Evergreen notes
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/
A note-writing practice and system inspired by Zettelkasten but with some key differences. It’s detailed in Andy Matuschak’s own public collection of notes online, which is a great example of ideas mingling.
I like the way that the notes are named, so they can easily be linked together without disturbing the flow of sentences.
Overview
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/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“
Principles
- Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Each note should be about one thing only,
- “This way, it’s easier to form connections across topics and contexts. If your notes are too broad, you might not notice when you encounter some new idea about one of the notions contained within, and links to that note will be muddied.”
- Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
- Not by book, project etc - this makes it easier to form connections across disciplines, topics and sources
- “The most straightforward way to take notes is to start a new note for each book, each project, or each research topic. Because each note covers many concepts, it can be hard to find what you’ve written when a concept comes up again later: you have to remember the name of each book or project which dealt with the topic”
- Evergreen notes should be densely linked
- “If we push ourselves to add lots of links between our notes, that makes us think expansively about what other concepts might be related to what we’re thinking about. It creates pressure to think carefully about how ideas relate to each other“
- Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
- “Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.”
- Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience
- Don’t write notes as if they are a final published piece, as the overhead isn’t usually worth it. Let them be notes and use them to write for an audience later.
- “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.”
Implementation
1 Collect passages that seem interesting and thoughts that emerge while reading: How to collect observations while reading
- “Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. ”
2 Process clusters of those passages and thoughts into lasting notes: How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes