Because Evergreen notes can be used as part of a strategy for writing public work (Executable strategy for writing), it’s tempting to “save time” by writing notes in publishable form. That might mean providing all the necessary background to understand some (boring to you) idea, or self-censoring, or adding lots of qualifiers, or spending lots of effort on clarity. Many of these practices can be somewhat useful as part of your own thinking process—for instance, clearer writing usually involves clearer thinking. But I find it substantially increases the overhead and effort in writing, often to the point of producing blockage.
More concretely, this manifests as a common failure mode for me when I’m writing notes as part of explicit preparation for some public writing. I’ll often try to do both jobs at once. That is, I might be writing atomic-style notes (Evergreen notes should be atomic) but I try to write them as if they’re sections in a larger essay or work. Or even just: I try to write things with all the context and clear prose needed for an outsider to understand what I’m talking about. Then I often find that I can’t write anything at all! Better to write at a level where I can produce something, then use that to lever myself upward. (Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”))
When it’s a topic I understand well, I can write notes for both myself and an audience simultaneously. But that sometimes produces the false impression that I can pull this off all the time! To avoid that false impression, I’ll write notes for myself “by default,” and only “opt into” writing notes for an audience explicitly.
Q. What bad habit do I often fall into when writing evergreen notes in preparation for public writing?
A. I’ll try to do my public writing as part of my first pass on the notes.
Q. Why do I often find myself stuck when I try to write evergreen notes as publishable prose for an audience?
A. When a topic is hard enough to distill on its own, the extra cognitive load of considering a reader overwhelms me.
A naive writing process begins with a rough inkling about what one wants to write and a blank page. Progress from this point requires an enormous amount of activation energy and cognitive effort: there’s nothing external, so you must juggle all of the piece-to-be in your head.
By contrast, if you’ve already written lots of concept-oriented Evergreen notes around the topic, your task is more like editing than composition. You can make an outline by shuffling the note titles, write notes on any missing material, and edit them together into a narrative. In fact, because you can Create speculative outlines while you write, you might find that the first of these steps is already accomplished, too. And writing each note isn’t hard: Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”).
Instead of having a task like “write an outline of the first chapter,” you have a task like “find notes which seem relevant.” Each step feels doable. This is an executable strategy (see Executable strategy). But beware—don’t let this strategy “poison” the initial note-writing process: Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience.
I describe two approaches here: an undirected version, in which writing projects emerge organically from daily work; and a directed version, in which you’re trying to write about something specific.
One other nice benefit of this approach: Evergreen notes lower the emotional stakes in editing manuscripts.
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.
Preparing Fragments Helps You to Ease Into Writing • Zettelkasten Method
To see with clarity if your research backs up your text’s structure sufficiently, the next step is to assign notes from your Zettelkasten to the items of your outline. When an item of your outline seems to be neglected because you don’t have enough notes that fit, you can continue your research, focusing on the missing pieces. As soon as you’re confident you got enough coverage for a start, you string the notes’s contents together according to the outline. Thus you create the very first draft. That’s all it takes to move from a plan to outline to manuscript. Then you begin to re-write, organize the material and start to make the text coherent.
There’s no magic involved in writing texts with the help of a well-fed Zettelkasten. To compile a first draft you put the contents of selected notes at the appropriate places in the outline, putting meat on the bones of your text’s skeleton. That’s how a Zettelkasten helps you complete your first draft.