Daily Notes

Learning things usually involves significant effort. Grappling with the unknown is difficult and time-consuming. Notes (in theory), allow us to maintain a corpus of knowledge about information we have encountered, that can be referred to instead of the source material to refresh our understanding of the subject matter. This noble idea usually falls flat in practise if note-taking is done passively, just for the sake of doing it. Passive note-taking gives the illusion of ensuring that a piece of information won’t be forgotten, since we’ve written it down. Yes, it won’t be forgotten, it will be lost instead, in the pile of notes that get created this way. They won’t accumulate any insight. In reality creating an external brain of sorts, consisting of information accrued in interconnected notes takes significant time, effort and care itself. Take Andy Matuschak’s evergreen notes as an exmaple.

The above is traditionally the purpose of note-taking. Instead daily notes serve the following purposes:

• As scratchpads for temporarily supporting working memory that will be written and discarded. They serve as a way to engage with the subject material actively and help process it.
• Records of daily work and progress, which can be transformed into technical/development blogs on the website.
• Streamline and simplify weekly reflections/reviews, no guess-work or forgetting both completed and pending tasks.

Hence they are by design ephemeral. I don't need to spend time categorizing, tagging or linking them. Note things down if I need to get a better understanding of the subject-matter, or just to reinforce an existing concept, then forget about them.