The huge amount of notes you’ve collected can feel like a massive mountain you just can’t climb. You might be staring at hundreds, maybe even thousands, of those little digital sticky notes. Each one could be holding some vital piece of info, or maybe it’s just digital clutter. It’s not fun thinking of perfectly organizing what’s left, but there is another solution.

While I would recommend finding a faster process to sort all your notes, you can clear your space without losing your precious notes. It is a bit of a process, but it’s so much better than having to deal with long load times just to get into the app.

You must use a computer if you want to stay sane

When I finally got around to dealing with the mountain of lists, ideas, and half-finished thoughts I had hiding in my Google Keep, I realized something important that you need to know. If you want to keep your sanity, you absolutely need to use a computer for this task. While I am one of many who consider this their favorite note-taking app, trying to do this huge cleanup on a mobile phone is constraining, and a lot slower to manage. This can be a real headache if you don’t use a PC.

Google Keep is designed to be a quick way to capture things on mobile, letting you jot down those spontaneous ideas fast. While the mobile app works perfectly for capturing instant thoughts or putting together a quick shopping list, trying to manage years of digital clutter requires features and visibility that only a desktop or laptop can really give you. Believe me, I was a massive Keep user, hoarding notes for years, and the moment the sheer volume of my notes made the app sluggish and basically unusable on my phone, I knew I had to switch to the web interface.

Making this jump to Google Keep’s web interface is where you start seeing real efficiency, offering better visibility from a large screen, which is a truly huge win when you are trying to sort through hundreds, or even thousands, of messy notes. Having a bigger screen makes it easy to clearly see the entire app interface, including your full label structure and all the available options, and that instantly makes the decision-making process for the organization much better.

The desktop environment gives you access to the tools you need for managing notes. The biggest one is the ability to select and edit things in bulk, which immediately makes the impossible job of cleaning up hundreds of notes totally manageable.

When you are on the web interface, you can use handy shortcuts like Ctrl + A to grab every note visible on the screen, or you can use the simple click-and-drag method to select a specific block of notes outside the individual cards. Once you have them selected in bulk, you can quickly move everything to a specific label, delete them, change their color, or archive them all at the same time. This simple ability to process groups of notes instead of having to click on them one by one, which you would have to do if you were using a phone, is a real time saver.

How to back up and delete everything

When I finally faced the total chaos of my Google Keep, which came from years of quickly jotting things down, I was lazy, and I took this route. This is the fastest way you’ll get rid of all your notes, but I regret it to this day because the hard drive I put it in failed. The ability to move everything to another drive and delete the remainder is a feature that deserves more attention, because it saved me from a slower app.

You have to perform a full backup of everything you’ve ever written or stored in Keep. That is because Google Keep itself actually lacks automatic versioning or reliable native backup tools. The absolute best way to mass export all this data is by utilizing the service specifically designed for downloading your Google data: Google Takeout. Since Takeout selects every single Google product by default, make sure to click “Deselect all” first and then go to “Keep”.

Then, pick the delivery method you want. I chose to have the download link sent directly via email, which is easy because you can then select “Create export,” which puts everything into a .zip file. I recommend storing the file on a drive you trust or just keeping it on your computer.

Once the export was confirmed and the data was safely saved, the truly satisfying part started. That was the bulk-deleting of absolutely everything. Ctrl + A (or Cmd + A if you are on a Mac) right on the main Notes page to select all and then press the three-dot menu and pick “Delete notes.” It is always satisfying to mass delete files because sometimes you get to see them slowly disappear.

The ‘sort and sift’ method is the best way

Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek

I recommend using the sort and sift method because it’s better to keep your data organized than to leave it for your future self to deal with. If I were to do it again, I’d set up a labeling system. Since Google Keep doesn’t offer traditional folders, a color-coded label and pinned notes organization model would be the way to go.

I’d design a system that would work for my specific needs, rather than just trying to use a general complicated structure. You should group your notes into big labels like “Writing,” “Projects,” and “Personal,” knowing that one note can easily belong to multiple labels at the same time. To keep my most frequently used categories easily visible.

Unfortunately, from there, you need to go through every single note. This is the essence of the sort and sift. You decide the fate of each piece of information right then and there when you look at it.

Don’t be afraid to delete your notes, get rid of things like old article outlines, grocery lists you made using Keep features, random screenshots, or those truly bizarre text notes that meant something a long time ago but not today. If you must hoard, then try archiving. This removes the clutter while keeping it inside your account so that you can deal with it at another time.

Once the app is cleaned up, the renewed clarity and the snappier performance of Google Keep itself really proves how great a well-executed cleanup can be. Going from feeling totally overwhelmed to being organized was a great feeling. Sometimes things get away from you, but there are solutions that you’ll be glad you went through. Regardless of the method you pick, make sure to be more organized in the future so you don’t have to do this again.