For spring cleaning this year, ditch your Swiffer, put down your mop and bucket, and take this time to finally organize, pare down, or say goodbye to your old college notes.
Looking back on hundreds of sleepless hours of term papers, lecture notes, problem sets, and grueling exams, it’s natural to have some anxiety at the thought of sending those four-plus years of your life through the shredder.
But the fact is you’ll most likely never look at the stuff again. Your life has moved on since you were an undergrad, and there’s really no need to hang on to your second-semester chem notes or your 10-page analysis of the Odyssey. The clutter’s not healthy for your body or your mind.
The Diagnostic Reality Check
Start by asking yourself these five questions:
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Has it been more than a year since you even thought about your college notes?
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Has it been more than two years since you looked at your notes?
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Are your notes in a state that could best be described as disorganized, mysterious, or a complete mess?
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Would it be easier for you to search for the information you need on the Internet than find it in your notes?
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Do you plan to do something other than teach, research, or go to grad school?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’ve got some spring cleaning to do.
Get to Work
If you can’t bring yourself to ditch everything, chances are you can still cut down on your college collection by at least two-thirds.
Here are some general tips on how to separate the trash from the keepers and how to organize what’s left:
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Stick to your most impressive or memorable papers and projects, and keep only your notes that contain highly technical, specialized, or unique information. Get rid of notes from those classes you had to take as requirements and that you didn’t have a personal interest in.
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To force yourself to be choosy and organized, limit yourself to one file box. Rip the “greatest hits” out of your spiral notebooks and recycle the shells; donate three-ring binders that are still in good shape.
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Once you’ve got your file box of notes you’re keeping, use file folders and tabbed dividers to organize your notes by subject, course, professor, year, or whatever other classification system makes sense to you.
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When you’re ready to devote the time, scan or type up your keeper notes and save them as PDFs on your desktop or an external drive. If the task sounds too daunting, set time aside to cull just one semester’s notes each month to make the process more manageable.
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Don’t want to do the organizing and the purging but can’t bear to throw all those hours of work away? Post ads on Craigslist, Facebook, MySpace, or to your school’s departmental bulletins to see if someone would like your notes for free.
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If you’re in grad school or planning on teaching, you may be thinking of keeping your notes to help you with your thesis or future lesson plans. Instead, saving your bibliographies and lists of references and required reading materials may be just as helpful and much less bulky.
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Got notes you’re not sure whether you should keep or send the way of the recycling bin? One way to help convince yourself that it’s actually time to make the break is to put your maybes into a few three-ring binders, write the date on a piece of tape, and then use that tape to seal the binders. After a year, when spring cleaning rolls around again, if the seal hasn’t been broken, then you’ll know it’s time.