Evergreen notes

1. What happened

Matuschak, previously an iOS engineer at Apple and a researcher at Khan Academy, has practised and set out these disciplines on a public working-notes site that he keeps updating; its pages carry no date of writing[1]Matuschak, A. Working Notes. The three disciplines checked against the primary site. Available at notes.andymatuschak.org, continuously updated; the pages carry no date of writing. This is an individual practitioner's working notes. There is no book and no paper. They are atomic, concept-oriented and densely linked, and appear as verbatim headings on the site. Attribution note: a fourth principle, “context-free”, circulates widely but was checked and does not exist on the original site. It is a common misreport..

The three principles are verbatim headings on that site. A note should be atomic, one concept per node, so that a reference has a precise target, while still covering that concept as fully as possible. It should be organised by concept, since a single topic can split into several concept nodes and the concept is the unit of reuse. And it should be densely linked, with links treated as first-class rather than decorative.

He states that the concept is deeply indebted to the slip-box tradition. This is a restatement and refinement of networked note-taking for the era of digital tools, not a new invention. A fourth principle in wide circulation, that notes should be context-free, does not exist on the site; it is derivative spirit mistaken for a standalone rule; the site carries two further principle headings, neither of them context-free.

2. Why this matters to you

The intuition that more detail is better treats a note like an essay. An essay's unit is the argument; a note system's unit is the concept. Take how we work here as an example. If the useful part of an eight-hundred-word reflection is one criterion inside it, that criterion is hard to cite on its own; give it a note of its own and a link has a precise target.

We check with two questions. Can this note be linked on its own without losing its meaning? And in six months, on a different project, will it still be usable? This is our working method, not a general rule from the original site.

It also matters when to stop. The site's note "Evergreen notes should be atomic" says that fragmenting notes too far fragments the link network with them, and that where to draw the line is a matter of trade-offs with no clear test[1]Matuschak, A. Working Notes. The three disciplines checked against the primary site. Available at notes.andymatuschak.org, continuously updated; the pages carry no date of writing. This is an individual practitioner's working notes. There is no book and no paper. They are atomic, concept-oriented and densely linked, and appear as verbatim headings on the site. Attribution note: a fourth principle, “context-free”, circulates widely but was checked and does not exist on the original site. It is a common misreport.. If a concept split into pieces leaves each piece unable to say it completely, it should not be split further.

There is one position that inverts easily. Evergreen means matured, not written well the first time. Notes get there through revisits. Aiming for a perfect note at the outset tends to stop people going back to change it.