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.
See:
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
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