my note-taking system

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My workflow is heavily influenced by systems like Zettelkasten. Inspiration also from Andy Matuschak's evergreen notes.

I like to call my note-taking a digital garden over Zettelkasten because (in my opinion) all definitions of Zettelkasten are speculative and digital gardening is a squishy concept.

see also: why is this a digital garden

I have an Inbox for fleeting notes or "every day" notes. From there, I process them. Most are archived. Many become garden notes.

• "not plant" garden notes are mutable, but I do not track their changes over time. This is because changes are irrelevant for non-plants. Some of these are
  • stones, which are like literature notes but for additional types of media, Quotes, and people/entities
  • seeds, which are more informal musings that may give rise to plant notes. Some examples are blog posts or thought notes; thought notes are not intended for long-term refinement
• plant notes follow my note maturity system. In order of complexity, these mainly consist of
  • concept notes to capture definitions, formal statements
  • distillations describe concepts or a collection of concepts or are simple, declarations - they distill ideas into a single statement
  • writings, including outlines and drafts

Notes outside of the garden typology are

• Lecture Notes, which are taken for courses
• Project management notes, which I use for research or other endeavors requiring tracking

See also comparison of my method with described zettelkasten methods

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Created 2025-03-17 Last Modified 2025-04-18