While thinking about this, a third option began to form in my mind, aided by an email exchange with reader, and frequent commenter Jaap van Dodeweerd: if I am going to start fresh, why not start completely fresh with a different tool? Why not try going paperless with Obsidian? I have been using Obsidian since January, and have written frequently about it over the past several months.

Create scaffolding within my existing Evernote account, partitioning with notebook stacks, or tags, or some other mechanism, and then moving things around as necessary to create the structure I am looking for and eliminate all of the notes that I don’t need.

The downside would be maintaining two Evernote accounts for some unknown period of time.

After that, I could delete all of the unused notes from Evernote and proceed with the new account. When I’d migrated everything I wanted, I could export the remaining notes to an export file and archive it so that I could access it if I ever needed it.

I could then plan my attack and over time begin migrating those notes that I wanted to keep to the new account. Create a new Evernote account and start from scratch there, unfettered by the clutter in my existing account.It seemed to me there were two ways to do this: With this in mind, I’ve been considering starting from scratch with Evernote, taking all of the lessons I’ve learned and applying them anew. Out of 12,000 notes that’s less than 1,200. It is the remaining 10% (or less) that I interact with on an ongoing basis. For some of those notes that is once in over 10 yerrs. I’ve looked perhaps once at another 10% of the notes.They get in automatically through services like FileThis and I’ve never had need to access those notes. I’ve never looked at 80% of the notes.For a while now, I have wanted to clean up my Evernote instance.

Evernote export to plain text