Hi! I’m Andy Matuschak. You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.
These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).
For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.
👋 Andy (email, Twitter, main personal site)
PS: My work is made possible by a crowd-funded research grant from my Patreon community. You can become a member to support future work, and to read patron-only updates and previews of upcoming projects.
PS: Many people ask, so I’ll just note here: no, I haven’t made this system available for others to use. It’s still an early research environment, and Premature scaling can stunt system iteration.
When writing Evergreen notes, I’ve found that using complete phrases as note titles helps maintain concept-orientation (Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented). For example: Educational objectives often subvert themselves, Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”).
These are often declarative or imperative phrases making a strong claim. This puts pressure on me to adequately support the claim in the body. If I write a note but struggle to summarize it in a sharp title, that’s often a sign that my thinking is muddy or that this note is about several topics (contra Evergreen notes should be atomic). In both cases, the solution is to break the ideas down and write about the bits I understand best first.
Questions also make good note titles because that position creates pressure to make the question get to the core of the matter. Some questions really are evergreen (To what extent is exceptional ability heritable?); others are more ephemeral creative prompts (How might the mnemonic medium enable readers in genres outside platform knowledge?). The goal with the latter type of note is to eventually drop the question mark, refactoring it into declarative/imperative notes.
A few common exceptions to this policy:
I often begin by writing a note without knowing what the title will be. The title often emerges from the text as it’s written. When a note suggests a strong title with a clear claim, that’s a good sign that it’s starting to make sense. Related: Evergreen note titles are like APIs