Why So Many Notes?

Several people have asked me why I have so many notes in Simplenote. I think the Notational Velocity site sums up my approach to notes best:

To make good use of NV, try to maintain one detail/fact/item per note. Notational Velocity's strength, note-filtering, is diminished when only a few notes contain most of the content in the database.

That's how I treat notes. Many small notes about a specific topic. While I do have long notes occasionally, they are usually unwieldy and difficult to sift through. If I have a large project, all related notes have a unique tag. I can group all of the notes together by the tag. But let's say I want to quickly lookup the Windows Server 2008 Apache service logon user for Pipeline Pilot¹, that's much easier to find if there is one note about it. If I have one note with everything there is to know about Pipeline Pilot, it would be almost useless in an emergency.