Evergreen Note

Andy Matuschak frame for a polished entry in his NoteTaking.

Evergreen notes: It’s hard to write notes that are worth developing over time. These principles help:

• Evergreen notes should be atomic... It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing
• Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
• Evergreen notes should be densely linked
• Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
• Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience

Evergreen notes are a safe place to develop wild ideas. ..the idea may just not be solid enough yet to attack directly

nurture the wild idea and let it develop over time by incrementally writing Evergreen notes about small facets of the idea. Those notes have much tighter scope: they just have to describe one atomic concept

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Steven Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas (Where Good Ideas Come From), calls it the “slow hunch.” As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle (Johnson 2011). A laboratory with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris. I would add the slip-box as such a space in which ideas can mingle freely, so they can give birth to new ones.