🌱Evergreen notes

Most note-taking is collecting, and collecting feels like progress and adds up to nothing. Notes are worth keeping only if they are written to develop and accumulate across projects. For that each note should hold one idea, be organised around a concept and not around the book it came from, link densely to the others, and be written in your own words for your own later use. The measure is not better notes but better thinking.

• Not an article. A small web of his own working notes, each a paragraph or two with a sentence for a title, linking to the others. The pages carry no date; I have filed it under 2020, when the notes were being passed around.
• Clipped on Friday 10 January with the web clipper, five days into the ninety. It landed in the inbox as a wall of text with the links stripped.
• On Saturday morning at Lantern Coffee I read the original pages properly and wrote the note by hand. This is the first thing in the vault that was clipped and then actually processed, which is the reason it is here as an example to myself.
• In system three the clipper was a way of not reading. I had 340 clippings and no notes on any of them.
• He practises what the notes say. That is rarer than the advice.
• Clipping is tasting and a note is digesting, which is 🏛️ Francis Bacon's distinction and four hundred years older than the web: 💬 Some books are to be tasted. Nothing is quoted from Matuschak's pages.