Easy, evergreen notes grow a better future you
Some thoughts on how to take more useful notes
Updated March 9, 2021. Published January 5, 2021
“Such is the miraculous nature of memory and make-believe and hence the very essence of human consciousness that not only do forgetfulness and recollection go hand in hand they are in truth indispensable to each other.”
~Albert Murray, 1971
Like many of us, I spent some time at the start of the year looking for ways to improve my personal productivity. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. I’ve been on a long journey to find an approach that’s easy to keep up. I want to grow an evergreen collection of notes that’s easy to maintain and useful as a personal reference day-to-day and year-to-year.
In college, my friend Sherry took the most amazing notes. She was practically a stenographer and an early riser in the same morning classes I occasionally missed. Her notes were better than the lecture. She captured everything the professor said, underlined key points, and wrote important terms in all caps with definitions added in the margins. Whenever I missed a class, Sherry lent me her notes, and every time, they were as good as, if not better than, being there in person.
Those are the kind of notes I want to take. But I always fall short. My mind wanders. I miss details. For meetings where I present, I take terrible notes. And when I do take good, detailed notes, they retire to a OneNote notebook or folder on my hard drive, never really referenced. And say I want to make changes to my approach, I have to wonder, will I need to use a new app? Migrate a bunch of notes? Learn some new system? All this, so I can more easily take better notes.
Yet, this year, as I looked back, I had a stunning realization. It’s not my notes. It’s my approach. I’m taking notes to remember when I should take notes to forget.
The sunshine of the spotless mind
I read a lot about personal productivity. I read about someone who took notes for every important book or article they read, and in each note they captured their thoughts, responses, and key paragraphs and quotes. It was like a personal record and library of everything they'd learned. Taking notes in Instapaper or Kindle makes it easy to export digital marginalia into your notebook. But once there, it’s not easy to reference. For a talk at last year’s IA Conference, I took separate notes on books like Everyday IA and Living in Information as well as a host of other books and articles. But I don’t have a couple of notes that synthesize what I learned about IA across all of those sources.
Tiago Forte proposes another approach, PARA. PARA stands for Projects, Areas of responsibility, Reference, and Archive. In PARA you capture notes in four major areas: Projects in one folder, Areas of responsibility in another, Reference, and then Archive where old things move for "cold" storage. If you have more ephemeral project notes–like from a meeting or a list of project URLs, separating Project and Areas of responsibility notes from Reference notes separates current noise from long-term reference items.
The idea of a Reference section was also a concept that resonated with me from Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). The GTD idea is to process everything that comes in and anything you can’t do, delegate, or delete AND that you might want to reference later gets saved in a Reference section.
Each of these systems focuses on remembering things. Like Sherry's psychology notes, the idea is to capture what happens and save it where you can find it later. Only, that's not how I want to use my notes. These systems overcome forgetting, when, really, I want to forget almost everything.
I want to remember what I’ve learned, and I want to forget everything else.
Notes to remember should be evergreen
To optimize how you take notes, ask yourself this question: in five years, when you’re a bad ass, why do you reference your notes? What do you want to find? How do you want to find and use the information?
That’s the question Andy Matushak, inspired me to ask. A former R&D lead at Khan Academy, Andy publishes a public notebook built on the idea of what he calls evergreen notes. Evergreen notes “are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects”. This means you can refer to them again and again. Evergreen notes are evergreen because they remember what you learn.
When you focus on evergreen notes, you distinguish between ephemeral notes and evergreen notes. Ephemeral notes fade away while evergreen notes never fade. Notes from yesterday’s meeting, the decision log from a project… Though you need those notes while they’re relevant, you won’t refer to them to remember what you’ve learned. You should forget those ephemeral notes as soon as possible. With evergreen notes, you revisit and edit them again and again as you learn more information. I have an evergreen note on how stories affect people. It includes what I remember hearing over the years as well as information from three articles I just read, all synthesized and organized into my point of view on the subject. “How stories drive change” captures what I’ve learned.
When you take notes on things like books or articles or meetings, you probably won’t refer to them in the future. And when you do, each individual note is separated from similar information in other notes. You need ephemeral notes while they're relevant, during the project or while reading the book. After that, they should fade from memory, so you can focus on more evergreen knowledge. If those notes contain evergreen ideas, move those ideas from the ephemeral note and into an evergreen note.
It's not weird we hold on so tightly to notes about books and articles and meetings. When we learned how to take notes, we learned to take ephemeral notes to study for a test that would happen soon or so we could look back and see what we decided in a recent meeting. But those aren’t the types of notes you want to keep and reference years later. Sherry’s notes were for the test, not an evergreen summation of basic psychology.
Write your notes for future you
So you asked yourself the question: in five years, why do you reference your notes? What do you want to find, and how do you want to find and use the information?
n the future, I want to refer to my evergreen notes and pull out a POV, approach, or checklist for a thing I'm working on with my team, so we can deliver better work faster. I don’t want memories of what happened. Instead of notes about meetings and books, I want evergreen notes about what I know and think.
What notes won’t you refer to? Me, I won't refer back to notes from a book on workshops. But I will reference my approach to planning workshops. The notes you want to refer to in 5 years? Those are the notes you start now and let them grow over time.
Luckily, the move to evergreen notes doesn’t require new systems or apps. It means you start with the notes you’re taking right now, this week, and move evergreen info into evergreen notes, so you can delete the digital marginalia. It also doesn't add much effort. Evergreen notes are incremental. In the example I posted, “Stories drive change”, I’ve revisited that note several times over the past month as I learned something new.
As you learn about a topic, you summarize it and add new learnings from things you read. A drop here, a drop there. Over time, the note becomes more and more evergreen. More and more useful. I started, “Stories drive change”, with a couple sentences. Now it’s a taxonomy of types of change and key story structures needed to support those types of change. That’s a bad ass note, and with no lock-in. If I change how I write notes or the app I use, this note will still be evergreen.
Start in 5-minutes with two, easy steps
To get started, define a loose, starting point taxonomy for your notes. Sounds big and difficult, but it’s really not. Mine is four kinds of notes:
notes that log my day
notes about projects
evergreen summaries, and
other stuff.
This is fast and loose and easy to change if I want to add or remove categories later. What types of notes do you want to refer to in the future? Your taxonomy starts and doesn’t need to be perfect. As time passes, you know your taxonomy will evolve.
Step two? Start your first evergreen note. Sometime this week, maybe today, you will answer a question relevant to your field with a specific perspective. Write that down. That’s where it starts.
Lastly, and this is my selfish ask, I'd love to see your notes and taxonomies. I’ve learned a ton reading others like Jorge Arango, Thomas Vander Wal, Andy Matushak, Maggie Appleton, and Joshwin Greene as well as the note-taking communities that have emerged around apps like Obsidian, Evernote, and Roam. It’d be great to see your set-ups on Twitter. (Follow me @austingovella.)
More and more I want an evergreen memory that matches my goals instead of one that follows a note-taking tradition I learned 30 years ago to help study for a psychology final. With age and experience, my time horizon moves farther into the future, and evergreen notes will still be useful when I get there.
Anyway…
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