Note Taking

On evergreen and atomic notes, 200-word note synopses and note management.

Cultivating and Connecting Using Modular Notes and Personal Memos

Principles

  • Rotation, to ensure the notes follow the 'evergreen' ambition, regularly review all notes starting from the oldest, aggregate, organize and add
  • Pruning and archiving
  • Evergreen notes
  • Write in your own words
  • Iterative crystallisation
  • Write introductions and conclusions

On Backlinking and Beyond

Notes should have an introduction and conclusion, then linking can allow the formation of arguments.

Automatic backlinking is not knowledge construction, it is a way to view data and should be grouped as such, like the graph, etc.

This is in resistance to the argument that backlinking can be harmful because costly in terms of the increasing cognitive load and the proliferating opportunity costs.

On published pages it should be possible to hide and annotate backlinks or maybe show them with some minimal context.

There are different needs for notes that document known facts for easy search in contrast to notes that aim to grow new knowledge, especially the knowledge that is new to the (human). However, this also seems correct in application to the knowledge that is new to the user.

Backlinks are a bad idea says this block post and some commentators disagree. It is interesting as a reflection of how to organize and structure knowledge under limitations.

A link to another note is much more useful if the authors explains why they are linking to it. For example, it is important to describe the type of the link relationship.

This project formalizes relationships between sources and is interesting as a way to describe and organize sources, in thinking, in writing and in storage. CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology


Backlinks