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”.

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:

1. This is a space where I can put anything and feel zero friction. (Close open loops)
2. 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.