Five years of evergreen notes by Andy Matuschak

#literature #seedling

Highlights

I could start writing an essay before I totally understand it.

Goal: a place to gather ideas over time and where they evolve with my thinking on topics until I'm ready to synthesize them into a meaningful whole.

Daily notebook for scratchwork -> develop a sharp note on an idea

Make a note atomic, conceptual, and evergreen + add links to other notes.

You can share a note to enliven discussions.

The downsides of all this is maintenance burden and a kind of “conceptual debt”.

Keep old notes that could be useful in the future.

Consider maintaining the following taxonomy of writing:

  1. Major essays - Long-term writing projects that could begin with a question and about a major issue you have very few inklings with. These are questions or projects you are sure you want to understand deeply.
  2. Monthly essays - Higher stakes and higher fidelity than working notes but less demanding than major essays.
  3. Working notes

Use monthly essays to develop ideas. With monthly essays, preparatory notes may feel less necessary. These essays are also generally more lively, immediate, and true.

As you become a confident writer, the benefits of your working notes will decline, while their maintenance cost could start rising as they accumulate.

You could look at note-writing as training that you could eventually outgrow.

Note-writing lacks a strong emotional context, because I'm just preparing notes for an unknown future use. It could eventually feel like a duty.

To add emotional context in my working notes, I need to know that they're being read and that I could use them when engaging with others.

When you associate actions with a specific live project, what you do responds to that project and you have a stronger emotional context.

Publishing working adds more emotional burden that could distract the already hard work of grappling with an idea. It's better to think about my reader when I already have a stronger handle of an idea.

Reward yourself around producing major essays and projects; not notes. Notes should just be stepping stones to get to the big projects.

Write the notes for yourself. Unless you already understand the topic well.

When notes are public, their staleness becomes a bigger problem.

Unupdated notes can subtly pollute the environment.

Perhaps it's best to not publicize notes, particularly those that easily change.

Write evergreen notes about your own ideas or how to develop those ideas alongside the ideas of others.

Write spaced repetition prompts to internalize other's ideas or knowledge about the outside world.

When reading a book, ensure you understand its main ideas by writing spaced repetition prompts. Then connect these to your own ideas through evergreen note-writing.

Integrate spaced repetition prompts into notes to support fluidity switching. Do this by converting your note into a prompt.

Allow yourself to return naturally to notes. Use emotional connection. Rekindled interest does not happen on a whim.

To avoid th overhead of note-taking, you could avoid it altogether, specifically maintaining clean notes. An alternative to note-taking is developing ideas directly in stream-of-consciousness scratchwork (journal? blog?) that could still meaningfully accumulate over time.

I don’t care about notes for the sake of notes: my aim is a powerful context for thinking. I wanted to create an environment where I could gather my ideas over time, where those scraps could accumulate and evolve with my thinking on the topic, until I could synthesize it into some meaningful whole.

I still keep a daily notebook with lots of scratchwork. But when I stumble on something juicy, I try to write a sharp note about that one claim, question, or idea.

The aim is to make each note clear enough to stand on its own, but I fill them with links to other small notes, so I can move around quickly and see how my ideas relate.

accumulating and improving the notes over time, individually and as a network.

Divergence and maintenance in notes

you develop your ideas on a topic over months or years, you can draw upon, and extend, strong foundations. And because the notes are densely linked, when you improve one note, there’s a sense in which you improve all the nearby notes in the network.

The downsides of all this is maintenance burden and a kind of “conceptual debt”.

The old notes have an air of staleness to them which makes me unenthusiastic about revisiting them. At the same time, I don’t like the idea of just throwing them out: I’m sure I’ll return to this topic someday, and there’s plenty of material in the notes

Notes as scaffolding

Shortly after I started my note-writing practice, I began publishing monthly essays for my patrons. This created another context for writing and thinking, with higher stakes and higher fidelity than my working notes, but still much less demanding than my more serious major articles.

When I started, I needed scaffolding to develop ideas beyond a limited scope. Now I routinely develop new ideas directly in the context of an essay I’m writing. Preparatory notes often feel less necessary. And if I can develop the ideas directly in an essay, I certainly want to do so: the work will generally be more lively, immediate, true.

Like all creative tools, my note-writing practice imposes both costs and benefits. As I become a more confident writer, its marginal benefits do seem to have declined. And as I accumulate more notes—more to link and maintain—I do feel the cost rising somewhat. Perhaps I’ll look back on this note-writing system as a “training” exoskeleton of sorts, one which I’ll someday have fully outgrown. I’ll still be grateful to have had it as a stepping stone.

Notes as public artifacts

I wanted to be able to share pointers to individual notes as a way to quickly enrich discussion.

One problem with my note-writing practice is that it often lacks a strong emotional context. When I’m squirreling away material for some abstract unknown future, rather than responding to the needs of some specific live project, the experience can feel dull and lifeless. Worse: it can feel like a duty—something I “should” do, rather than something I’m excited to do. But if I know that others will read even my working notes, before they’re subsumed into some more coherent project, that can create a meaningful creative context. That context becomes even stronger when I have particular people or conversations in mind.

a socially-motivated context—especially a totally public one—isn’t ideal for rough working notes. If I’m grappling with a fragile idea, that’s already hard enough. I don’t want to be simultaneously modeling and second-guessing what my hypothetical reader will think. That’s its own creative challenge, one better addressed when I have a stronger handle on the material myself. And I don’t want to reward myself too much for working notes. I want to orient myself around producing major essays and projects; the notes are just stepping stones to get there. So, practically speaking, when writing my working notes, I don’t draw much on the social-emotional connection. I pretend the notes are just for me, unless the idea is something I already understand pretty well.

The public availability of my notes makes staleness a bigger problem.

if I don’t update those old notes, they’ll subtly pollute the information environment, and people won’t get the benefit of my best work; if I do update them, I’m signing myself up for chores. One simple half-solution would be to stick a notice banner across all the relevant notes. Unsatisfying.

Notes and spaced repetition

This unorthodox note-writing practice lives alongside my unorthodox spaced repetition practice.

Each practice creates a powerful context for honing my understanding, and each aims to combat the tides of forgetting as I work over years. Each practice also has an associated medium—the evergreen note and the spaced repetition prompt—but those two mediums have very different grains.

Evergreen notes are prose, and even though I try to make each note focused on a single idea, they’re better suited for longer, more holistic discussions. Spaced repetition prompts are more suited to laser-focusing on a single detail. A collection of prompts can dissect a complex system, but only once I understand it quite well—and sometimes that understanding can only come through prose writing. The two practices are focused on different outcomes, too: the evergreen notes make ideas available in prose for future writing and thinking; spaced repetition prompts make ideas available in memory for those future tasks. The latter is more ideal—but it’s more costly, and doesn’t work as well when the ideas aren’t so precise.

One useful guiding heuristic has emerged: I write evergreen notes mostly about my own ideas, or to develop the relationship between others’ ideas and my own; I write spaced repetition prompts mostly to internalize others’ ideas, or knowledge about the world.

Of course, the lines here are blurred. When I sit down with a book, I’ll often begin by ensuring I understand what the author means; then I’ll find myself making connections to my own ideas, shifting away from what the author intends for a while. This isn’t a one-way movement: the two modes will often interleave. To support fluidity switching stances, I’ve integrated spaced repetition prompts into my notes, so that I can jot a handful of prompts alongside paragraphs of extended prose.

The integrated note/prompt surface makes my coexistent practices a bit more natural, but I notice there’s still a significant amount of duplicated work. I’ll often use prose writing to figure out exactly what I think an author means by a certain line of argument, then I’ll turn that conclusion into a few spaced repetition prompts. In many cases, this is basically just busywork: writing the prompts is a matter of translating my prose sentences into “prompt-speak”, almost a kind of style transfer. The resulting duplicative text adds line noise to my notes and makes them less usable. Observations like this make me enthusiastic about an “idea-centric” memory system in which items are prose insights-in-context, and practice tasks are adaptively generated from those highlights.

One last collision between note-writing systems and spaced repetition systems is the possibility of somehow placing the notes themselves on a spaced repetition schedule. I was quite enthusiastic about this a few years ago, but I’ve tried many permutations of this idea without compelling results. For instance, perhaps my environment should surface random notes from the past each day, to foster serendipity. Or perhaps, if I have some spark of an idea but I don’t know what to do with it, I should make it reappear a month later. On a couple occasions this has led to generative writing sessions, but the rest of the time it’s just seemed like noise. The key issue here seems to be emotional connection: I get interested in a topic, so I write a note… but when it’s algorithmically resurfaced, I’m probably thinking about something else, and that old note doesn’t seem meaningful. I’ll often find myself returning again and again to old topics, but that rekindled interest doesn’t happen on command.

Future prospects

I don’t need my writing assistant to polish the prose in my working notes: I’ll develop those ideas further through the process of writing them into a coherent whole. Basic issues of language, grammar, and syntax are not bottlenecks for me. I don’t need related notes to be automatically resurfaced: search and links have worked fine for me, and I rarely notice myself “losing” notes. I don’t need meeting or book summary generation in my notes: writing a précis is an important part of how I solidify my understanding. I don’t need help shifting the tone of my language around.

So, where might I benefit from help?

One angle would be to avoid writing these “evergreen notes” at all. If I could develop ideas directly in stream-of-consciousness scratchwork, but they could still meaningfully accumulate over time, maybe I could avoid the overhead involved in creating and maintaining “clean” notes.

Ideally, I could ramble about the topic in an unstructured format, but with quick and legible handles back to the “good stuff”. I’d like to be able to incrementally refine those rough ideas over time, without the ceremony of “creating and naming a note”.

Another angle is to notice that I get stuck a lot when writing. Often the approach I’m taking isn’t working, but I don’t have the meta-cognitive wherewithal to step back and choose a different strategy. Worse, I often fail to even notice that I’m in this situation when I’m in it. In the moment, it just feels like aversion and dissatisfaction. What’s interesting here is that if I complain about my stuckness to creative peers, the conversation almost always leads me out of the swamp, usually through utterly familiar suggestions. Is it possible to create a writing assistant which can do something similar, and which could even notice when I’m stuck in this way—without it feeling like Clippy?

It’s hard to search for something when you don’t know it exists, or that you should search for it. I’d be grateful for a tool which watches my reading and writing, notices my mind’s grasping frontier, and surfaces keen suggestions.

References

Matuschak, Andy. “Five Years of Evergreen Notes | Andy Matuschak.” Patreon, 21 Aug. 2024, https://www.patreon.com/posts/five-years-of-109216672.