Andy Matuschak has developed a conceptual framework and practice for making notes called Evergreen notes. It’s (primarily, albeit loosely) this concept around which I’m starting to develop my own notes here.

Evergreen notes have a couple core attributes:

  1. Atomicity
  2. Concept-orientation
  3. Dense-linkage
  4. Self-directed

In addition to those, there are some key principles for the process of evergreen note-making:

  1. Write for yourself
  2. Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies (I really just love the way this is phrased, though it is often shortened in my own mind as “ontology over taxonomy”)