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.
It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. While reading, you’ve marked passages that seem relevant, and you’ve scribbled notes with your thoughts (How to collect observations while reading). Now we’ll process all that into lasting notes.
First: what notes should even get written? We’ll write Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented, so what are the key concepts? You need to take a step back and form a picture of the overall structure of the ideas. Concretely, you might do that by clustering your scraps into piles and observing the structure that emerges. Or you might sketch a mind map or a visual outline. The structure you observe does not have to match the book’s structure: it’s whatever makes sense relative to your own personal ontology (Do your own thinking).
Once you have a picture of the concepts at play, you’ll begin an iterative process of note-writing. Here I’ve summarized Christian Tietze’s process, which I’m presently adopting / adapting:
Create Zettel from Reading Notes • Zettelkasten Method
Second, I find out if a cluster’s main point has too many prerequisites to stand alone. It might be a conclusion which draws from lots of assumptions or from complex models I’d need to explain. I prepare the conclusion first and then branch off into other notes to capture all the necessary ideas. This is where links come in handy: the details point back to the concept note and the concept note mentions its detail branches.
Clusters don’t lean onto the book’s outline. A book’s index for example collects references, not caring about the table of contents or the flow of ideas. For definitions of terms a similar approach is useful: collect usage examples in the text and definitions themselves to get a clear picture of the term’s meaning. Clusters can be topic-based, too, just like an index.
This is what I call ‘orthogonal to the content’: they don’t adhere to the succession of pages and sections. Instead, clusters form themselves around any purpose you deem fitting.
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.
Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index.