On naming notes
Interestingly enough, I already worked on this project in October of 2024. I mentioned a link from Andy-Matuschak where he discussed his naming scheme.
Unfortunately I didn’t delve much into the topic — and maybe that’s why it came back hunting me today. But let’s jump back to one of Andy’s statements:
These [the note titles] are often declarative or imperative phrases making a strong claim. This puts pressure on me to adequately support the claim in the body.
I noticed that I currently don’t do that. I think it could compromise finding the note again in a later moment. And this is a big turn off: if you don’t find the note again, you end up with many notes touching the same problematic but without any connection. A good naming system should also optimize for finding the note again!
But that’s not a comprehensive critique of this naming scheme. Not at all. I’ll get back to it eventually.
Another technique he mentioned is to use questions as titles (something I also heavily considered). A question forces the need for an answer; and sometimes that’s exactly what we wants. Thus naming notes based on this concept makes sense from the perspective of the outcome we want and the way we think — asking questions, hypotheses and looking up in the answer space is second-nature when are trying to solve a problem.
One common realization is that concept notes get us only so far. We need middle ground notes that symbolize their work-in-progress nature — they are thoughts being built or relevant thoughts from others that we want to preserve for future discussions.
I also don’t think it’s inherently bad if the note has less re-discoverability (is that a word?). It’s okay if some notes only resurface when you are in a given mental state.
So the question I ask is which naming rules lead to better thinking? The name of the note is important because it constrains the scope of the note. And the scope we work on constrains the types of connections we can make and the emergent novel thoughts we can potentially make.
Balancing context is key when designing notes.
Notes that enable better thinking
On one side we have notes that are clearly bound to a concept, to a reference note, to a day, to a month. There’s no or little ambiguity on how to call them. On the other side, when working on the project of understanding a concept better — the pros, the cons, the historical influx of ideas that shaped it — we want to rely on a set of guidelines to shape it into a serviceable state: one that incentivizes discussion, connection and convolution with our minds.
I like the idea of writing the strongest context cue first on the title. For a more fleeting note/essay this manifests in the form of a date, or a simplified version of it with just the year and the month — see this note for an example. It elegantly attaches the quality of being “fleeting” to it without tags or any special mechanisms.
An use case
To shape this idea even further I’ll mention the use case of annotating a academic paper — since it’s activity I’m currently doing a lot. I want to be able to put the author’s idea in contrast to other authors; and also preserve it for future instances, in which I want to retrieve this knowledge.
For that I am often relying on implicit indexes: if the given reference contributes to a new challenge for a given topic, I link it to a note called “Challenges of [topic]”. I call it implicit index because the indexation is happening implicitly, via backlinks: if I want to retrieve the whole mapping I go this “challenges” note and see all its backlinks.
I like this; it’s flexible enough and I’m not repeating myself.
So from here we start to see the emergence of a new type of note. It’s not a concept per se, but it is a research about this topic.
They’re researches in their simplest form: state of art researches. Naming them is straightforward: I see the pattern emerging of combining a strong noun with a topic. Another example is Use cases for [topic].
There’s two aspects of a research that are relevant: the backlinks — who is contributing to and using this research; and its content: which patterns emerge from it? Which other sub-researches emerge from it? And here it becomes evident its “open-ended” nature. We will hardly know if the research is completely resolved — of course, sometimes it’s possible; however, more often than not, the best we could do is give our best shot based on what we currently know.
They are not everlasting: Researches are fluid!
Researches are fluid
Opposed to atomic concepts with a clear story and application behind, researches are open-ended by nature. Even the research question behind it can change and even become stale, obsolete, get refined, get expanded.
A new contribution can come and completely change your understanding and previous notion/answer to it. And this is by design. Therefore, a good system for representing them should also consider its fluid nature.
But how to name them?
As discussed, for simpler notes the pattern of a strong noun + topic can be helpful. However, for the vast majority of research questions we need a bit more variety in the expression. Fact is that I am still learning how to do it well. I still haven’t converged into an adequate method for doing that; oftentimes I name it as questions — closely resembling the research question, with hows, whats and so on; in others I think a statement fits better.
Maybe this lack of consistency is not entirely bad. But it’s a consequence of how this particular research is more commonly expressed out of there. Nevertheless, this is still an open topic to me.
claims as notes
I support the idea from Andy-Matuschak about creating notes for strong claims. I like that these notes can be naturally used mid sentences due to the natural way it’s formulated.
More broader than that, I argue for creating notes for every discussion-worthy claim. If a note is strong, then it’s helpful to extract in its own note. You might even bind the reference as its main context like “[claim] by [author], [year]”.
To help contain the messier nature of having multiple notes, it’s helpful to use Indexes or Outline-Notes.