About these notes

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.

Last updated 2023-10-23.

§What’s top of mind

Sort of like a /now page, but with a broader time horizon and focused on what I’m thinking about.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work

If you had to set one metric to use as a leading indicator for yourself as a knowledge worker, the best I know might be the number of Evergreen notes written per day. Note-writing can be a virtuosic skill, but Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts and Note-writing practices are generally ineffective.

Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate
Evergreen note-writing helps reading efforts accumulate
Note-writing helps writing accumulate: these notes are the fuel for the Executable strategy for writing, particularly if you Create speculative outlines while you write.

A caveat: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

References

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.

If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.

Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus.

Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

Evergreen notes

Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes. That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”. When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work.

It’s hard to write notes that are worth developing over time. These principles help:

This concept is of course enormously indebted to the notion of a Zettelkasten. See Similarities and differences between evergreen note-writing and Zettelkasten.

Implementing an evergreen note practice

See:

References

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.

Many students and academic writers think like the early ship owners when it comes to note-taking. They handle their ideas and findings in the way it makes immediate sense: If they read an interesting sentence, they underline it. If they have a comment to make, they write it into the margins. If they have an idea, they write it into their notebook, and if an article seems important enough, they make the effort and write an excerpt. Working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places. Writing, then, means to rely heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down.

Luhmann, N. (1992). Communicating with Slip Boxes. In A. Kieserling (Ed.), & M. Kuehn (Trans.), Universität als Milieu: Kleine Schriften (pp. 53–61). Retrieved from http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

Last updated 2023-07-13.

“Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective. The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, “lifehacking”-type frame, focused on answering questions like: “how should I organize my notes?”, “what kind of journal should I use?”, “how can I make it easy to capture snippets of things I read?”, etc.

Answers to these questions are unsatisfying because the questions are focused on the wrong thing. The goal is not to take notes—the goal is to think effectively. Better questions are “what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?”, “how can I shepherd my attention effectively?” etc. This is the frame in which Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work makes sense: Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate.

In terms of technology, what matters is not “computer-support note-taking” but “computer supported thinking.”

It’s easy to focus on “note-taking” because it’s a visible component of an invisible practice: if you see someone insightful writing in their notebook, you might imagine that if you get the right notebook and organize it well, you’ll be insightful too. And of course, taking notes is tangible. It’s relatively easy, and it feels like doing something, even if it’s useless (Note-writing practices provide weak feedback). So it’s an attractive nuisance.

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

References

Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.

Conversation with Michael Nielsen, 2019-12-16

computer supported thinking

A nice screed on this subject: Notes Against Note-Taking Systems - by Sasha Chapin

Last updated 2023-07-13.

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the authors achieve meaningful creative work: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities. There are two related problems here: Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use, and Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes.

Luhmann, by contrast, barely wrote about his Zettelkasten: he focused on his prolific research output, then published a couple small essays about his practices near the end of his career.

I’m not quite guilty of this problem myself, but I certainly slip into this behavior for weeks at a time. This is a cautionary note. Related: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply

If you want to deeply internalize something you’re reading, the best way I know is to write about it:

because Understanding requires effortful engagement
- and in particular, Writing forces sharper understanding
- remember: Collecting material feels more useful than it usually is
because otherwise you won’t Do your own thinking
because Knowledge work should accrete and Evergreen note-writing helps reading efforts accumulate
indeed: Most people read ineffectively

For deep understanding, it’s not enough to just highlight or write marginalia in books: there isn’t much pressure to synthesize, connect, or to get to the heart of things. And they don’t add up to anything over time as you read more. Instead, write Evergreen notes as you read.

But of course, it doesn’t always make sense to read in this way: much of the time you’re not really trying to internalize the text deeply, and text may not be worthy of that much attention: The best way to read is highly contextual.

Also, it’s worth noting: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading. Speaking at least for myself, experience has suggested that I need more support to effectively engage with what I’m reading.

Method

Our broad approach is an alternating cycle:

Collect passages that seem interesting and thoughts that emerge while reading: How to collect observations while reading
Process clusters of those passages and thoughts into lasting notes:How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes

References

It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.

Levy, N. (2013). Neuroethics and the Extended Mind. In J. Illes & B. J. Sahakian (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (pp. 285–294). Oxford University Press.

Notes on paper, or on a computer screen … do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

How to collect observations while reading

It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply, but it’s distracting to switch back and forth between reading and writing polished notes. Instead, collect insights in a lightweight way while you read. You can put them in A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes. That'll Close open loops, and you’ll process them later (see How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes).

Annotations—even inline marginalia which include your own writing—have very little informational value. They’re atomized; they don’t relate to each other; they don’t add up to anything; they’re ultra-compressed; they’re largely unedited. That’s fine: think of them as just a reminder. They say “hey, look at this passage,” with a few words of context to jog your memory about what the passage was about.

Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. You wouldn’t want to rely on that long-term, since then you’d just have a huge pile of hooks you’d have to “follow” anytime you wanted to think about your experience with that book.

When processing these observations, you’ll want to be able to see the big picture and see clusters of ideas, so it’s helpful to collect annotations in a manipulable fashion.

Concretely, the approach I’m trying:

Physical books:
- Write couple-word thoughts on a slip of A7 paper (Pocket memo pad to capture into writing inbox while out)
- Draw a dot or line in the margin of interesting passages and dogear the page.
Web articles:
- Copy+paste interesting excerpts into a single working note in my writing Inbox.
- Or perhaps use the Bear excerpter, in combination with the marker tool.
Digital books and PDFs:
- Use in-app highlighters
- Export all highlights into a working note in Inbox to cluster

==TODO==

I find the digital solutions quite unsatisfying: it’s slow and heavy browsing between annotations in these solutions.

References

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books

The text inspired a thought, and the inspiring part is already marked in the text.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes

taking notes on my Mac while reading just doesn’t work for me. My state while typing is too different from the state I’m in when I read print. Going back and forth requires heavy switching of mental gears. First, this wears me out after a while. Second, this switching ruins the focus: I cannot follow the text properly. That’s why I take notes on paper and mark the passage I want to refer to with a little * in the page’s margin.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes

Even if you aspires to write Evergreen notes, most notes begin as transient notes. You should be able to capture thoughts without friction (Close open loops), then reliably develop them into evergreen notes over time (Knowledge work should accrete). This implies two important mechanisms:

a quick way to capture transient notes which clearly isolates them from evergreen notes; and
a place to put notes you want to develop further and a practice which reliably drains it (Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained)

I use a “writing inbox” for this purpose. Undeveloped ideas, excerpts from my Daily working log, notes from reading, one-line prompts, etc all begin in that queue. During My morning writing practice, I’ll look through notes in this inbox and spend time developing any that strike me. On most days, I spend the majority of my writing time in this way.

Many notes in my writing inbox end up as evergreen notes, but that’s not appropriate (or possible) for all of them. If a note doesn’t seem sufficiently interesting after a few looks, it’s best to archive or delete it. (A challenge here: Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle)

While I’m at my computer, I capture notes directly into my writing inbox. I also feed it with: Pocket memo pad to capture into writing inbox while out.

References

Building Blocks of a Zettelkasten • Zettelkasten Method

Last updated 2023-07-13.

Daily working log

Each day, I start a note titled with that day’s date; e.g. 2020-03-12. It captures ephemera throughout the day: reflections, scratch work, etc. It’s an intentional dumping ground, a release valve so that there’s always “a place to put that thing.”

In the Taxonomy of note types, this is the lowest-fidelity layer, ephemeral by design. But as scratch thoughts look like they might have legs, they get extracted into a note in my writing inbox (A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes). Sometimes I’ll use the daily working log as a drafting space, and I can extract sections roughly-as-is into Evergreen notes.

For me, the important bits are:

This is a space where I can put anything and feel zero friction. (Close open loops)
I feel a natural pressure to extract anything which wants to “outlive the day”—to move up the Taxonomy of note types.

Because the daily working log is also a live note, it also functions as a useful stub for Contextual backlinks: Backlinks can be used to implicitly define nodes in knowledge management systems.

Last updated 2023-07-13.

Taxonomy of note types

==TODO: flesh this out; write a note for each note type; etc==

For me, the practice of writing and revising notes is, at its core, about trying to move up the following rough ladder:

Ephemeral scratchings in Daily working log
Prompts and incomplete notes in writing inbox (A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes), which are meant to possibly become Evergreen notes. These prompts may accumulate writing over time via spaced repetition (see Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings)
Evergreen notes, in increasingly complex stages of development:
- stubs implicitly defined through backlinks (Backlinks can be used to implicitly define nodes in knowledge management systems); e.g. Note-writing system, Audiobooks
- simple definitions for terms of art, little of my own added; e.g. Span of absolute judgment, Spacing effect
- Bridge notes narrowly relate two adjacent terms
- precise, narrow declarative notes (Prefer note titles with complete phrases to sharpen claims); e.g. Human channel capacity increases with stimulus dimensionality
- sometimes these are framed as questions, when evidence is too inconclusive to frame sharply; e.g. To what extent is exceptional ability heritable?, To what extent can application prompts supplant recall prompts in the mnemonic medium?
- higher-level APIs (Evergreen note titles are like APIs)
- notes abstracting over many other notes, e.g. Educational games are a doomed approach to creating enabling environments, Reading texts on computers is unpleasant
- personal terms of art, e.g. Enacted experience
“Outline notes”, e.g. §Enabling environments, games, and the Primer

Note types outside this ladder:

Proper noun notes
- “Literature notes”, titled after a single work and meant primarily as linkages to other more durable notes, and as targets for backlinks. I write these roughly as “outline notes,” except for someone else’s ideas. For example: Miller - The magical number seven, plus or minus two
- Likewise, but less commonly, I also have “person notes” (e.g. Anand Agarawala) and “business notes” (e.g. Confluent)
- These note types are weakly evergreen. I may add to them over time, but because they aren’t concept-oriented (Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented), they’re not as useful to build on as an evergreen note. Non-trivial writing about proper nouns typically gets factored into separate evergreen notes which can be used in multiple places.
- “Log” notes, which accumulate ephemeral observations about a specific practice, system, or project over time. They’re akin to a Daily working log, but sliced by some topic of interest rather than by date. e.g. Log: personal mnemonic medium
- With better transclusion or support for Contextual backlinks, such notes could be written directly in one’s Daily working log, and “log” notes could be defined as a query over such notes.

Tactically speaking, I usually denote a note’s “type” with a tag.

Don’t over-obsess or over-formalize this stuff. Remember: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”.

Last updated 2023-07-13.