◇note
Evergreen notes
A note about a kind of note. Recursion intentional.
An evergreen note is a single, well-titled, atomic unit of belief that you intend to revise rather than archive. It earns its keep over time: the longer you have it, the more places it gets pointed at, the more useful it becomes.
The two properties I find most useful in practice:
- Atomicity. A note holds one idea. If two ideas live in one note, one of them is sleeping under the other.
- Concept-not-event titling. The title is the idea, not the occasion of writing. “Reading on paper vs. screen” — yes. “Thoughts from train ride” — no.
This idea comes from Andy Matuschak. I disagree with him on one small thing, captured in Notes vs. marks: not every annotation should aspire to evergreen status. Some marks are good because they are ephemeral.
Pointed at by
Margin — “…e the same idea. <Q>Is a margin note a *kind* of Evergreen Note in the Andy Matuschak sense, or a different s…” read