I’ve found a lot of success going one step further giving up on retrieval all together. I use either a new text file every time (which I never open again) or a physical notebook page (which I never refer back to). I get so much value from the act of writing itself.
Same. I just bought a scanner which I intend to use to scan and OCR my notes so that I can finally shred the mountain of paper I have. But I know I won't read the digital copy either so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. I guess it's the next step to putting it completely out of mind.
That's not a terrible idea. The OCR is struggling with my chicken scratch, but maybe ChatGPT can read the image directly. Might try one day. I was reading some of my notes...and it's mostly garbage, not sure it's even worth doing.