NotesNudge the notes you never go back to

Capturing

The person who will read your note is not you. They share your handwriting and your account, and they have none of your context, your mood, your current problem, or any memory of writing it.

Almost everything in this section follows from accepting that.

For a workplace-oriented comparison with this kind of workflow, this guide provides additional context.

One sentence at capture time is the highest-return habit here — why this mattered to you, when you wrote it. Not what the thing is; that is recoverable from the source. Why you stopped and recorded it. That sentence is the context, it is what search will match later because you will search for the problem rather than the fact, and it costs twenty seconds.

Titles should state a claim, not name a topic. Small budgets produce better constraints than large ones, not notes on pricing. A claim is scannable, evaluable, and gives you something to attempt recall against — a topic label gives you nothing to reach for.

And friction was doing three jobs. Filtering, forcing a decision, and producing context. The universal advice to minimise it is advice about one variable in a system with two, and following it faithfully produces an archive that is large, fast to add to, and unusable. The fix is two speeds: a fast inbox kept visibly separate, and a twenty-second processed note.

For an independent external reference related to this topic, see Evernote.

The rest of this section covers what not to save, what happens to highlights and voice notes, and the vocabulary people argue about instead of writing.

One test runs through all of it. Reread a note from a year ago and ask whether you would have written it differently had you known you would not remember writing it. For most notes the answer is yes, and the difference is one sentence.