Beside the file

A second system for notes becomes a second job. The notebook that lasts is the one that opens beside the file you are already editing.

The rewrite always promised a cleaner place for thoughts. The thoughts that mattered were already in the margin of the work, written while the problem was still warm.

Short on purpose

We kept the entries short on purpose. A paragraph you can finish is a paragraph you will trust later.

A long note is a draft of a document nobody asked for. A short one is a reminder you can check without leaving the task.

What survived

After the rewrite, the surviving notes were the ones with a date, a file, and one sentence. The taxonomy did not survive. The sentence did.

If a note cannot be found from the work it describes, it is already lost. Put it where the next person will be standing.