Evergreen notes are not articles

Andy Matuschak, the original developer of evergreen notes, uses them to help him develop ideas over time.

As he states in his evergreen note about evergreen notes, they're meant to "evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects." The main difference between his evergreens and most people's transient notes is that evergreen notes are idea-oriented, with each note encapsulating one original idea that links to other ideas, while most people's notes are written about what they learn.

For this reason, evergreen notes should be atomic - each Andy note is a few paragraphs long - while articles are meant to be well developed. Evergreen notes only talk about idea, articles talk about many. Evergreen notes are mainly for you, articles aim to be worth people's time to read. Andy doesn't consider his evergreens as published articles, evident by how he says "I rarely publish writing" on the North Star podcast with David Perell.

And most importantly, articles are something you publish once and say, "I'm done with this project." Evergreen notes are written with the intention of being revisited, relinked with future notes - Andy says he links each note on average with "10 others" (North Star). Revisiting old ideas is the only way that you can develop ideas over time.

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Application to personal knowledge management

For this reason, evergreen notes almost resemble Postulate snippets more than posts - a few-paragraph-sized chunk of text written about one idea that are meant to be linked with others to help develop ideas over time.

Meanwhile, especially with Postulate's pivot to creators, posts are more meant to be well-written and be actual polished articles.

I spent the past 3 months following Samson's idea of using learning in public for personal knowledge management, by writing Postulate blog posts about everything I learn that I want to remember. This is a generally awesome system.

But one problem remains is that I have close to no separation between what's meant to be fully developed articles as opposed to atomic evergreen notes. I hadn't even realized that these two are not meant to be the same thing until yesterday.

For the most part, I've considered my "evergreens" on Postulate actual blog posts, for example, saying that I wrote 28 blog posts in March. Now I realize that number is nothing to brag about - evergreen notes are not blog posts or articles. It's like someone saying they wrote 28 notes in a month. Andy says he writes "dozens of evergreens every month." (North Star podcast) And if someone really did write 28 articles in a month, they would not be very well-developed ones.

Because of this lack of separation, I had felt a weird dichotomy between feeling guilty that my Postulate "blog posts" are generally low-ish quality compared to most articles and simultaneously feeling like I'm not writing enough, that my snippet-to-post linkage is low and that I'm not evergreen-ing as many ideas as I could.

But no. You can't have both worlds - be writing high quality articles while writing these articles often.

Maybe if snippets could be public, I would write my evergreen notes as snippets.

For now, though, I think I will continue writing blog posts for evergreen notes, just with the newfound understanding that you are not meant to feel bad if they are not well developed articles, and hopefully with more intention towards developing ideas over time. Maybe I should make it explicitly clear that these posts are not article-y but rather note-y, like how Andy explicitly labels his evergreens as "Andy's Working Notes." As well, I don't want to only be a writer of atomic evergreens - I have plans for a big writing project in the next few months ;)

This big article will be separate from evergreens.