--- title: "a taxonomy of notes" slug: a-taxonomy-of-notes type: evergreen stime: 2026-05-25 @ 1:32AM status: growing certainty: likely importance: 6 tags: [meta, zettelkasten] --- The slipbox keeps semantic note types, but it does not need a separate template for every type. All notes share the same frontmatter schema, and every note is a flat `.md` file in the root. The `type` field describes what the note is; the Obsidian template only supplies a useful starting shape. Four flexible templates cover the vault: - `note.md` for claims, questions, ideas, essays, and reflections - `item.md` for people, companies, places, projects, products, tools, and institutions - `source.md` for papers, books, articles, lectures, videos, podcasts, and conversations - `collection.md` for hubs, indexes, notebooks, reading lists, and topic collections For example, a person and a company are both item notes. They use the same template and factual body shape even if their `type` values differ. Add a new semantic type when it helps retrieval; add a new template only when a genuinely new body shape is needed. All notes move through four stages: rough, growing, evergreen, abandoned. - Working notes in [Scratchpad](scratchpad.md) - [Evergreen notes]() - the central form, one claim per note - title: complete declarative sentence ("Memory is the load-bearing constraint of self-directed learning"), imperative ("Write notes for yourself by default"), or noun phrase for terms of art ("[Gaussian integral](gaussian-integral.md)") - body: 2-5 paragraphs, first sentence restates title at one degree higher specificity, no preamble - links: one outbound per 25-50 words of body, external links in `## Bibliography` only - optional: `Q. / A.` spaced-repetition pairs, bullet lists of related claims, block quotes in bibliography - use when: you have a single idea you can explain without mentioning the source - Idea note - freeform working note for material that is not yet (and may never be) a single claim - title: project name or noun phrase ("[Agentic Port Of Sophia to Rust](agentic-port-of-sophia-to-rust.md)", "caveman-adhd combined skill") - body: whatever shape the idea needs — long specs, prompt writeups, checklists, multi-section dumps, evolving designs - no 2-5 paragraph rule, no one-claim rule; headings and unfinished sections are fine - lifecycle: extract crystallised claims into evergreens; abandon when dead; keep as idea while it is still a living multi-claim design - use when: AI prompt writeups, long-term project specs, multi-primitive system designs, anything too large or too fluid for an evergreen - Proper noun notes (weakly evergreen, accumulate facts rather than develop arguments) - Paper note (literature note) - one note per academic work, the book gets shredded, the claims survive - title: full academic citation ("Ramanujan, S. (1914). Modular Equations and Approximations to pi") - body: bullet hierarchy only, no prose paragraphs - first line: full citation with DOI/URL - each top-level bullet is a claim, phrased as a forward link to an evergreen - sub-bullets: qualifications, sub-claims, follow-on links - use when: processing a paper, textbook chapter, or formal published source - Person note - a hub for a single human being, exists primarily to be linked to - title: the name, nothing else ("Richard Feynman", not "Notes on Feynman") - body: bullet list of biographical facts and pointers, 5-20 lines - affiliation, training, current role, distinctive concepts - external links (site, Wikipedia, IMDB) inline in bullets - quotes in blockquote form, attributed inline - no paragraphs of prose - if it gets long, refactor bullets into evergreen notes about the person's ideas - use when: a person appears across 3+ evergreen notes and needs a hub - Company note (institution note) - a hub for an organization, factual rather than argumentative - title: the organization's preferred name ("Bell Labs", "Anthropic"), no tagline - body: bullet list - founding, mission, key people, key outputs - bullets dated where possible (`[[YYYY-MM-DD]]`) to prevent silent rot - external links inline - one allowance for opinion: "Why X matters (dated)" section, explicitly dated and labeled - use when: an organization appears across 3+ notes and needs a factual anchor - Question note - what an evergreen becomes when the claim has not crystallized - title: interrogative sentence ending in `?` ("Why did Plan 9 fail to displace Unix?") - body: - opens with one-line rephrasing of the question or its stakes - enumerates positions as bullets, each linking to an evergreen that argues that position - hedged personal lean if one exists, labeled ("My current lean, weakly held:") - closes with the most useful unresolved sub-question, not a resolution - lifecycle: meant to be refactored into a declarative evergreen when evidence resolves - use when: enough evidence to name the positions but not enough to commit - Letter note - dated, long, reflective, closest form to a blog post - title: ISO date prefix + topic phrase ("2026-05-23 Letter - On the shape of a corpus") - body: long-form prose, sub-headings, full paragraphs, first-person voice, 1,000-4,000 words - internal and external links coexist in body - closes with a sign-off ("Until next month, Kris") - use when: monthly reflection, plans, half-formed ideas, occasion-bound writing - Lecture note - a note taken from a lecture, not an outline for giving one - two coupled forms: - master series note - title: prefixed with `section-` ("section-feynman-messenger-lectures-1964") - body: one-paragraph orientation, then numbered list of individual lectures as links - optional: cross-cutting notes section for claims that emerge across the series - individual lecture note - title: lecturer, series shorthand, number, topic, date ("feynman-messenger-1-law-of-gravitation-1964-11-09") - body: bullet hierarchy, lecturer's main moves in order - sub-bullets: examples, equations, asides - each claim worth extracting is a forward link to an evergreen stub - no running prose - optional: `← back to [[master-series-note]]` link - use when: processing a lecture watched or attended, one note per lecture - master series note created when 2+ lectures from the same source exist ## Non-types - Scratchpad - not a note type, a daily capture surface for ephemeral thoughts - titled by date ("YYYY-MM-DD"), tagged `type: scratchpad` - filtered out at build time, never reaches production - ideas extracted into long-term places: films to watchlist, books to reading list, everything else into the appropriate type above - see [Scratchpad](scratchpad.md) - Jottings (a state, not a type) - raw capture that has not yet become a note - has `status: rough` and whichever type it will become - process within 48 hours or delete - surviving longer than 48 hours is avoidance, not importance - Index / Map of Content (a view, not a type) - curated link lists into topic clusters - created reactively when 5-10 notes cluster around a topic - `type: evergreen` whose content is a structured list of links - title is the topic ("[Differential calculus](differential-calculus.md)") ## Observations - proper noun types (person, company, paper) are weakly evergreen: if you find yourself writing prose, it belongs in an evergreen note elsewhere - dated types (letter, lecture) are not designed to survive their occasion - only evergreen and question are argumentative; idea is constructive/speculative; the other five describe, record, list, or hub - title style is the most reliable form-tell: - declarative sentence -> evergreen - project name / freeform noun phrase + multi-section body -> idea - citation string -> paper - bare name -> person - sentence ending in `?` -> question - ISO date prefix -> letter - `section-` prefix -> lecture - organization name -> company ## How to choose 1. single human being? -> person 2. organization? -> company 3. single published work? -> paper 4. lecture watched or attended? -> lecture 5. monthly update to audience? -> letter 6. question you cannot yet answer? -> question 7. claim you can state in one sharp sentence? -> evergreen 8. long-term spec, prompt writeup, or multi-claim design still in motion? -> idea 9. none of the above? -> write a sentence in your scratchpad and come back tomorrow ## Related - [About These Notes](about-these-notes.md) - [One Idea Per Mini-Essay](one-idea-per-mini-essay.md) - [Keep Mini-Essays Short](keep-mini-essays-short.md) - [cheap intelligence enables retroactive idea mining](cheap-intelligence-enables-retroactive-idea-mining.md) - [Manager vs. Maker Time](manager-vs-maker-time.md)