Do you take notes? Even if you don’t, I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Whether you currently take notes or not, or plan to start, I encourage you to read this article about “Evergreen Notes.” Take a look at what’s in it:
What will you learn?
- What are Evergreen Notes (and why are they green?…)
- Why note-taking is usually ineffective
- How to remember everything for a long time
- How to create a “second brain”
- How to implement Evergreen Notes into your life
🔎 What is usually the problem?
If you have ever started taking notes, especially with the ambitious goal of “effective knowledge storage”, you may have noticed that your notes are not producing the desired effect. And perhaps you have even experienced the “collector’s fallacy”, when notes begin to do more harm than good.
Most likely, you use notes as a jotting down of thoughts, and this turns into a disorganized storage. These notes often do not mean anything, especially in the long run. They are like fuel that the author writes and throws away to help him understand the current topic. This is one of the reasons why the practice of note-taking is usually ineffective.
These are called “fleeting notes”
Fleeting notes are valuable notes for temporarily supporting working memory in the process, but if our goal is to create a repository of our notes that will help us in the long run, increase our efficiency, and serve as a “second brain”, then these notes obviously cannot be the basis of our system.
However, we can still consider these notes as a contribution of random thoughts to the construction of “tidy thoughts,” which will be presented as “Evergreen Notes.”
📗 Evergreen Note… What is it?
_Evergreen notes is a note-taking concept that aims to make notes “long-term and effective”.
These notes evolve, connect with each other and contribute to different areas of your life, and together they form your “second brain”.
Evergreen notes:
- long-term
- tightly connected
- effective
- constantly evolving
The most important thing is that such notes will be “alive”. You closely monitor them and update or repeat them when necessary. As if you were taking care of plants in a garden. Imagine what would happen if you did not water and weed your most beautiful flowers in a flower bed for a whole year. I do not think that they would retain their former beauty. But this is usually done with notes, although they should not be lifeless. Below we will consider practices that will make your notes “Evergreen”.
⚛️ Atomicity
It is best to create notes that are dedicated to only one thing, but at the same time, they should be as comprehensive as possible. This way, it will be easier to establish connections between topics and contexts (note connections are very important in this concept).
This concept is very similar to the principle of separation of concerns in software engineering, which suggests that modules should be dedicated to only one topic, so that they can be easily reused.
📢 Conceptual Focus
It is best to organize your Evergreen notes by concept (rather than by author, book, event, project, topic, etc.). This way, you will discover connections between your resources as you update and add links to a note (again, Evergreen notes should be closely related)
Suppose you are reading a book on psychology, and of course you decide to make a separate note for it. Or even a separate note on a separate topic, following the principle of “atomicity”. Then you take another book on the same topics and create separate notes for it. But with this approach, knowledge does not accumulate, and your notes do not progress or grow. Your new thoughts about a topic do not merge with old ones to form a coherent whole: you just have a disparate set of notes about it, perhaps under different titles.
If we read two books on the same topic, we can easily connect our notes on them. But new connections tend to emerge where you least expect them. By organizing your notes by concept, you may discover unexpected connections between ideas that appear in completely different books. You may have never noticed that these books were related before.
Organizing by concept makes note-taking a little more difficult, but it has a benefit: when creating new notes, we need to find their place in the big picture. In this way, we explore part of our previous note-taking network, which may lead us to unexpected results.
🔗 Connectedness
Forcing ourselves to add lots of connections between our notes forces us to think more broadly about what other concepts might be connected to what we're thinking about.
Finding the right connections requires reading through old notes, so it's also an organic mechanism for periodically reviewing the notes we've written. This can lead to unexpected discoveries.
You don't have to refer to notes you've already written, you can leave "placeholders" that you'll come to later.
💫 Natural Structure
Let structure emerge naturally. By imposing it from the start, you prematurely limit what can emerge and artificially compress the subtle relationships between ideas.
Our filing systems, organizational structures, and libraries assume that hierarchical categories are the natural structure of the world. But often, items belong in many places. And items are related to other items in entirely different hierarchical categories.
Worse, by pre-sorting things into clearly defined categories, we inevitably blur their boundaries. Things don’t always fit together perfectly. Perhaps, once enough new ideas have accumulated, a new category will emerge… but its shape cannot be seen because everything is already sorted. And because everything is already sorted, further sorting requires breaking down the existing structure.
It’s better to let networks of related ideas form gradually, without labeling: let ideas and beliefs emerge naturally . Once you see the shape, you can begin to wonder about its character. That's why Evergreen Notes is a safe place to develop bold ideas.
✏️ Write for Yourself
Because Evergreen notes can be used as part of a public writing strategy, it’s tempting to “save time” by writing notes in a publishable format. This might mean providing all the information you need to understand an idea that’s a bit boring to you, self-censoring, adding lots of clarification, or putting a lot of effort into clarity. Many of these practices can be helpful to your own thought process—clearer writing usually means clearer thinking, for example. But I find that doing so adds significant overhead and effort to writing, often to the point of stagnation.
More specifically, this shows up as a common pattern of failure for me when I’m writing notes in explicit preparation for some public writing. I often try to do both at once. That is, I can write notes in an atomic style, but I try to write them as if they were sections in a larger essay or paper. Or even simpler: I try to write things with all the context and clear prose needed for an outsider to understand what I'm talking about. Then I often find that I can't write anything at all! It's better to write at a level where I can create something, and then use that as leverage to move up.
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