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:

• Evergreen notes should be atomic
• Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
• Evergreen notes should be densely linked
• Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
• Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience

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:

• Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply
• Taxonomy of note types
• A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references
• A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes
• Executable strategy for writing

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

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”.