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:

1. a quick way to capture transient notes which clearly isolates them from evergreen notes; and
2. 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

Similarities and differences between evergreen note-writing and Zettelkasten

My practice of writing Evergreen notes is heavily inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten practice and its contemporary advocates. I use a different term both because there are some distinctions and because I want to give myself space to explore ideas in this space apart from the culture surrounding Zettelkasten, which has its own prior values and proclivities.

Key similarities:

• concept-orientation (Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented)
• atomicity (Evergreen notes should be atomic)
• emphasis on linkage (Evergreen notes should be densely linked)
• serendipity as a virtue (Notes should surprise you)
• the centrality of one’s own ideas and their development over time, rather than merely accumulating summaries of others’ ideas (Evergreen notes are a safe place to develop wild ideas, Do your own thinking, contra Commonplace books)
  • emphasis on using one’s own words, even when describing others’ ideas (Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply)

Key differences:

• My approach includes a few methods surrounding the note-writing which expand its scope:
  • a method for capturing scraps which would not yet qualify as Zettel, then revising them over time: A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes
  • an unusual method for managing that inbox: Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations
  • a method for systematically revisiting questions and proto-notes over time: Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
  • a concrete daily practice: My morning writing practice
• More generally, my approach uses a broader Taxonomy of note types which describes a hierarchy and methodology for capturing ideas very early and incrementally developing clusters of notes into increasingly higher-level representations. By contrast, Zettels are mostly meant to represent a few “middle” levels of this hierarchy.
  • Titles are very important indexes in my system. Zettels normally have numeric identifiers; modern adherents may give their notes titles, but apparently not with the same approach of “creating APIs.” Evergreen note titles are like APIs
• Contextual backlinks significantly change the nature of “links,” allowing emergent behaviors like Backlinks can be used to implicitly define nodes in knowledge management systems
• I’ve embedded a Spaced repetition memory system into my notes: The mnemonic medium can be extended to one’s personal notes. This has substantially changed the medium, but in ways I don’t yet understand very well.
• My notes are publicly accessible, and I integrate them into public conversation. I don’t understand the impact of this practice yet, but it certainly changes my relationship to the notes in a significant way and creates valuable discussion. There are likely some interesting networked intelligence angles here. I know of no prominent “live” public Zettelkasten. Luhmann’s is archived, but that’s a different relationship—he’s not using it in conversation, then using that interaction to inform his writing.

One final difference, this one a touch pointy: the primary purpose of my system is to develop ideas in my core creative projects. Most people in the contemporary Zettelkasten culture seem to use their systems primarily to write notes about others’ ideas. If they’re developing their own ideas with them, those ideas are an interesting hobby, not their core creative work. All this falls afoul of the issues around People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use. I don’t know how, exactly, but my context of use substantially shapes the note-writing practice.

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”.