This is a personal notes directory: a place to record things worth revisiting
later. The glossary below fixes what each kind of note is — not how it is
structured, named, or tooled. Those decisions live in docs/adr/, never here.
Note: A single self-contained record of something worth revisiting. Every note has exactly one intent: Reference, Internalise, or Track. Avoid: entry, doc, page — use "note" for the unit.
Intent: The single job a note serves — Reference, Internalise, or Track. A note's intent fixes which folder it lives in, how it is written, and how (or whether) it is revisited. One subject may spawn notes of several intents. Avoid: "type", "kind" — use "intent".
Reference note: A note kept so you can look something up on demand — knowledge deliberately externalised so you do not have to hold it in your head. Success = findability and accuracy. Avoid: "second brain", "resource" (PARA term).
Internalise note: A note for material you want to move into your own head — to recall unaided or to change your own behaviour — not merely look up. Success = durable retention/transfer. This is the only intent the spacing/retrieval-practice evidence governs. Avoid: "study note", "flashcard" (a flashcard is one possible form, not the intent).
Track note: A note that holds actionable items with a lifecycle (e.g. idea → active → tabled → done). Success = staying current and triaged; never memorised. Avoid: "todo", "project". ("Backlog" is fine informally.)
Capture: A transient state, not an intent: a raw, undigested jotting sitting in an inbox until it is processed into a Reference, Internalise, or Track note (or discarded). Avoid: "fleeting note" (Zettelkasten term), "draft".
Topic: The subject a note is about (e.g. "AsciiDoctor syntax", "git rebase"). The default Reference unit is one file per topic. Avoid: "category", "area" (PARA term), "tag".
Idea: A single self-contained point inside a note. When one note accumulates two or more independently-referenced ideas, that is the signal to split it. Avoid: "atom" (Zettelkasten term), "card".
Process (verb): To convert a Capture-state jotting into a typed Reference/Internalise/Track note — or discard it. The deliberate work (selecting, rephrasing, turning an observation into a production prompt) happens here, not at capture time. Avoid: "file", "sort".
Spawn (verb):
When one subject — or one capture — produces several notes of different
intents (e.g. a phrasing observation spawns an Internalise drill and a
Reference cheatsheet). The spawned notes are connected by xref:, never merged
into one.
Avoid: "split", "derive", "decompose".
Prompt / Response: The two halves of an Internalise item: the prompt states a situation or cue; the response is the form you want to produce unaided — a single canonical answer for a fact-like item, or a worked exemplar for a skill item, where a faithful variant of the same move still counts. The response stays hidden until you have attempted it. Avoid: "front/back" (Anki term), "flashcard".
Grade: Your own assessment of a single retrieval attempt on an Internalise item, on a fixed four-value scale: again (couldn't produce), hard (laboured), good (clean), easy (instant). You record a grade after each attempt; it is the stable vocabulary all revisit-scheduling builds on, whatever method does the spacing. Avoid: "score", "rating", "button" (Anki term).
Revision — used in two incompatible senses, with two different evidence bases. Keep them apart:
- Revising from a note = studying it to get it into your head (British "exam revision" sense). Applies to Internalise notes only. Governed by the retrieval-practice and spacing research.
- Revising a note = editing/updating/pruning it so it stays correct and useful ("gardening", maintenance). Applies to Reference and Track notes. The memory research says nothing about this.
Resolution: keep "revision strategy" as the umbrella term for the whole "when and how do I revisit notes" question, but inside it always say practice (from a note) or maintenance / gardening (of a note) so it is unambiguous which activity — and which evidence — is in play.
"Lookup-able" — used to decide what to exclude from a Reference note, and easy to misread as "exists online". It does not mean that. The test is transformation value to you: exclude only what you would regenerate faster than you would find it in your own notes, with no selection, distillation, or provenance value. A curated, sourced distillation is worth keeping even when the raw facts are a web search away.
You: Is the "learn AsciiDoctor more deeply" thing a Reference note?
Agent: Depends what you want from it. The part where you drill the syntax until you can write it unaided is an Internalise note. The part where you paste blocks you'll look up mid-edit is a Reference note. And "things I might build once I know it well" is a Track note — a backlog with a lifecycle, not something you memorise or look up.
You: So one subject can spawn three notes?
Agent: Yes. The subject is the same; the intent differs, and intent is what fixes the note's structure and how (or whether) you revisit it.