Evergreen notes

Notes have stages. Fleeting notes capture a thought in seconds and are never linked. Literature notes hold someone else’s argument in your words. Permanent — or evergreen — notes are the ones you keep: written for yourself, dense with links, and rewritten every time you meet a case they get wrong.

Evergreen does not mean finished. It means the note is alive enough to be worth rewriting, which is a different bar from “accurate once”. A note you never revise is usually a note you never read again.

Because revision happens in place, the identifier has to survive it. That is the argument for Zettelkasten method identifiers over note titles: a title can be improved, a link can only survive if its target cannot move.

Reviewing is the mechanism, not the intention. A garden is a queue of notes that are almost right.