Work in progress
Literature notes
Fleeting notes
Related to
Branches
reference:
Andy suggests writing Evergreen notes as you read. There are a few nuances here, however. Firstly, it can be distracting to switch back and forth between reading and taking notes. Instead, make markings of interesting passages or write simple thoughts on paper or a temporary document while reading. These can be pushed very quickly to the writing inbox, where it’s okay that we have some temporarily incomplete notes. These notes/remarks, however, should be enough to give you the proper context when reviewing and remind you why that thing was particularly salient.
How this collection of reading notes gets refined can vary. Andy suggests taking a big picture view of the ideas presented in the reading notes, and then clustering them into logical piles. A loose process from here:
- Write a broad note capturing the big idea of one of the clusters
- Break this note up into fine grained notes, focusing more on the individual atomic ideas/concepts within the cluster
- Connect these new atomic ideas into the system. Search for relevant past notes. Link with old notes and merge new content in as necessary.
- Iterate on the remaining notes in the cluster using the information gained integrating the last note into the system. Use what you learned from that interaction to update other temp notes or remove those that aren’t necessary.