Cornerstone Note - Adam Cairns

What Should Notes Be About?

Note every note you take should end up in your Zettelkasten or your Note-Making System. Lists of errands to run, jobs to do are best organised elsewhere.

I separate the storage of documents (PDFs, web articles and so on) from where I store my notes. This is because I want to avoid the Collectors Fallacy, something I’ve been prone to in the past.

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What Are Evergreen Notes?

The term ‘Evergreen Notes‘ is used by Andy Matushak to describe notes which are more than fleeting.

Evergreen Notes adhere to the Zettelkasten Principles which makes recording useful notes easier to do consistently.

I have developed my own terminology. Instead of Evergreen Notes, I use the term Cornerstone Note because I like the idea that they are building blocks of information.

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What Are Evergreen Notes?

The term ‘Evergreen Notes’ is used by Andy Matushak to describe notes which are more than fleeting.

Evergreen notes adhere to the Zettelkasten Principles which makes it easier to do consistently.

I have developed my own terminology. Instead of Evergreen Notes, I use the term Cornerstone Note because I like the idea that they are building blocks of information.

… Read the rest

Notes Should Be Atomic

The nature of a Note-Taking System is that it is an interconnected network of your ideas, concepts, thoughts or feelings.

Feelings are not normally mentioned, but because I want to test how a Note-Making System can help with Creativity Activation, I am also including feelings in the sorts of items that I collect.

I think it is quite likely that a piece of poetry or prose will engender a similar feeling when I see a great piece of art or when I hear or see something that evokes the same feeling.

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Cornerstone Notes

3 December 202129 April 2021 by Adam

Cornerstone notes are the term I use to describe Andy Matushak’s Evergreen Notes

Andy suggests evergreen notes are written to:

evolve
contribute
accumulate, over time
across projects.

Principles

A simple note adheres to the same principles defined for any note that finds its way into my Note-Making System:

a note should be Atomic
a note should be Concept Oriented
the combination of an Atomic note and the fact that it is Concept Oriented means it becomes more than an Item of Knowledge – it begins to communicate Actionable Information and transforms into an Item of Information
a note should be Densely Linked
a note should be organised using Associative Ontologies rather than hierarchical taxonomies.

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