You find an old note: ‘Option 2, but only if they agree.’ You now remember what it meant—so the temptation is to rewrite it properly. Resist it. Rewriting replaces evidence with interpretation, and your current memory of what you meant is less reliable than it feels.
Why editing history is riskier than it looks
The original wording is data. It records what you actually knew and felt at the time—including the uncertainty. When you overwrite it, today’s confident reconstruction silently replaces yesterday’s honest ambiguity, and you can no longer tell which is which. If the reconstruction is wrong, the error is now permanent and invisible.
Append, with a date
The fix is a correction layered on top: ‘Clarified later: Option 2 meant the shorter contract; “they” means the landlord.’ The original stays; the clarification is visibly separate and visibly later.
- The original remains the source; the addition is interpretation.
- The date on the clarification preserves the true sequence of your understanding.
- Both layers are indexed, so search finds the note by either wording.
What deserves a genuine edit
Typos, autocorrect damage, and transcription errors are not history—they are noise, and fixing them in place is fine. The line is meaning: correct the record’s form freely, but never alter what it claimed.
Clarify on encounter
You do not need a cleanup project. Repair notes when you naturally run into them—in a search result, a review, or a clarification prompt. Every repaired note makes that corner of your history permanently more searchable, and the archive improves at exactly the rate you actually use it.
Treat old notes like evidence: annotate, date, and preserve. Rewrite only form, never meaning—your past self deserves an accurate record more than an eloquent one.