in one year, how many hours spent in adding a bedroom onto someone's house and how they only got about $1.00 per hour and how much it cost to finish that project. It was a thrill to see all of this. So if you have room, keeping a couple of representative notebooks wouldn't be a bad idea for posterity's sake.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Yes, the notes represent a lot of work. But they only REPRESENT the work, they are not it. I finally threw out my notes from Uni in 1995. This will make you laugh - I had finished the degree in 1966!!!! Now there are just the notes from another degree finished a mere 10 years ago... I know it must be done, but it is hard.
Posted 2 years ago # -
As a beginning university prof, I use my old notes constantly. Even if the information in them isn't relevant (which it often is), looking through my notes from undergrad classes lets me see how the prof organized his or her semester. Based on my memory of whether the class was awesome, terrible, or just so-so, I can make decisions about organizing my own curriculum relative to what they did.
What I did do, though was get a Canon imageclass mf4370dn printer/copier/scanner and scan all my notes to .pdf files. You can scan from the document feeder, so a whole semester worth of notes shoots by in about 2 minutes and then the physical copies are ready to recycle.
@Aslaug - At the risk of bringing down the wrath of declutterers everywhere, personally, unless you're really hard up for space, I'd say keep the notes and let your son decide what to do with them. Sure they're "only notes," but the way they're organized may give clues to the way your husband's mind worked on fresh information in the way that a prepared and revised document doesn't.
Posted 2 years ago #
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