To Learn, You Need to Forget
Leaves: An Obsidian plugin that tends your digital garden
TLDR: This is how Leaves came about, a playful Obsidian plugin that archives or deletes your notes after a set time unless you add to them or link them to others...
The second brain movement promised us unlimited memory, but what if that's the problem?
The difference between noise and information is utility. Having more information than you need in your workspace is actively distracting, just like a crowded desk. For many, the "second brain" has become a way to justify the hoarding of thoughts, when it should be improving the clarity of thought and fostering useful action.
I don't want to live suffocating in a crowded storage room. My mind, like my house, is not a place for safekeeping, not a museum or mausoleum, but a space of cultivation. Emptiness is required for new thoughts and forms to emerge.
What if you could have everything you need now, without being burdened by what you ought to have?
Moving forward with only what is essential for this day, this hour. Just a page with your recent notes, their connections to previous thoughts, and necessary project files. You don't need more data, you need an horizon, some constraints, and just enough information to get started.
Information becomes knowledge when it finds context
The best way to record something and never use it again is to write without necessary context and no actionable element. Things need other things to exist and persist. Ideas, like plants, require tending.
This is how Leaves came about, a playful Obsidian plugin that archives or deletes your notes after a set time unless you add to them or link them to others.
How Leaves Works
Like seeds, each note is an idea. As you add to it or connect it to other thoughts, it grows into something meaningful. If you don't pay attention, don't tend to it, it dies—returning to the digital compost.
The Organic Lifecycle:
New ideas get life timers: you choose: hours, days, weeks, months
Engagement refreshes vitality: editing "waters" your thoughts
Connected ideas support each other: linking creates resilient networks = life timers become linked
Gentle reminders before expiry: time to tend or let go
Unused thoughts compost naturally: making space for what's alive
When you link notes together with Obsidian's native `[[brackets]]`, they become a constellation. Edit any note in the chain, and the whole network stays alive. Stop tending to a thread of thought, and it naturally decomposes, making space for what matters now.
The danger of saving every thought is that by capturing it, we think we possess it. But there is no control, only the illusion of it. The satisfaction of a well-organized vault can either be spent as refuge or invested as fuel. It is the same collection, yet one becomes a hiding place, the other a launching pad.
Sometimes when I look at my old notes, I see traces of who I was, like glimpsing a younger self in someone's eyes, those moments when we touch something eternal. Why do I feel like I'm a character in a story I wrote long ago but forgot? Each note has its own backstory, its own boundary between what was intended and what became.
This isn't about productivity. It's about recognizing that attention, like love, cannot be hoarded, only given. Your vault becomes a living conversation between who you were and who you're becoming. The ideas that persist are those you actually court, not those you merely collect.