Work in progress
Literature notes
Fleeting notes
Related to
Branches
Overall, Andy’s system goes something as follows:
- Push possible reading material to a reading inbox. Reliably drain this queue, deciding to either toss the source, skim it, read it full (and take notes), or place it elsewhere.
- Have a place to write daily notes. This is a local dumping ground for the 24 hour period; any logging, scratch work, fleeting ideas, etc are to be put here.
- As things come up, whether they are fleeting notes, reading notes, or whatever, push these to a writing inbox. This queue is reliably drained, turning partially written material into evergreen notes or deleting the note.
- During the process of creating durable notes, add them to outlines so they can be easily used later for writing (while providing nice, complete, global overviews of topics where the notes come together to form something more).
Additionally,
- Keep literature notes separate. If taking notes while reading material, keep them somewhat brief, lightweight observations. You can keep a summary of notes or whatever else in that document for reference, but the main goal is to let the bulk of the value be soaked up in evergreen notes and integrated into our knowledge web as a series of atomic ideas.
- Write about what you read. Take light notes on paper or make notes of stand-out paragraphs while reading. In theory, these could also be more full processing pages like this one. Then you iteratively turn these notes and ideas into evergreen notes by finding ways to interpret the material and link it into your current web of concepts and ideas.
- Zettels can be titled with a question. Want the note be have an inquisitive topic, maybe one you don’t have the answer to? Put the question in the title. Can be an argument of sorts, where you argue multiple sides of the point.