Evergreen Note-taking
Evergreen note-taking is a practice developed by Andy Matuschak to advance his research projects and to achieve "better thinking."
Inbox
The #inbox is a repository of topics or prompts that I can refer to when I don't sit down with a clear idea of what I want to write.
- I can filter through the #inbox and see what strikes my fancy.
- When I have an idea I'd like to write on later, I can quickly create a new note and tag it with inbox
- My Bear <> Sherlock integration supports this with:
bn note title #inbox
- My Bear <> Sherlock integration supports this with:
- When do items come out of the inbox?
Foundational Notes
I need a launching off for a few anchor, foundational notes. Ideally, the would emerge organically over time through the dense inter-linking.
For the moment, it seems my anchor notes will be:
Audience
I'm writing primarily for myself to read.
Value in publishing these notes:
- Serendipity, chance encounters, Signal flare is a public artifact that attracts like-minded thinkers for like-minded thinkers
- Enables better conversations with "fellow travelers" as it gives me notes to link to in our conversations
- Publishing makes me clean them up perhaps more than I would normally do for myself. Good peer pressure.
Tooling
I've written more comprehensively about my tooling in Personal Learning System, My Reading & Writing Workflow
Graphs
- I'd love to be able to see the densely connected Foundational Notes via a graph
- I'd like to spot orphans
Process and Questions
-
Each note should represent a single, atomic "idea"
- Getting the ideas to be right-sized will be tricky
- When do I pull an idea out of a note into it's own note, essentially, when do I refactor?
-
What's a good format for prompts?
- Prompts should probably be:
- A noun
- The note would then be describing the noun
- A declarative statement
- The note would be elaborating on the meaning of the declarative statement
-
When to use prose versus bulleted lists?
-
Evergreen note-taking practice each morning
-
How does evergreen note-taking compare to Incremental Note-taking?