Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate

Evergreen notes

Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } .

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the authors achieve meaningful creative work: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); }

Sense of abundance

Expansive, curious, open, unfearful, unhurried. The opposite of Scarcity mindset .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } .

The Future of Text

We are a community dedicated to working on how we can better develop text to augment our capabilities and we invite you to join us. We believe that the potential of richly interactive text to truly augment how we think & communicate is massive. Text after all, is externalized symbols we can interact with to extend our mind’s reach. Therefore text is not just a medium, it is also a tool for thought, and we are looking Beyond Visual Range.

supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe

A recent  NYT piece  argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.

reMarkable: The Paper Tablets for Focused Work

Experience the power of focused work. reMarkable’s paper tablets and accessories provide a dedicated space for your notes, documents, and ideas, free from notifications. Reclaim your attention now.

On Writing #3

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management — Unattributed

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?...

Note-ifying all the things (with Boris Mann)

Conversation about note-taking, the overwhelm of tools, and future possibilities. (shortlink:…

What does it really mean to have a moment of insight? | Psyche Notes to Self

From art to science to love, the moment of insight happens when we see a likeness between different things

Writing Is Thinking

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…

A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts

Recent studies suggest that tools such as ChatGPT make our brains less active and our writing less original.

Ivo Velitchkov on Twitter / X

Just took the survey of @remarkablepaper I've been using it for years now, and I still miss three basic things:1. Export of highlights from PDF and EPUB2. Links between notes and related to that:3. Persistent IDs of every object (note, notebook, folder, tag) so that they…— Ivo Velitchkov (@kvistgaard) April 12, 2024

How I Write Blog Posts with Obsidian — Unattributed

You've probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowl...