Evergreen Notes

What is Evergreen Note?

Evergreen notes are a specific way of taking notes that focus on building a cumulative and interconnected knowledge base. Unlike traditional notes that are often project-specific or time-sensitive, evergreen notes are designed to be relevant and valuable over time.

• They are not static documents. You can update and refine them as you learn more or encounter new information. This ensures that your notes remain accurate and relevant.

• They are designed to be long-lasting. This means using a format that is easy to store and access, even after many years.

• They are not just a repository of information but also a tool for thinking and learning. You can use them to generate new ideas, solve problems, and make decisions.

It could be consider the same or similar to Zettelkasten.

Haikal Kushahrin

Evergreen notes is a note-taking method coined by Andy Matuschak, inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.¹

Maggie Appleton

Evergreen notes should be:

• Atomic: Capture one single idea concisely & in its entirety. This allows you to reuse, remix, and recontextualise notes across projects.

• Densely-linked: Connect your notes through organic associations, rather than heirarchical structures.

• Imperative & Declarative Titles: Make titles that are statements, clear instructions, commands, orders, or directions.

• Concept-oriented: Create notes based around concepts and big ideas, rather than specific books, articles, events, and media.²

Haikal Kushahrin

By writing evergreen notes, writing an article is more like editing than composing. Instead of writing ideas from your head, you arrange your notes into an argument. It’s easy to write when all your ideas are already written in front of you.¹

Wikipedia

In botany, an evergreen is a plant which has foliage that remains green and functional through more than one growing season. This contrasts with deciduous plants, which lose their foliage completely during the winter or dry season.³

Write for yourself

Andy Matuschak

When it’s a topic I understand well, I can write notes for both myself and an audience simultaneously. But that sometimes produces the false impression that I can pull this off all the time! To avoid that false impression, I’ll write notes for myself “by default,” and only “opt into” writing notes for an audience explicitly.⁴

Andy Matuschak

Because Evergreen notes can be used as part of a strategy for writing public work, it’s tempting to “save time” by writing notes in publishable form. That might mean providing all the necessary background to understand some (boring to you) idea, or self-censoring, or adding lots of qualifiers, or spending lots of effort on clarity. … this manifests as a common failure mode for me when I’m writing notes as part of explicit preparation for some public writing. I’ll often try to do both jobs at once. That is, I might be writing atomic-style notes but I try to write them as if they’re sections in a larger essay or work. … I try to write things with all the context and clear prose needed for an outsider to understand what I’m talking about. Then I often find that I can’t write anything at all! Better to write at a level where I can produce something, then use that to lever myself upward.⁴

Andy Matuschak

When a topic is hard enough to distill on its own, the extra cognitive load of considering a reader overwhelms me.⁴

Sascha

I don’t think it is possible to write notes in public without any alteration from how you write when you know that those notes won’t go public.⁵

Atomic Note

Andy Matuschak

It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing—but which, as much as possible, capture the entirely of that thing. This way, it’s easier to form connections across topics and contexts. If your notes are too broad, you might not notice when you encounter some new idea about one of the notions contained within, and links to that note will be muddied. If your notes are too fragmented, you’ll also fragment your link network, which may make it harder to see certain connections.⁶

Andy Matuschak

The notion is quite similar to the software engineering principle of separation of concerns, which suggests that modules should only be ‘about’ one thing, so that they’re more easily reusable.⁶

Being “atomic” doesn’t mean it has to be in separate note. Just like in coding, you could put more than one methods or functions that work together in the same file.

Luciano Strika

Each separate note could be replaced with a new paragraph or header in a big note in a system … Then I could maintain an “outline” folder for essays-to-be, where they could grow organically. This may start with my small ‘how to make a static site and host it on the web’ and grow slowly from there, as a growing place for posts before I publish them on my actual blog.⁷

You don’t have to refactor the note right away. You can take note normally, and then come back to see if part of it should be in its own note or not.

Interconnected Links

Luciano Strika

I prefer to take a slightly monolithic approach, where I write big notes of 500-1000 lines or more for a single topic, and make each atomic idea a paragraph or subheading. If necessary, I can then just link to headings through their id instead of the whole note … I’d rather be able to review a whole subject in a few minutes by reading a single page instead of opening a hundred tabs every time.⁸

Luciano Strika

If I was more writing or content-generation oriented instead of writing notes for future search, making more atomic notes and linking them could be better.⁸

Discovery

Andy Matuschak

When writing new notes, we have to find where they fit into the whole. So we explore some part of our prior web of notes, which may lead us somewhere unexpected.⁹

Backlinks

Andy Matuschak

Systems which display backlinks to a node permit a new behavior: you can define a new node extensionally (rather than intentionally) by simply linking to it from many other nodes—even before it has any content. … This effect requires Contextual backlinks: a simple list of backlinks won’t implicitly define a node very effectively. You need to be able to see the context around the backlink to understand what’s being implied.¹⁰

Andy Matuschak

A contextual backlink displays not only a reference from another location, but the specific context around that reference—for instance, the page of a book or the referencing paragraph.¹¹

Similarity to Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

The concept of the evergreen note itself is like a concept of Minimal Viable Product (MVP), where the public notes are represents the most basic version of a product that has enough features to satisfy early customers.

The idea is to quickly build, measure, and learn. You build the MVP and deliver it to users. Then you measure how users interact with the product, what they like, what they don’t like, what features they use the most, and so on. From this, you learn what needs to be improved, added, or removed, and you iterate on the product based on these learnings.

Now, replace the “product” to “evergreen note” and “users” to “yourself”, that sound just like what evergreen note is.

See also

• Digital Garden
• Differences between Evergreen Notes and Digital Garden
• How to Name Your Evergreen Notes

References