2023-04-25
Substance over structure on note-taking
date-created:: 2023-04-24
Musings on note-taking on this digital garden
I should make the writing more organic and atomic à la Matuschak Evergreen Notes. /
Metadata
- Title: Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Tags: #note-taking
- URL: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes_should_be_atomic
Page Comment
- atomic note; atomicize; atomicization; Evergreen notes
Highlights & Notes
- Evergreen notes should be atomic It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing—but which, as much as possible, capture the entirety of that thing. This way, it’s easier to form connections across topics and contexts.
/ and less top-down organizational and taxonomic or with too much enumerating. The latter tendencies are perhaps out of an innate predilection for order and neatness, or even OCD, but I can feel they will end up obstructing thinking rather than foster it. Let thought run free and be expressed freely in notes scattered about, and links and backlinks will take care of connecting them.
For example, I should refrain from neatly creating hierarchical notes like this
| Dictionaries and thesauri
| ---- AHD5
| -------- issue of grammar found in an AHD5 definition
just for the purpose of writing about a seemingly quirky intransitive sense for discuss in AHD5. Instead, I should simply and directly create a note for the substantive issue of Absolute verbs 不明示受詞的「絕對」動詞, link it to the most obvious topic of Grammar to create at least one connection, and stop caring about whether higher-order categories of dictionaries or AHD5 should exist or how and where they should fit in.