An idea is found by what it connects to and not by where it is filed
💎CORE ARGUMENT
A folder asks me to decide in advance the one place an idea belongs. The question I will have later is different: what is this idea next to?
I spent 2021 and most of 2022 answering the first one. System two was deep folders, and every new note raised the same problem: is a note about queues Operations, Product or Things I read? Any answer hid it from the other two. When I could not find things I blamed the tree, redrew it, and on an August night deleted six hundred notes because the structure was wrong. It was wrong, but another tree would have been wrong in the same way.
I do not think by address. I get to a thought from another thought. Backlogs lead to stocks, stocks to the sabbatical fund, the fund to what counts as enough, and no hierarchy would have filed those three together. A link records the route I actually took. A folder records where I guessed, months earlier, that I would look.
This makes a link worth more than a tag or a location, provided it says why. Related is nearly useless. Contradicts, is an example of, is what I did about it: those are the trail.
The practical result is that I have mostly stopped caring where a note sits. This vault has folders, I did not design them, and I have not moved one. What I spend the time on is the two or three sentences that tie a new note to its neighbours.
A map still earns its place. It is a list of links with a point of view, and it does the job of a folder without the exclusivity.
Where I might be wrong. Links rot too. A note with twenty of them is as hard to use as a folder with two hundred files, and I already have a few that link to everything nearby out of politeness.
I may also be crediting links with what search does. Half the time I find a note by typing three words of its title. That is why the titles are sentences, and it says little for trails.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
A new permanent note gets at least two links with a reason attached before I close it. I do not ask where it goes. If I cannot find two neighbours, either the idea is new to me, which is rare, or the note is not yet a claim.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Give every new permanent note two reasoned links before closing it
- Prune links that say only that two notes are related
📖 Bush on the memex: a machine that stores trails of association, imagined in 1945, on the grounds that an index is not how a mind retrieves. 📖 Matuschak on evergreen notes: dense, specific links between small notes.
💎 A system I keep rebuilding is a system I am not using: three of my four rebuilds were re-filing exercises. 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source: a link is only useful between notes that each stand up alone.
Recall is associative: one thought brings up the next. A folder gives a note a single address and makes it invisible from everywhere else. A link with a stated reason gives it as many entrances as it has neighbours, and the reasons add up to an argument.
Folders are honest about one thing links are not: what kind of object this is. An invoice, a recipe and a meeting note should be found by type, at once, and I would not want to reach the tax letter by association.
The map for this cluster is 04. 🗃️ Notes & Writing. The rule against moving things is in Rules for this vault.