How I cleaned up Obsidian 10 random notes at a time

I had 708 notes in Obsidian, and at least 300 of them were half-written drafts, brainstorms or things I no longer needed. I knew I had to clean it up, but I kept putting it off. When I opened Obsidian with good intentions, I looked at the list of notes, wondered where to even start, and then closed it and went to do something else. Every big cleanup ended after ten notes, because everything looked important and I was afraid of deleting something valuable.

I borrowed the idea from MyMind. It has a feature called Serendipity that shows you random bookmarks from your collection, and for each one you quickly decide whether to keep it or delete it. I built a tool that does the same thing with my Obsidian vault.

How it works

The tool shows 10 random notes. It skips notes younger than 7 days, because I’m still working on those, and also the ones I’ve already reviewed. Ten is about right, because you can see progress and the decisions don’t wear you out yet. One session takes about 4 minutes, so it fits into a morning coffee or a break between tasks.

For each note I press one key. Keep leaves it in the vault and marks it as reviewed, optionally adding a #to-process tag, which I used for notes that needed more work. Archive moves it out of the main space but keeps it in search, which suits things with historical value. Delete moves it to .trash/, so it can be restored. Skip leaves it for a later session, and Open opens it in the editor when I want to read the whole note before deciding.

$ triage

🎲 Obsidian Note Triage
📊 Progress: 0/708 reviewed (0.0%)

📄 Note 1/10: Brainstorm Blueweb zmeny.md
📅 Created: 2025-10-15 | Modified: 2025-10-20
📏 127 words | 🔗 2 outgoing links

[k] Keep      [a] Archive   [d] Delete
[s] Skip      [o] Open      [q] Quit

Your choice: k
✓ Marked as reviewed and kept

The tool remembers which notes I’ve reviewed in their frontmatter. After a session it shows how many I’ve done and how many are left, so I can stop at any time and continue later.

What it did

In 3 weeks I went through 347 of the 708 notes, or 49%. I archived 89, deleted 23 and kept 235.

Random selection helped the most. When I pick notes myself, my energy goes into deciding whether to start with the oldest, the newest or by topic. This way the tool picks and I only decide. The trash and the protection for fresh notes took away my fear of deleting something important by accident.