Let's reframe things here in part because it's highly illustrative of both the phrases as well as the specific question you raise.

Imagine Andy Matuschak reading Sonke Ahrens' How to Make Smart Notes (CreateSpace, 2017) and making notes on what he feels is important. As he reads, he does what is prescribed, namely, he restates the idea in his own words based on what he's read. In doing this he takes the idea of "evergreen" content from journalism settings (and later SEO settings) which he was familiar with and applies that name to what Ahrens called permanent notes to expound on his understanding of Ahrens! (An evergreen article in newspaper work is an article which was written for a particular recurring holiday, event, or story and is regular. Why spend huge amounts of staff time writing that truly original Valentine's day article? The broad stories about gifts to give and restaurants to visit really don't change from year to year. Just dust it off and reprint it, as readers are unlikely to have saved or remembered it and it becomes free re-purposable content.)

Of course, in rewriting this definition, Matuschak adds in some additional baggage for those who aren't carefully reading his work. He adds some additional emphasis on revisiting one's ideas and rewriting them over time, which is certainly fine, but I think the novice note maker puts too much emphasis on this portion thinking that each permanent or evergreen note must eventually become polished to perfection. In practice, most seasoned writers don't and won't do this. In fact, I suspect if you looked at Matuschak's note on evergreen notes, you'd find that it probably hasn't changed since the day he wrote it other than agglutinating links from other notes.

This doesn't mean that one can't modify or change their ideas over time, this is certainly useful and good, but I suspect that the majority aren't doing it the way that might be imagined by Matuschak's original statement or the way that his idea was picked up by the (niche) digital gardening community and spread primarily in the work of Maggie Appleton. It's some of this evolution of Matuschak's definition which bled into digital gardens, which have some overlap with zettelkasten and the note taking realms, which have muddied the waters. As a result, one should take it as general advice and apply it to their own situation, needs, and practice.

For those who use their own notes for writing, one will often mark their cards/notes to indicate that they've used those ideas in various projects so that they're not actively repeating themselves ad nauseum. Some of the additional tweaks one might make to their notes from a style or context specific perspective are also left to the editing portion rather than being done in the notes themselves. As a result of some of this, unless there is a dramatic flaw in a note, there isn't generally a lot of additional work one would come back to it to revise it. If it does require that sort of major revision, then perhaps the better method would be to make a new note and linking it to the original along with an explanation of the error. I typically wouldn't recommend polishing individual notes to some Plationic idea of perfection. Doing so is often just make-work which distracts from one's time which could be better spent doing additional reading or actual thinking. If you're going to do that sort of polishing work, do it at the end when you've got a longer piece of writing you're including your note in.

The real question now, is how are you personally going to define permanent notes, evergreen notes, or other related phrases like atomic notes? This practice is called by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren "coming to terms" with an author's work and is part of their analysis for how one should read a book to get the most out of it. I highly recommend reading How to Read a Book (Simon & Schuster, 1972 or Touchstone, 2011) as a companion to any of the usual note taking manuals.

If you want to continue the experiment on a better unified definition of permanent notes, evergreen notes, atomic notes, etc., you can find a pretty solid bibliography of note making, writing, and reading manuals to peruse at https://boffosocko.com/2024/01/18/note-taking-and-knowledge-management-resources-for-students/#Recommended%20reading.

While one could certainly go down the rabbit hole of reading all these resources, I would recommend only looking at one or two and spending your time working on actual practice. It's through practice that you're more likely to make actual progress on your own problems and questions.

reply to u/franrodalg at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1azoo9m/permanent_vs_evergreen_notes_am_i_thinking_about/

https://www.derrekchow.com/

Collaborating with Andy Matuschak on future of book/reading project BookBridge

https://notes.azlen.me/g3tibyfv/

Inspired by Andy Matuschak's site

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Ton Zijlstra</span> in Man at Knowledge Work – Interdependent Thoughts (<time class='dt-published'>05/26/2021 13:35:30</time>)</cite></small>

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Research_fellowship

Seeing this a bit late...

I'm sure fedwiki influenced me, but for whatever reason it wasn't top of mind—I was really thinking about the 2011-era Tweetie for iPad.

— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) September 9, 2022

While FedWiki's design may have influenced the card like design of Andy Matuschak's online notes, his inspiration for it was the 2011-era Tweetie app for iPad.

One might suggest that the freedom, flexibility, and customization of these systems is actually an unuseful time suck for many users which only encourages shiny object syndrome. From a design perspective, try starting out building a system that works for you before beginning on design for others. Research and looking at the user interfaces offered by the competition will helpful as well. Which are the most popular? fun to use? Why? What actual affordances do those interfaces and functionalities allow? are they truly productive?

Possibly more productive, what sorts of standards can you leverage to make people's pre-existing notes more useful? Can you take pre-existing stores of .txt or .md files and provide different views or perspectives on them? This will allow people to pick and choose which applications might work with their stores of data to provide different views or perspectives on them. Why reinvent a text editor or tools like Logseq or Obsidian when you can leverage the local stores of data to provide the sorts of services you're not seeing in the broader space? For example, on the "social media" side, there are existing solutions for taking your locally stored notes, putting them into the cloud and displaying them on the web, but the various steps are highly technical and require a relatively large amount of work and admin tax to maintain. A service that allows one to point at their local store of data and automatically host it on a website and keep it synced would be a major boon for the non-technical user.

Separately, Matuschak did not invent evergreen notes. The first clear cut instantiation I've seen in the literature is from Konrad Gessner in 1548, and honestly even his idea really stems from a longstanding tradition of working with commonplace sententiae preceding his work. (see https://hypothes.is/a/uEboYlOwEeykkotYs594LA) Matuschak simply applied the definition/idea of "evergreen" (meaning easily reusable) articles or content from journalism to describe his notes which could be reused in various contexts. (Example: Why rewrite an article on how to decorate and entertain for the holidays, when you can reuse the same article you've been publishing for years, perhaps along with some updated photos?) "Atomic" notes is another variation on this same theme, but is one which underlies the ability to re-use notes in combination with one or more other notes to generate new ideas.

https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

found by way of

Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V

One may notice that Niklas Luhmann's index within his zettelkasten is fantastically sparce. By this we might look at the index entry for "system" which links to only one card. For someone who spent a large portion of his life researching systems theory, this may seem fantastically bizarre.

However, it's not as as odd as one may think given the structure of his particular zettelkasten. The single reference gives an initial foothold into his slip box where shuffling through cards beyond that idea will reveal a number of cards closely related to the topic which subsequently follow it. Regular use and work with the system would have allowed Luhmann better memory with respect to its contents and the searching through threads of thought would have potentially sparked new ideas and threads. Thus he didn't need to spend the time and effort to highly index each individual card, he just needed a starting place and could follow the links from there. This tends to minimize the indexing work he needed to do regularly, but simultaneously makes it harder for the modern person who may wish to read or consult those notes.

Some of the difference here is the idea of top-down versus bottom-up construction. While thousands of his cards may have been tagged as "systems" or "systems theory", over time and with increased scale they would have become nearly useless as a construct. Instead, one may consider increasing levels of sub-topics, but these too may be generally useless with respect to (manual) search, so the better option is to only look at the smallest level of link (and/or their titles) which is only likely to link to 3-4 other locations outside of the card just before it. This greater specificity scales better over time on the part of the individual user who is broadly familiar with the system.

Alternatively, for those in shared digital spaces who may maintain public facing (potentially shared) notes (zettelkasten), such sparse indices may not be as functional for the readers of such notes. New readers entering such material generally without context, will feel lost or befuddled that they may need to read hundreds of cards to find and explore the sorts of ideas they're actively looking for. In these cases, more extensive indices, digital search, and improved user interfaces may be required to help new readers find their way into the corpus of another's notes.

Another related idea to that of digital, public, shared notes, is shared taxonomies. What sorts of word or words would one want to search for broadly to find the appropriate places? Certainly widely used systems like the Dewey Decimal System or the Universal Decimal Classification may be helpful for broadly crosslinking across systems, but this will take an additional level of work on the individual publishers.

Is or isn't it worthwhile to do this in practice? Is this make-work? Perhaps not in analog spaces, but what about the affordances in digital spaces which are generally more easily searched as a corpus.

As an experiment, attempt to explore Luhmann's Zettelkasten via an entryway into the index. Compare and contrast this with Andy Matuschak's notes which have some clever cross linking UI at the bottoms of the notes, but which are missing simple search functionality and have no tagging/indexing at all. Similarly look at W. Ross Ashby's system (both analog and digitized) and explore the different affordances of these two which are separately designed structures---the analog by Ashby himself, but the digital one by an institution after his death.

Marshall, in looking at your cards, I'm curious how easy/hard you feel it is to remember longer portions of full quotes like your H.L. Menken example using only spaced repetition? I usually find it far more taxing and not as long lasting as using other more classical mnemonic methods (method of loci/songlines).

Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I've found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I've yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

Groups in arts education rail against the loss of music, dance, and art in schools and indicate that it's important to a balanced education.

Why has no one embedded these learning tools, for yes they can be just that, into other spaces within classrooms? Indigenous educators over the millennia have done just this in passing on their societal and cultural knowledge. Why have we lost these teaching methods? Why don't we reintroduce them? How can classrooms and the tools within them become mnemonic media to assist both teachers and learners?

Perhaps we need to bring back examples of how to do these things at the higher levels? I've seen excercises in my daughter's grade school classrooms that bring art and manipulatives into the classroom as a base level, but are they being done specifically for these mnemonic reasons?

Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak have been working at creating a mnemonic medium for areas like quantum mechanics relying in part on spaced repetition. Why don't they go further and add in dance, movement, art, and music to aid in the process. This can be particularly useful for creating better neurodiverse outcomes as well. Education should be more multi-modal, more oral, and cease it's unending reliance on only literacy as it's sole tool.

How and where can we create a set of example exercises at various grade levels (similar to rites of knowledge initiation in Indigenous cultures, for lack of specific Western language) that embed all of these methods

Link to: - Ideas in The Extended Brain about movement, space, etc. - Nielsen/Matuschak mnemonic media work

https://words.jamoe.org/highlight-question-and-answer/

A somewhat disingenuous reframing of the Cornell notes method. They've given it a different name potentially for marketing purposes to sell in a book. At least HQ&A is a reasonable mnemonic for what the process is.

They do highlight the value of modality shift from reading to thinking about how to formulate a question and answer as a means of learning. They don't seem to know the name or broader value of the technique however.

This question technique is also highlighted in the work of Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen. Cross reference: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ and their quantum mechanics course experiments.

Nodes in a knowledge management system can be defined extensionally, rather than intensionally, through their backlinks and their respective context.

Bi-Directional links, or backlinks, only help define the node being linked to if the context in which the links occur is also provided.