https://old.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1gkdw4m/hidden_flaws_i_found_with_the_zettelkasten_system/

Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

intelligence department!!!

subtlety in definition of "mere note-book" versus card index

Kaiser doesn't give a strong definition of the difference between notes (here taking on a fleeting sort of definition), and notes indexed and arranged, but he gives it a powerful sounding name and implies that there is useful power within the practice of doing so.

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/

Choosing an external system for knowledge keeping and production forces the learner into a deliberate practice and confronts them with their lack of understanding. This is a large part of the underlying value not only of the zettelkasten, but of the use of a commonplace book which Benjamin Franklin was getting at when recommending that one "read with a pen in your hand". The external system also creates a modality shift from reading to writing by way of thinking which further underlines the value.

What other building blocks are present in addition to: - modality shift - deliberate practice - confrontation of lack of understanding

Are there other systems that do all of these as well as others simultaneously?

link to Franklin quote: https://hypothes.is/a/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA

I like that she's explicit about not migrating over all of one's highlights and annotations after the fact. Few people focus on this piece which is highly important and many beginners fall trap to thinking that they need to write down, save, and link everything.

What if the initial exercise of making the fleeting note was enough to have a baseline knowledge of a thing that really isn't going to be used again? Save the time and effort for the really important ideas. Build these.

An annotation like 2+2=4 is useful in 2nd grade and will be remembered/used for your lifetime. It's so ubiquitously commonplace that it doesn't need to be commonplaced into your zettelkasten. Similarly for basic ideas that anyone in a particular sub-field will already know. Delve deeper for building true insights.

This is related to the idea of collector's fallacy, but is subtly different from the usual framing. It has to do with focus against the commonplace.

Sönke Ahrens' Concept of "Permanent Notes" in a Zettelkasten is Completely False

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6jt7SPbhMs

One snippet of brief insight which he could have built upon, but instead he sandwiches it in multiple shills for his book, shills for his newsletter, and several heaping servings of zettelkasten cultish religion.

sigh

Given the presentation here, one wonders how long Scott spent looking through the main portion of Luhmann's ZK to verify that, in fact, that section did not appear. It's nice that he found the bilbliography card related to the footnote, but I don't see enough evidence for deep search to indicate that it might not actually exist somewhere. I also know from experience that Scott doesn't have enough strength in German to potentially pull off such a search, particularly given two different translators of Luhmann's German into English. It may have been the case that Scott missed it.

The better example would have been to use Goitein whose writing output far exceeded that of Luhmann with a fraction of the cards.

reply to u/Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/knowledge_that_is_excluded_from_synthesis/

What is your purpose/need/desire to turn all this material into individual zettels or atomic ideas? If you've read the material, taken some literature notes, and reviewed them a bit, don't you broadly now know and understand the methodology? If this is the point and you might only need your notes/outline to review occasionally, then there's nothing else you need to do. If you're comparing other similar methodologies and comparing and contrasting them, then perhaps it's worth breaking some of them out into their own zettels to connect to other things you're working on. Perhaps you're going to write your own book on the topic? Then having better notes on the subject is worthwhile. If you don't have a good reason or gut feeling for why you would want or need to do it, taking hundreds of notes from a book and splitting them all into interconnected atomic notes is solely busy work.

It's completely acceptable to just keep your jumble of literature notes next to your bibliographic entry for potential future reference or quick review if necessary. Perhaps you've gotten everything you need from this source without creating any permanent notes? Or maybe only one or two of the hundreds are actually valuable to your potential long term goals?<br /> It's really only the material you feel that is relevant to your longer term goals, research, and synthesis needs that's worthwhile breaking out into permanent notes/zettels.

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5lr0mz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Just as Adler and Van Doren (1972) suggest that most books are only worth a quick inspectional read and fewer are worth a deeper, analytical read, most (fleeting) notes, highlights, and annotations you make are only worth their quick scribble while vanishingly few others are worthy of greater expansion and permanent note status. You might also find by extension that some of the most valuable work you'll do is syntopical reading and the creation of high value syntopical notes which you can weave into folgezettel (sequences of notes) that generate new knowledge.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything needs to be a perfect, permanent note. If you're distilling and writing one or two good permanent notes a day, you're killing it; the rest is just sour mash.

As ever, practice to see what works best for your needs.

Watch the scale and scope of what you're doing. If you read a book and make a hundred highlights and small notes, DO NOT attempt to turn all of these into permanent notes. You might fell like that is the thing to do, but resist it. A large portion are small things or potentially useful facts that you'll likely never use again or would easily remember, particularly once you've read a whole book.

Find the much smaller subset (5-10% or less of the overall total of notes and highlights as a ballpark rule of thumb) of the most interesting and potentially long term useful ones, and turn those into your permanent notes. Anything beyond this is sure to cause overwhelm. Also don't think that your permanent notes need to be spectacular, awesome, or even bordering on "perfect". They just need to be useful enough for you.

If you own the books or keep your brief notes and highlights written down and need them in the future, you'll still have those to search/find and do something with later as a backstop just in case.

reply to u/PumpkinPines at tk

Your 1chapter1note idea is essentially what Ahrens called a "literature note" for your lecture. Many of the things you write down you'll either absorb or remember over time as you learn and you won't think twice about them. However there may be one or two interesting snippets you put into your lecture notes that are really intriguing to you and those you'll want to excerpt and expand on as more fleshed out "permanent notes" which will be the zettels in your zettelkasten. Over time these may grow into projects, papers, articles, a book, or other more explicit content.

For more on this idea, try these recent discussions * https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yf1e8j/help_a_newbie_difference_between_literature_notes/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/

A common make-work mistake is that everyone seems to think that they need to take each scrap they write down into some sort of "perfect" permanent note. Don't do this. You'll only exhaust yourself and die by zettelkasten.

The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

reply to u/noobinPython at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12rfku6/how_has_the_zettelkasten_system_changed_the_way/

Historically there is the popular idea of a waste book, which originally comes from double entry accounting, in which one might keep quick scribbled notes and ephemera. Upon reaching a quiet space for work and reflection one would then transcribe all the most important ideas into a more permanent place in their commonplace book or zettelkasten. I suspect this historical practice is part of where Ahrens came up with the often used terms "fleeting notes" and "permanent notes" which serve the same purpose.

I follow this practice and either have a small pocket notebook (usually a small Field Notes) or an index card at hand for writing things down throughout the day. Then every evening or every few days at worst, I transcribe/rewrite the idea.

As examples, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books were ultimately published and were highly influential. Isaac Newton developed his version of the Calculus in his waste book.

Keeping one's fleeting notes separate from their permanent notes can be useful for managing the idea of clutter.

Luhmann generally did this by keeping things in different boxes. Modern academics may use different digital applications (Zotero/Obsidian, Hypothes.is/Zettlr, etc.as examples) for each as long as there is some reasonable dovetail between the two for data transfer when necessary.

a subtle catch about Ahrens' terminology

reply to u/sscheper at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10o4jnl/comment/j6ii64d/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Is this about as close as Scott Scheper comes to recommending taking Cornell Notes?!? 😂

Let's be honest that this is roughly what this (and Bibcards) ultimately is. You take some general notes on a lecture (book or other material) as a sense making tool to help you better understand the material. You write down some bits you want to remember and use for some brief spaced repetition perhaps. You write down some pointed questions to help review for a test later. The subtle difference is that Cornell notes were designed to do the sense making, summary, and repetition portions well for students and learners, but didn't focus as much on the longer tail of knowledge creation using analysis, and synthesis. To fill in the last mile for your card index, take the best idea(s) (maybe one or two at most) and flesh it out to create a useful maincard.

If it's useful try some 8 x 12" paper for your lecture notes, and take them Bibcard or Cornell Notes style. Once you've excerpted your main card notes, you can fold your sheet in half twice and file it with your Bibcards, naturally taking care to have the paper's spine face up to prevent other slips from becoming lost in between. (This obviously works best for those using 4 x 6" index cards though if you're in the 3 x 5" camp, then use 6" x 10" sheets for folding.) For those with middle grades or high school students, this may be a more profitable method for introducing these methods to their study, learning, and creation patterns.

Summary: Cornell Notes can be an excellent method for capturing session-based fleeting notes and distilling them down into permanent notes. Cornell Notes focus on the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy rather than the broader spectrum that a zettelkasten method might.

I'm not sure how frequent this pattern is within fleeting notes, but it's something I do myself to create at least a temporary shorthand context of how things interrelate and which can easily be cleaned up later in the longer form permanent notes.

The tougher thing is to always capture these sorts of things which one won't remember, but which quite often create better and stronger insights down the road.

By waiting some amount of time (days/weeks/a few months) between originally reading something and processing one's notes on it allows them to slowly distill into one's consciousness. It also allows one to operate on their diffuse thinking which may also help to link ideas to others in their memory.

Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.

— Bianca Pereira | PKM Coach and Researcher (@bianca_oli_per) October 24, 2022

Coming from the Strange New Worlds Plugin, Bianca Pereira defines core notes (those worked on and thus likely of more value) versus peripheral notes.

Core notes have a similar connotation to so-called permanent notes while peripheral notes have connection to fleeting notes, though peripheral notes would seem to have a higher connotation of value than fleeting notes.

Some of this is similar to my commonplacing practice and collection versus my more focused Luhmann-esque zettelkasten practice.

Content addressing is when a piece of content has its own permanent address, a URI. Many copies may exist of the content, hosted by many in the network, all copies have the same address. Whoever is best situated to serve you a copy, does so. It makes the servers interchangeable. My blogposts have a canonical fixed address, but it's tied to a specific domain and only found on 1 server (except when using a CDN).

IPFS starts from content addressing.

Content addressing, assuming the intention 'protocol for thought' here, does match with atomic notes type of pkm systems. All my notes have unique names that could as human readable names map to CIDs. CIDs do change when the content changes, so there's a mismatch with the concept of 'permanent notes' that are permanent in name/location yet have slowly evolving content.

Thanks for this additional piece of Data Matthias! I have a feeling that some of the benefit will also come down to the level of quality of the notes and how well interlinked they may be. Those doing massive dumps of raw, unelaborated, and unlinked data using services like Readwise into their collections will certainly take longer than those who have more refined ideas well linked. My number is presuming something closer to the former while something along the lines of a tenth of that (an order of magnitude) would seem to fall in line with my current working model. It would be nice to have a larger body of data to work with though.

syndication link

https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/03/55806862/

https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich<br /> Joined: January 18, 2012<br /> First annotation: 2018-11-29

Annotations: 10,099 (public and private as of 2022-07-03)

Date of publication: 2022-07-03<br /> Duration: 3 years, 6 months, 5 days or 1312 days<br /> Average of: ~10099/1,312 = 7.69 annotations per day

compare: https://hypothes.is/a/26pRxBpQEe2VXK8kiyXtKQ

I suspect that earlier years were more sparse with higher number of fleeting notes. The past year or two output and quality increased dramatically with more valuable literature notes and more actual near-permanent or actual permanent notes.

Part of Allosso's definition of point notes: they should be making a point.

(No mention of "atomic notes"?)

Dan Allosso's definition of a point note.

This is roughly equivalent to permanent notes or evergreen notes in Ahrens or Matuschak's frameworks respectively. Somehow I like what seems like a broader feel here, thought the name

Does this version contain within it the idea of growth or evolution over time? Evergreen note in Matuschak's version does, though the word evergreen stemming from the journalism space would indicate an idea that doesn't evolve over time but is simply reusable or republishable with little or no work. The linguistic link to evergreen articles in the journalism space creates cognitive dissonance for me in calling notes evergreen. Evergreen connotes reusability, which is useful, but ideas should have the ability to evolve and procreate with other ideas.

Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.

By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.

This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)

As permanently identified paragraph level locations, purple numbers might allow one to combinatorically rearrange sets of notes or facts in a variety of different ways.

This pattern might be seen in earlier instantiations of note taking tools like the German zettelkasten.

Documents might be generated by creating playlists of purple numbers in particular (useful) orders.

Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

Active reading with a pen in your hand and the creation of smart notes is a small-scale equivalent of a full introductory lecture from the perspective of Richard Feynman's technique for testing understanding.

Active reading is roughly equivalent to the idea of reading with a pen in your hand or showing evidence of a mind at play.

Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

Integrate this into the definition of permanent notes.

Fleeting notes are context collapse (context apocalypse?) just waiting to happen.

Collecting fleeting notes and not processing them into something more useful and permanent will eventually end in abject failure.

An example can be seen in the note taking of Joachim Jungius in 1657. He compiled approximately 150,000 slips (also known as scraps) with excerpts and ideas without any sort of order, arrangement, index or reference system. Following his death his students and heirs could make nothing of the massive "scrap heap". As a result, Vincent Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi (1689) specifically warns against this practice (p. 72).

(cross reference from : https://hypothes.is/a/SyenKlO2Eeys0esqwOgjUw)

Not highlighted in this context but it bears thinking about, Ahrens is looking at writing in particular while many note taking techniques (Cornell notes, SQ3R, SQ4R, etc.) and methods geared at students are specific to capturing basic facts which may need to be learned, by which I mean memorized or at least highly familiar, so that they can later be used in future analysis.

Many of these note taking concepts are geared toward basic factual acquisition, repetition, and memorization and not future generative thought or writing applications.

It's important to separate these ideas so that one can focus on one or the other. Perhaps there are contexts within which both may be valuable, but typically they're not. Within the zettelkasten context the difference between the two may be subtly seen in the conception of "literature notes" and "permanent notes".

Literature notes are progressive summarizations which one may use to strengthen and aid in understanding and later recall. These may include basic facts which one might wish to create question/answer pairs for use in spaced repetition programs.

Permanent notes have a higher level of importance, particularly for generative writing. These are the primary substance one wants to work with while the literature notes may be the "packing peanuts" or filler that can be used to provide background context to support one's more permanent notes.

Compare this with: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/22/different-types-of-notes-and-use-cases/

Related to literature notes, but a small level down are the sorts of basic highlights that one makes in their books/reading. For pedagogy's sake they're a sort of fleeting note that might be better rewritten in a progressive summarization form. Too often they're not, but sit there on the page in a limbo between the lowest form of fleeting note and a literature note.

Hierarchy of annotations and notes: - fleeting notes - highlights - marginalia marks: ?, !, ⁕, †, ‡, ⁂, ⊙, doodles, phatic marks, tags, categories, topic headings, etc., - very brief annotations - literature notes (progressive summaries) - permanent notes

The important part of permanent notes are generating your own ideas and connecting (linking them densely) into your note system. The linking part is important and can be the part that most using digital systems forget to do. In paper zettelkasten, one was forced to create the first link by placing the note into the system for the first time. This can specifically be seen in Niklas Luhmann's example where a note became a new area of its own or, far more likely, it was linked to prior ideas.

By linking the idea to others within the system, it becomes more likely that the idea can have additional multiple contexts where it might be used and improve the fact that context shifts will prove more insight in the future.

Additional links to subject headings, tags, categories, or other forms of taxonomy will also help to make sure the note isn't lost completely into the system. Links to the bibliographical references within the system are helpful as well, especially for later citation. Keep in mind that these categories and reference links aren't nearly as valuable as the other primary idea links.

One can surely collect ideas and facts into their system, but these aren't as important or as interesting as one's own ideas and the things that are sparked and generated by them.

Asking questions in permanent notes can be valuable as they can become the context for new research, projects, and writing. Open questions can be incredibly valuable for one's thinking and explorations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N02UyrTQJo&t=2s

My equivalent, as best as I can tell, is:

• Permanent notes (atomic, linked concepts) = Notions
• Temporary notes (half-formed thoughts, links, snippets, etc.) = Notes
• Temporary notes initially, which later become permanent notes = Ideas (see later comment about why)
• Admin notes (projects, tasks, meetings, etc.) = Work notes

You should construct evergreen (permanent) notes based on concepts, not related to a source (e.g. a book) or an author.

Your mental models are compression functions. You make them more powerful by trying to use them on new information. Are you able to compress the new information with an already acquired function? Yes, then you've discovered an analogous concept across two different sources. Sort of? Then maybe there's an important difference, or maybe it's a clue that your compression function needs updating. And finally, no? Then perhaps this is an indication that you need to construct a new mental model – a new compression function.

Whereas Dr. Sönke Ahrens in How to Make Smart Notes seemed to be saying that the writing of a permanent note (~evergreen note) is a unit of knowledge work with predictable effort & time investment (as well as searching for relevant notes), Andy emphasizes only the note searching activity in this context.