04. 🗃️ Notes & Writing

The second map in the vault and the one with the most history in it. Four notes systems came before this one, and each rebuild began on the week a piece of writing got hard. This map is where I keep what I finally concluded about that: the notes are for the writing, and the writing is for finding out what I think.

It started the day I finished Matuschak's pages and has been tidied twice, never restructured. That is the rule.

🧭 The Atlas

The tired builder

• 💎 A system I keep rebuilding is a system I am not using: the claim I avoided for five years. It came out of 📕 How to Take Smart Notes, which I read at the end of rebuild number four and which ended it.
• 💎 An idea is found by what it connects to and not by where it is filed: why the folders of 2022 were never going to be right.

What a good note is

• 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source: the test. Dad's notebooks pass it.
• 💎 Notes should be written for the person who has forgotten everything: future me is a stranger with my handwriting.
• 💎 Forgetting is fastest right after learning: a seed, and the reason a literature note gets written within the week or not at all.

Writing

• 💎 Writing is how I find out whether I understand: Bacon's exact man, four centuries early.
• 💎 Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style: cut the first paragraph, then ask what I meant.
• 💎 An issue is three notes that already agree with each other: why the newsletter stopped being a blank page in March. The procedure is 🧭 Newsletter issue from three notes.

🔗 Connected MOCs

• 03. 🏁 Finishing & Habits: the 300 words that feed all of this.
• 01. 🔁 Systems & Feedback: most of what the notes are about.
• Rules for this vault: the one page that keeps me from building a sixth.

❓ Open question

If the itch list has nineteen items and I want none of them any more, was the urge to rebuild ever about the tool at all, or was it only ever the feeling of a hard paragraph looking for somewhere else to go? I think I know. I would like one more hard year of evidence before I call it settled.