Notes Manifesto

What is a note? Typically, people will think of a post-it with a half-scribbled thought reminding them of something they need to remember later, or a torn-off sheet of notebook paper with a brief message for a friend. Essentially, that’s all a note is: something to communicate something to someone, whether that someone is your future self or another person. Maintaining a collection of notes for your own reference is sometimes called personal knowledge management (PKM).

This site hosts my working notes for organizing my projects, learning, thinking, and writing. It’s sometimes a bit of a mess, but it’s that way on purpose. As a reflection of my thoughts, my notes are living documents, full of half-explored ideas, and evolving as I gain new information, experience, and perspectives. I don’t place boundaries on what I write about or how much I write about it; rather, I consider this a place to exercise my creativity and practice my thinking.

So why publish my notes to the internet? Learning in public is a practice where writing and self-publishing are incorporated into the learning process. By continually writing about what I am learning and doing, I reinforce and clarify what I have learned. By making my notes public, I am opening up my ideas to feedback from the others. This further enhances learning and the refinement of thought.

Values

As a lifelong note-taker, I’ve discovered some best practices for myself, which I try to implement here. These aren’t necessarily rules, but standards I try to adhere to.

I have learned to value:

  • Messiness over perfection. Notes may have errors or contradict themselves.
  • Continuously evolving notes over static notes. Embracing change rather than stifling it.
  • Freedom over structure. Guidelines breed creativity; rules stifle it.
  • Compound notes over atomic notes. Compound notes encourage freedom of thought over isolated thinking.
  • Interconnection over isolation. Dense interlinking allows for easy discovery and helps draw attention to unseen parallels.

What These Notes Are not

While I place few restrictions on the subject and style of my notes, there are some things that these notes are not:

  • Instructions or how-to guides. There are better resources for learning out there.
  • A blog, journal, digital garden, or zettelkasten. My notes are unbound by these conventions.

Note Taxonomy

Notes are classified in two different ways:

  • Tags are used to identify the topic of the note, for example, knowledge-management, web-hosting, philosophy, etc. Notes may have multiple tags.
  • Type is used to identify the type of note, for example, evergreen, essay, meta, news, etc. Notes may only have one type.

Use of AI

Read my AI Policy for details on how I use AI within the context of my notes.