Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Permanent notes

13 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Create notes that you will keep for a lifetime

Summary: Permanent notes preserve concepts and ideas that remain valuable regardless of your current project, institution, or location. Unlike daily notes that organise immediate work, temporary notes that are designed for deletion, or project notes that are archived when projects complete, permanent notes form an external long-term memory that grows and develops throughout your career. This lesson explores how to create concept-oriented notes that serve your thinking and writing across all your academic work.

Key habits:

  • Create permanent notes based on concepts and ideas rather than on specific sources, projects, or events
  • Write permanent notes in your own words as complete thoughts rather than as fragments or quotes
  • Review literature notes regularly to identify ideas worth developing into permanent notes
  • Connect new permanent notes to existing ones, building a network of related ideas over time

Introduction

Evergreen [permanent] notes are written and organised to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. - Andy Matuschak (n.d.)

Some notes will still be valuable in a decade, but not if you keep them in your diary. The challenge is that without a systematic approach to note-taking, there’s no clear framework for distinguishing between notes with a limited lifespan and notes that deserve to be kept forever. Meeting notes from three years ago probably aren’t useful anymore. That brilliant insight about teaching methodology you captured somewhere two years ago might still be valuable, but where is it?

When you don’t differentiate between types of notes, everything accumulates in an undifferentiated mass. Old project notes sit alongside current tasks. Fleeting thoughts from years ago remain mixed with today’s meeting notes. This accumulation creates two problems: you can’t find valuable ideas when you need them, and you feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of notes.

Permanent notes solve this problem by creating a dedicated space for ideas and concepts that transcend specific projects, institutions, or time periods. These are notes that will remain relevant whether you change jobs, shift research directions, or move to a different country.

Key distinction: Permanent notes are concept-oriented rather than source-oriented, event-oriented, or project-oriented.

Understanding permanent notes

Permanent notes function as an extension of your long-term memory. While daily notes serve as external working memory for immediate tasks, permanent notes preserve understanding and insight in a form that remains accessible and useful indefinitely.

Think of permanent notes as conversations with your future self. When you write a permanent note today about threshold concepts, you’re not writing for yourself right now – you already understand the idea. You’re writing for the version of yourself six months from now who’s designing a new module, or two years from now who’s writing an article, or five years from now who’s supervising a doctoral student. That future self needs to understand the concept without extensive context-reconstruction or re-reading original sources.

This forward-thinking nature shapes how permanent notes should be written:

  • Complete thoughts rather than fragments
  • Your own words rather than collections of quotes
  • Sufficient context to be comprehensible without remembering the specific circumstances of creation
  • Room to evolve as your understanding develops over time

The permanence means these notes are living documents that you return to repeatedly. You might create a permanent note about a concept, add to it months later when you read a related article, revise it a year later when teaching clarifies your understanding, and connect it to other notes as your thinking develops.

What makes a note permanent

Not every insight or idea warrants a permanent note. The test is both practical and conceptual: will this idea remain relevant to your work regardless of your current context, and does it represent a concept rather than a specific instance or source?

Concept-oriented focus

Permanent notes are organised around concepts and ideas rather than around sources, projects, or events:

Permanent note ✓Not permanent note ✗
“Threshold concepts in disciplinary learning""Notes on Smith 2019” (literature note)
“Cognitive load theory applications to online teaching""Curriculum review project” (project note)
“Methodological considerations for qualitative interviews""Meeting with research team - 15 March” (daily note)

This concept-orientation means a single permanent note might draw on multiple sources, connect to various projects, and incorporate insights from different contexts. The note isn’t about capturing what any particular source says; it’s about developing your understanding of a concept that matters to your work.

Context-independent relevance

Useful heuristic: Ask yourself “Would this note still be valuable if I moved to a different institution, worked with different colleagues, or shifted my research focus within my broader field?”

  • If yes → probably worth a permanent note
  • If the note’s value is tied to specific people, places, or projects → belongs in daily or project notes

This doesn’t mean permanent notes are abstract and disconnected. They can include specific examples, particular applications, or references to specific sources. But the core insight should transcend those specifics.

Development over time

Permanent notes are not write-once-and-forget documents. They’re meant to grow and evolve as your understanding develops:

  1. Initial creation: A few paragraphs capturing a key concept
  2. Over time: As you think more, read related sources, apply the concept in practice, and make connections to other concepts, the note grows richer
  3. Regular revisiting: When working on new projects or reading new literature, look back at relevant permanent notes and update them

The collection becomes increasingly valuable precisely because it reflects your accumulated thinking rather than just initial captures of ideas.

Creating permanent notes from literature notes

Most permanent notes begin as observations in literature notes. You’re reading an article and capture your understanding in a literature note. As you continue reading and thinking, certain ideas keep appearing across different sources, or you keep returning to particular concepts. These recurring ideas are candidates for permanent notes.

From source-specific to concept-general

Example process:

You’ve read three articles about assessment design with different perspectives. Your literature notes for each capture specific arguments and observations. But you notice a common thread about the relationship between assessment format and learning outcomes that isn’t fully developed in any single source.

This observation becomes the seed of a permanent note:

  1. Create note: “Assessment format influences the learning students prioritise”
  2. Develop concept: Draw on all three literature notes, synthesising different perspectives into your understanding
  3. Support with sources: Include brief quotes when they articulate something particularly well, but the body is your thinking about the concept

Developing through writing

The act of writing a permanent note is itself thinking and development. When you sit down to transform literature note observations into a permanent note, you discover:

  • Gaps in your understanding
  • Connections you hadn’t noticed
  • Implications you hadn’t considered

This development continues beyond initial creation. Weeks or months later, when working on a related project or reading new literature, you might return to the permanent note and add new insights.

Maintaining source connections

Even though permanent notes are concept-oriented, they should maintain connections to the literature notes and sources that informed them. When you reference a particular study or draw on a specific argument, include a citation or link to the relevant literature note.

However, these source connections should support rather than dominate the permanent note. The note shouldn’t read like a literature review with “Smith argues X, Jones argues Y” paragraphs. Instead, it should present your understanding of the concept, with citations providing evidence.

Permanent notes in academic practice

Supporting research and writing

You’re beginning work on a journal article about student engagement. Rather than starting from scratch, you search your permanent notes for relevant concepts. You find notes on cognitive load, active learning and engagement, attention spans, and assessment’s influence on behaviour.

These permanent notes become intellectual building blocks. You’re working with your own synthesised understanding rather than going back to original sources every time. After writing, you enrich the original permanent notes with insights from the writing process.

Informing teaching development

You’re redesigning a module and want to incorporate effective formative assessment. You have permanent notes on formative assessment principles, feedback timing, student responses to assessment types, and workload management. These notes draw on pedagogical literature but also incorporate your observations from years of teaching.

These notes help you design more thoughtfully because they make relevant concepts immediately available. They also help you articulate design rationales.

Supporting supervision and mentoring

A doctoral student struggles with their methodological approach. In conversation, you draw on permanent notes about methodological considerations, the relationship between research questions and methods, common challenges, and strategies for dealing with ambiguous data.

These notes make your accumulated wisdom about common issues immediately accessible. You might even share relevant permanent notes with the student as starting points.

Building your permanent notes system

Choosing sustainable formats

The most important consideration is format sustainability. These notes are meant to last 30-40+ years, so choose formats likely to remain accessible that long, or that can be easily migrated.

Plain text offers the best long-term sustainability. While Word documents and proprietary formats may be readable now, there’s no guarantee they’ll be supported decades from now. Plain text – or markdown – has been readable for decades and will likely remain readable indefinitely.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use formatting, links, or images. Markdown supports all of these while remaining fundamentally plain text.

Organising permanent notes

Two main approaches:

Hierarchical organisationFlat organisation
Folders for different domains (Teaching, Research, Methodology)All notes in single location
Clear structure, easy to browseOrganised through links and tags
Can become rigid over timeNotes exist in multiple conceptual spaces
Familiar paradigmCan feel less structured initially

Many academics use a hybrid: minimal folder structure combined with extensive linking and tagging. This provides enough structure to browse while maintaining flexibility for connections across categories.

Creating connections between notes

The power of permanent notes grows exponentially when notes are connected to each other. When creating a new permanent note, actively look for connections:

  • Does this relate to other ideas you’ve already captured?
  • Does it provide an example of a more general principle?
  • Does it contradict or complicate another concept?

Make these connections explicit by linking between notes. Over time, these connections accumulate into a network reflecting your intellectual territory.

Pause and reflect

Reflection: creating quality permanent notes

The most common challenge with permanent notes is perfectionism. Because these notes are meant to last forever, there’s temptation to make them comprehensive and perfectly articulated before saving them. This perfectionism prevents many academics from building substantial collections – they keep refining and never feel the note is “ready.”

Remember: Permanent notes are meant to evolve over time. It’s better to create an imperfect permanent note that captures a concept in basic form than to never create the note because you’re waiting to fully develop the idea. You can always return and enhance it later.

Another challenge is distinguishing between permanent notes and literature notes. If a note is essentially “here’s what this article says,” it belongs in literature notes even if the concept seems important. Permanent notes should be your thinking about concepts, informed by but not dominated by specific sources.

There’s also a tendency to create permanent notes that are too narrow or too broad:

  • Too broad: “Teaching” (not about a concept but an entire domain)
  • Too narrow: “The specific example Smith uses in chapter 3” (about a particular instance)
  • Just right: “Formative assessment timing and student learning” (specific enough to be meaningful, general enough to apply across contexts)

Finally, resist treating permanent notes as a way to avoid engaging with original sources. They’re meant to complement direct engagement with sources, not substitute for it. Use permanent notes to build from rather than to avoid reading widely and deeply.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Maintain concept-oriented focus, not source-oriented or project-oriented: The fundamental distinction is their focus on transferable concepts and ideas rather than specific sources, projects, or events. You create permanent notes about threshold concepts, not about specific articles. You create permanent notes about methodological considerations, not about specific research projects. This concept-orientation is what makes permanent notes valuable across different contexts and over extended time periods.

  • Write for your future self in your own words: A permanent note isn’t a collection of quotes or a summary of what sources say – it’s your developed understanding of a concept. Write as if explaining the idea to yourself six months or two years from now, when you’ve forgotten immediate context. This means complete thoughts rather than fragments, your own words rather than extensive quotes, and enough context to be comprehensible without extensive background reconstruction.

  • Allow permanent note value to compound over time: A small collection of permanent notes is modestly useful; a large, interconnected collection built over years becomes transformative. As you create more permanent notes and connect them to each other, you’re building an external representation of your intellectual territory. This network makes your accumulated thinking immediately available when you’re writing, teaching, or developing new projects, and it reveals connections and patterns that might not be visible when ideas remain scattered.

Resources

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