Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } so that the thinking accumulates.
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); } .
“Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”
Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, “lifehacking”-type frame, focused on answering questions like: “how should I organize my notes?”, “what kind of journal should I use?”, “how can I make it easy to capture snippets of things I read?”, etc.
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); } .
Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention
Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } , but the computerized component’s value lies specifically in dynamically scheduling and selecting questions to be reviewed. In some sense, the efficacy of a Spaced repetition memory system .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } comes from its power to program your attention (Programmable attention .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } ). Think: “{cron} for your mind.” ☉
Tinkered Thinking
Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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.
Double processing information for notes : Garden of Learning by Juhis
As I read discussions about note-taking and learning, I often run into complaints about how much time and effort it takes to make and maintain notes and how people wish they could end ...
OmniCanvas - Free Infinite Canvas Notes App
Free infinite canvas notes app for visual thinkers. Organize ideas spatially with drawing, linking, and collaboration.
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.
“Writing is Thinking”—an annotated twitter thread
“Writing is thinking” is my favorite expression for how to work in a company. This annotated thread explores the value of writing.
Konrad Hinsen's blog
A much cited essay by Bret Victor, "Explorable Explanations", argues for supporting and encouraging active reading in communicating ideas. Explanatory text should thus be complemented by interactive visualizations and computational demonstrations, allowing the reader to actively engage with the ideas. If you haven't read Victor's essay yet, please do so now, and then come back here. It's not very long. What I am going to discuss is a variation on Victor's proposal, and I won't repeat his well-presented arguments.
The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
However, recent work on augmenting reading largely focuses on making reading more efficient, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where people must rapidly make sense of research papers and other complex documents (Lo et al., 2024). These systems often aim to help readers skim, summarize, and synthesize large volumes of information in order to reduce cognitive effort and accelerate document- and corpus-level sensemaking at scale (Gu et al., 2025; Lo et al., 2024; Fok et al., 2023). At one extreme, the form of reading implicitly envisioned by these systems may resemble what we call “reading to discard”: extracting the essential, actionable informational core of a document as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that the rest can be swiftly tossed aside—much like we often process inbound mail. This motivates us to ask what scaffolding approaches might resist “reading to discard,” what alternative forms of reading we might scaffold, and what alternative views and values of reading might guide the conversation.
Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.
