Andyʼs working notes
About these notesAbout 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.
My morning writing practice
As part of my My daily routine, mornings are often spent writing and revising Evergreen notes. This is typically the most challenging work I do all day, so I like to do it when I have the most clarity and focus. It’s not for “note-taking” in a traditional sense—writing down other people’s ideas, or recording things that happened—it’s for developing ideas. (i.e. Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts vs. Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate)
Unless I have something in mind that I’m particularly excited to write about, I usually begin by opening my writing inbox (A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes) and flipping through those prompts and incomplete notes. If any strike me, I’ll draft Evergreen notes about them. This may happen over multiple days: I may flesh out a note considerably, then run out of steam and leave it in my inbox to finish another day.
If my inbox is relatively low, I’ll get out my memo pad (Pocket memo pad to capture into writing inbox while out) and fill my inbox with those notes. I don’t force it: if none of the prompts seem interesting, I’ll archive the ones which seem most boring and move on.
After working through my writing inbox, I’ll focus my attention on my primary creative projects and ask myself prompts like:
- what are the most important unknowns for this project?
- what new ideas am I excited about?
- what are the most interesting things I know about this project?
For these prompts, I’ll use my Daily working log as a scratch space, splatting a dozen or so one-liners into a haphazard bulleted list. After emptying my head, I’ll write about any that seem interesting. Usually that leads to rabbit holes which consume the rest of the session. I’ll add promising stragglers to my writing inbox for future days.
If those prompts don’t feel fruitful, I’ll use the time to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. I’ve usually got a backlog of books and articles I’ve read but for which I haven’t yet written Evergreen notes. If the prompts don’t feel fruitful for several days in a row, that’s a sign that I need to shake things up: my inputs aren’t high-variance enough, or I’m not giving myself the right kind of creative space, or I may need to re-evaluate my projects. My writing inbox should always feel like a cornucopia.
I take 5-minute breaks to get up and move around every 25 minutes, but even with those breaks, I usually can’t continue this practice longer than 2-3 hours. Sometimes I can do another session later in the day.
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
Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle
Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained, and Inbox Zero is one approach to ensure that they do. It lowers items’ wait times (theoretically to one day) by aggressively increasing the departure rate.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests that you can increase your queue's departure rate by strategically deferring, delegating, or dropping tasks. “Inbox Zero” is an elaboration by Merlin Mann. It ensures that you're increasing the departure rate enough by processing your entire inbox down to zero items each day. This is a blunt approach, but it does ensure that the departure rate always exceeds the arrival rate.
Challenges
You have to make a decision about every item in your inbox. This is a significant cost, and it’ll only make sense to pay when inboxes are relatively small.
Explicitly deferring a task imposes an emotional cost, possibly unnecessarily: “inbox zero” is only necessary if the arrival rate always exceeds the departure rate. If the arrival rate is variable and sometimes sits below the departure rate, you can still handle everything in a reasonable timeframe.
Explicitly dropping a task is hard because Software interfaces often harmfully frame destructive operations as final decisions, not contingent preferences.
More practically speaking, Inbox Zero usually leads to deferral numbness: it’s too easy to punt a task over and over again. Allen suggests that one should periodically perform a reflective review to reconsider tasks which are repeatedly deferred, but these reviews require yet more decisions. Adherence seems to be low.
When processing the inbox in this way, there’s also a lot of pressure to simply do more of these tasks, which may not be what you actually want.
Opportunities
A more ideal mechanism would ensure that wait times remain tolerable, but the cycle time doesn’t necessarily have to be one day. We must also consider the number of decisions to be made. I’d rather make fewer decisions but tolerate a longer average wait time.
One possible instantiation: Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations.
References
Allen, D. (2015). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero | 43 Folders
Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.
Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations
Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained, but Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle. In large part that’s because Software interfaces often harmfully frame destructive operations as final decisions, not contingent preferences.
If you recast the destructive operations as “not right now,” they feel completely different. That browser tab isn’t gone—it’ll come back later. Maybe it’s a day later at first, then if I skip it again, a few days later, then maybe a week, and so on, until “not right now” is effectively “close”… but it doesn’t feel nearly so stressful. This notion can be applied to task queues, reading lists (A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references), email inboxes, etc. Spaced repetition mechanics create a sense of effortlessness.
It helps me to bring some physicality into the metaphor. Imagine your desk has lots of papers on it. You naturally pull out the few which you’re using at the moment, and maybe you set a few aside for special attention. The rest sit, perhaps in a couple of piles. You intermittently look through the piles, pulling out ones which strike your fancy. The ones which sit long enough start to simply dissolve, compost into the table surface. You can always restore them if you like, but if you don’t, they’ll get tilled under.
This is an example of a way in which Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention.
References
Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.
Discovered in Dec 2020 that Simon Hørup Eskildsen blogged about a similar idea in June 2018.
Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice, but the computerized component’s value lies specifically in dynamically scheduling and selecting questions to be reviewed. In some sense, the efficacy of a Spaced repetition memory system comes from its power to program your attention (Programmable attention). Think: “{cron} for your mind.”
Manually making decisions about which cards to review would be far too taxing on a per-card basis. The transaction cost is too high. When that work is mostly outsourced, you can make a coarser decision—to devote your attention to SRS practice for 10 minutes—and then let your attention be directed by the machine within that block.
Systematically, we can generalize spaced repetition to:
- a priority queue of microtasks
- (for memory tasks, in SM-2: a simple due date)
- an interactive environment which presents sufficiently high-priority tasks
- (for memory tasks, a flashcard UI which shows “due” cards)
- feedback actions which modify a task’s subsequent priority
- (for memory tasks, forgotten / remember modify the next due interval)
Within a traditional flashcard-style system, you can use this observation to go far beyond memorization: see Spaced repetition memory systems can be used to prompt application, synthesis, and creation and Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to develop or change habits. Spaced repetition prompt design is about designing tasks for your future self.
But the core concept—automatically arranging and presenting tasks according to some expanding schedule—can be instantiated in many interfaces and domains. I call this notion Spaced everything.
As a pianist, I have a huge number of technical exercises that I maintain: e.g. scales, argpeggios, and patterns played in variations across each key. I only want to work on exercises for 20-30 minutes a day. Which ones should I do? You can imagine a system which:
- keeps track of each exercise, including axes of variation (blocked, arpeggiated; keys; modes)
- priority is a function of both recency and the previous maximum tempo I achieved, relative to my target tempo
- presents a prioritized queue of 20-30 minutes worth of exercises
- perhaps the exercise durations are estimated by measuring my practice
- perhaps it can be configured to present at most 5 variations of any single exercise, to ensure breadth
- solicits feedback from me in terms of a subjective rating and/or a maximum tempo marking
It’s interesting to imagine a single interface malleable enough that I could define my piano exercises above as one sort of routine, and a SRS memory system as another routine—both special cases of a single general primitive.
Some examples:
- Incremental reading
- Timeful text
- Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
- Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations (to-do lists, email, reading lists, etc)
- Readwise
Related:
- For applications which can use the simple SRS flashcard format, see Unusual applications of spaced repetition memory systems
- Spaced repetition systems as catechism
- OS-level spaced repetition system
References
Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.
Related
Evergreen note maintenance approximates spaced repetition
Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle, vs. using spaced-repetition to “approximate” inbox grooming.
I use this concept to engage with my implementation of A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references
A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references
To avoid a proliferation of anxiety-inducing browser tabs and a terrifying folder of PDFs, it’s important to have an automatic procedure for capturing references to readings which might prove useful.
Once captured, each item in the inbox either:
- gets trashed (doesn’t look like it’s worth a detailed read after all)
- gets read in a serious fashion (i.e. Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply)
- gets read shallowly and filed in the reference library
- (maybe) gets added to some other list like “recipes to be cooked”
Importantly, this isn’t a “someday maybe” list. It doesn’t accumulate indefinitely, because then it wouldn’t be a reliable way to Close open loops.
So, when constructing a reading inbox, the important considerations are:
- zero-friction capture for books, articles, web pages (to easily close that loop)
- zero-friction to view the reading corresponding to an inbox item
- zero-friction listing across item type
- the inbox should encourage lingering items to be removed (e.g. it should be obvious when one has been passed over many times)
Interestingly, no existing “read later” or reference management system fits these criteria. They’re usually siloed by content type, and none of them encourages lingering items to be removed. See also: Beware automatic import into the reading inbox.
The reading inbox is an important release valve for things I encounter when on my smartphone (see Use phones to collect and triage, not (usually) to read).
Related: Incremental reading
References
Note-Taking when Reading the Web and RSS • Zettelkasten Method
The Inbox is the place to hold the items we either want to or need to pay attention to. A lot of stuff will never reach our inbox; we can shut off the noise outside.
Some things that found their way onto the reading lists turn out to be useless. Toss them. Putting items on the reading list is a tiny commitment only: we commit to pay attention to them later, but we don’t need to hold on to them if they don’t withstand a critical look.
Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
I’m often struck by an interesting question or notion in conversation or on a walk. In many cases, I can’t write anything terribly insightful on that topic in that moment: I certainly can’t write a good Evergreen notes. I don’t have anything useful to say about the notion yet—it just seems awfully interesting.
What action should I take now? How can I arrange to develop that inkling over time? I could create a “to-do” or block out time to think about this question, but that’s often not what’s called for. Instead, often what I need is marination: let’s come back in a few days, see what bubbles up.
I can capture the notion in A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes, but it’ll rapidly become a pile of unwieldy scraps which I’ll come to ignore (Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained).
Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention, so such mechanisms might be helpful here. In such a system, I might:
- Sit down to my morning writing and see a small handful of writing prompts for the day, drawn from my writing inbox
- I can choose to append whatever’s top of mind about any of them (perhaps they obscure what was written previously until I’ve added new material)
- Once I’ve done that, I can mark the prompt as “fruitful,” meaning it’ll come up again relatively soon, or “unfruitful,” in which case the system will increase its interval substantially.
- Alternately, I might take a moment to convert one of these prompts into one or more Evergreen notes.
- Any prompts which I simply ignore will have their intervals increased, but perhaps not as substantially as explicitly-unfruitful prompts.
By taking advantage of the exponential nature of spaced repetition intervals, one could make incremental progress on potentially hundreds of prompts, while considering only a few on any given day.
This would represent a system for incremental thinking.
Related: Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate.
Implementations
Rice Issa has published a simple implementation.
References
Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.
Spaced repetition memory systems can be used to prompt application, synthesis, and creation
A Spaced repetition memory system like Anki is primarily designed to help people memorize a lot of declarative knowledge, like vocabulary. But the same mechanisms can be used to create relatively unorthodox cards which prompt application, synthesis, and creation.
One limit to these types of questions is that because you authored them, you have to leave the context relatively vague: “apply the lens of utilitarianism to a recent decision,” rather than “apply the lens of utilitarianism to the death penalty.” The latter question’s not very helpful if you wrote it: you would have already thought through the answer, so it’d really just be a memory prompt when you saw it again later. This limitation makes the idea described here promising: The mnemonic medium can help readers apply what they’ve learned through simple application prompts.
Related:
- Unusual applications of spaced repetition memory systems
- Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to develop or change habits
- Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
References
Twitter post, 2018-03-11: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/973020621847187456
Conversation with Michael Nielsen, 2020-01-01