Every year, on a Saturday afternoon in late October, my mother used to bring two flat wooden boxes down from the closet at the top of the stairs. Inside one were the summer kimono, washed and folded with sheets of tissue between them. Inside the other was the winter wardrobe, stored since spring with cedar to keep the moths out. The whole afternoon was given to the exchange — every garment looked at, considered, refolded, returned to its proper box. Some were quietly removed from rotation. Some were repaired. The next morning the closet held only what the coming season would actually need.
This is koromogae (衣替え), the Japanese seasonal wardrobe change. It is, on the surface, a domestic chore. Underneath, it is one of the cleanest annual rituals I know — an enforced moment of looking at what you have, deciding what still earns its place, and putting back only what does. I have come to do the same thing, once a year, with my Notion workspace. This essay is about that ritual, and why I think every digital workspace needs one.
If you are looking at the Notion workspace that survives this annual reset year after year, you can see the version I keep here →. The reset below is what keeps it small.
Why the workspace needs a reset at all
A digital workspace, unlike a closet, can grow without ever feeling crowded. There is no shelf running out of room. There is no drawer that will not close. The infinite-canvas property of tools like Notion is genuinely useful, but it has a cost: nothing in the workspace ever forces you to confront how much of it has stopped being used. Pages that are not opened do not become dusty. Databases that are no longer maintained do not yellow at the edges. They simply persist, unnoticed, accumulating.
I noticed this most clearly in my second year of using Notion. The workspace had grown to about forty pages, eleven databases, and three "dashboards" that I had built with great enthusiasm and then quietly stopped opening. None of it was in my way, exactly. But the act of opening Notion had started to feel slightly heavier than it once had — not slow in any technical sense, just psychologically heavier. I was carrying more than I was using.
The koromogae-style reset I now do once a year is the answer to that drift. It is modelled on my mother's October Saturday, in four stages. Each stage takes between thirty minutes and two hours. The whole thing is one afternoon, with a pot of tea and the laptop on the kitchen table, and at the end the workspace is roughly the size it was the previous year. That stability — not growth — is the goal.
Stage one: archive
The first hour is given entirely to archiving. The rule is simple: any page or database that has not been opened in the last six months is moved, without further deliberation, to a folder called Archive · {year}. Notion's "Last edited" property and the activity sidebar make this almost mechanical. There is no judgment at this stage. Anything that has not been opened goes.
The reason for the no-judgment rule is that judgment, at this stage, slows everything down to a halt. The temptation is to look at each page and ask "but might I need this someday?" The answer is almost always "perhaps." Perhaps is not a useful filter. Six months of non-use is. If a page genuinely matters, it will be retrieved from the archive within weeks of being moved there, and that retrieval is the real test of whether it belonged in the active workspace.
The archive folder itself stays in the workspace, searchable. Nothing is deleted. This matters. Knowing that nothing is lost is what allows the archiving to be ruthless. My mother did not throw the summer kimono away in October; she put them in the box. The point was that they were no longer in the closet, taking attentional space. The same logic applies here.
Stage two: pare
The second stage is more difficult, and is where most of the actual thinking happens. With the inactive pages safely moved, I open each of the remaining databases in turn and look at what is inside.
The questions are these: does this database have entries from the last three months? do those entries actually get used, or are they being added out of habit? if I stopped maintaining this database tomorrow, would anything in my life become harder?
That third question is the harsh one. Most years, two or three databases that I had been faithfully maintaining turn out to fail it. They were once useful, then became habitual, then became performative. A "books I want to read" list that had grown to two hundred entries and was being added to faster than I could ever read. A "places to visit in Tokyo" database that I had not opened in seven months. A "ideas for essays" board with fifty entries, of which I had written one in the previous year. These are not bad databases. They are simply databases that have stopped earning their place.
What I do with them is what my mother did with garments she had not worn in a season but was not ready to discard: I move them to the archive folder, intact, and check next year whether I missed them. So far, I almost never have.
The exception worth naming
The kakeibo ledger is exempt from this stage. The monthly reflection database is exempt from this stage. The reading log — even when sparse — is exempt. The reason is that these are the practices the workspace exists to support, and a quiet month of any of them is data, not decay. I have written about why those three deserve permanent residence in the three Notion databases every writer needs. They survive every reset.
Stage three: refile
The third stage is the one that most resembles my mother's actual folding. With the workspace pared down to what genuinely earns its place, I go through each remaining database and look at the field structure. Properties that have not been used in months get removed. Tags that proliferated during the year get consolidated. Views that were built for a project that has ended get deleted, leaving only the views I actually open.
This is the stage I find most satisfying, and the one I would warn against indulging too long. It is easy to spend an entire afternoon refining property structures, tweaking views, adjusting icons. The koromogae rule applies: refile what is being kept, do not redesign it. If a database needs significant redesign, it probably failed stage two and you are bargaining with yourself.
One specific small action I always do at this stage: I rename anything that has acquired a vague name. "Notes," "Misc," "Inbox 2" — anything that does not describe what it actually contains gets renamed to what it actually contains. The renaming alone, I find, surfaces about a quarter of the year's accumulated drift. A database called "Inbox 2" is almost always a database that has stopped knowing what it is for.
Stage four: re-cover
The final stage is the most cosmetic and, I think, the most quietly important. I open the home page of the workspace and rewrite the single sentence at the top — the sentence that names what the studio is currently focused on — for the coming year. Sometimes that sentence is almost identical to last year's. Most years it has shifted, and the shift is worth naming explicitly.
I also choose a new cover image for the home page. Mine is usually a photograph from somewhere in the past year — the balcony in autumn, a corner of the kitchen, a page from one of my grandmother's ledgers. The image is small and almost no one but me will see it. The point is the act of choosing. It is the digital equivalent of putting fresh paper in the lining of the empty closet before the new season's clothes go in.
The whole stage takes about twenty minutes. It would be tempting to skip it as ornamental. Do not. The closing gesture is what marks the reset as a reset. Without it, the four hours of archiving and paring will not feel like a ritual, and the next time you open the workspace it will feel like the same workspace, only emptier. With it, the workspace feels like a new room.
When to do it
I do the reset on the first Saturday of November, which is roughly six weeks before the calendar year ends. The timing is deliberate. The end of December is, for most people, already busy enough. Doing the reset in early November means the cleaned workspace gets to host the genuinely useful annual review at the actual year-end — the moment of reading twelve monthly reflections in sequence that I described in the slow-living templates essay and the kakeibo template essay.
If November does not work for you, the only requirement is that the date be predictable. Like koromogae itself, the ritual works because it arrives on schedule. A workspace reset that happens "when I get round to it" never quite happens.
What I have learned from doing this for three years
A few things, in honesty.
The first is that the workspace I think I have and the workspace I actually use are never the same workspace. Stage one always reveals at least one major piece of architecture I had stopped opening months earlier without noticing. The reset is, in part, an annual confession.
The second is that the things I am tempted to add during the year are almost never the things that survive the next year's reset. New databases that felt urgent in March are usually gone by November. The handful of things that have survived multiple resets — kakeibo, monthly reflection, reader inbox, asset library, daily reset — are the workspace. Everything else is, with rare exceptions, decoration.
The third is that the act of doing the reset gets faster every year, not slower. The first one took most of a Saturday. The third took about three hours. The reason is that a workspace that has been reset once knows what it is, and the year's accumulation has less to attach itself to. This is, I suspect, the same reason my mother could do the kimono exchange in an afternoon when it would have taken a beginner two days. Repetition refines the system itself.
For readers who want to try this once
If you have never done a workspace reset and the idea appeals to you, I would suggest two modifications for the first attempt.
Make the archive folder painfully obvious — call it Archive · trying this once, with a bright icon, so it is impossible to lose. The fear of losing things is the single most common reason resets stall, and naming the archive deliberately reduces that fear.
And limit the first reset to a single afternoon, even if it is incomplete. A partial reset done in one sitting is much more likely to become an annual ritual than a thorough reset spread across a weekend. The koromogae works because it is contained. So should your first attempt.
If you want the workspace I keep — the one that has survived three of these resets and is roughly the same size it was when I started — you can try the Notion template I use here →. The structure is built to be reset annually, not added to indefinitely. If you would like the paper companion for the kakeibo half of it, the journal in my Etsy shop follows the same structure.
One closing thought, from my mother's closet
The thing about koromogae that I did not understand as a child, and only really understood after the third or fourth reset of my own workspace, is that the ritual is not about subtraction. It is about renewed attention to what is being kept. The summer kimono that goes back into the box has been looked at, considered, and chosen for the next summer. It is not the same garment that was put away in spring; it has passed through your attention, and that passage is what makes the rotation feel like care rather than chore.
A Notion workspace, reset annually, becomes a kept thing rather than a held one. That is, I think, the difference between a workspace that supports a slow life and a workspace that quietly competes with it. The reset is what does the work.