Most people take only transient notes
In contrast with ☯️ The Flow, most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts. These are very convenient to write, but after a year of writing such notes, they’ll just have a pile of dissociated notes. The notes won’t have added up to anything: they’re more like fuel, written and discarded to help the author process their ongoing experiences. Fleeting notes are valuable scratchpads to temporarily support working memory, but knowledge work should accrete, so we should view them as “messy-thought” inputs for the “neat-thought” notes they’ll inform. This is one reason why Note-writing practices are generally ineffective.
References
- Matushak, Andy. Andy’s Notes.