(2020-03-31) Brockwell A Taxonomy Of Notes

Matt Brockwell: A taxonomy of notes

It started with reading something that Andy Matuschak wrote, about having a “taxonomy of notes”. (2020-02-20) Matuschak On Note-Taking

*I am now using “🌲1, 🌲2, 🌲3, and 🌲4” as hashtags, whenever I create a new note.

This is shorthand for what I am calling “Evergreen note - level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4”. (speed tip: I use the “textblaze” browser extension to make hotkey combos to type those tags … that way, a short keystroke combo generates each of those complete hashtags — complete with square brackets and “evergreen emoji”l — in just a few keystrokes, whenever I want the tag.)*

Below, I’m going to illustrate the concept using a real-life project that I just started: I am organizing my knowledge about the physiology of sleep.

“Level one” evergreen note - aka 🌲1:

Andy calls this a “stub” — I also like to think of it as a “placeholder” or even a “cognitive hail Mary pass”.

I’m researching sleep — and the first thought I have about it is that it is a “regenerative process”. So on the spot I create a new page called regenerative processes. That page is an example of a [[🌲1] page.

“Level two” evergreen note -aka 🌲2

This is the level of neatly defined concepts, or as Andy writes, “terms of art” — that is, the concept-knowledge building blocks that you need in order to start thinking about a complex topic.

In my sleep example, Sleep Phases — NREM and REM, a page in which I map out my definitions, terms, and foundational knowledge — that would be a “level 2” note.

“Level 3” evergreen note (aka 🌲3)

From my perspective, it’s at level 3 that your own ideas first occur, because if level 1 was about defining areas of the house that you were going to fill, and level 2 was about defining the objects you were going to fill them with, then, at level 3, for the first time, you are working on describing and declaring relationships between the objects in your mental house — or your “magic junkyard”, to borrow a descriptor I first read used by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

As I build my sleep notes little by little, I might eventually be ready to title a page something like this: Sleep is a process-state, during which vital neurophysiological housekeeping processes occur.

“Level 4” Evergreen Note 🌲4

A level 4 note is built on top of one or more level 3 notes.

I think I can synthesize these statements into an exploratory “level 4” statement, which could be Hypothesis: The physiologic housekeeping in stages NREM 1–3 includes processes that “prime” the brain to dream in REM, the final stage of the cycle

I started this experiment in order to teach myself to be more deliberate, about the kinds of pages I was creating in my Roam notebook. The simple act of hesitating and thinking about “What level-of-page is this?” has encouraged me to be more thoughtful, in general, about how I organize my knowledge, and more specifically, about what kinds of pages I am creating, and why.