Evergreen Notes

Evergreen note taking is a style of note taking associated with networked though. Evergreen notes, like an evergreen tree, are ‘designed’ to accumulate usefulness over time

Andy Matuschak posits that evergreen notes have 4 properties

1. Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented

2. Evergreen notes should be densely linked

3. Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies

4. Evergreen notes should be atomic

For me Evergreen Notes evolve from a loose 4 stage process

1. seedlings

   • the brain dump stage

2. budding

   • sense is being made out of the brain dump and a structure is emerging

3. evergreen

   • well on its way to being a true Evergreen Note and at a stage where it could be understood by the outside world

4. acorn

   • blank placeholder pages with no information that may one day grow into an evergreen or maybe never sprout

It seems to me that for a note to get to anevergreen it needs to be a bit of a [volunteer tomato](“In a garden, you pull everything up. Sometimes a stray vine just keeps coming back. It volunteers. That’s really why you, Quentin, you just keep coming.”). A note that just keeps coming back to you, it sticks in your brain almost as if it’s volunteering.