- **Epistemic status:** #budding > "Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument." (Sönke Ahrens 2021) Fleeting notes are those ideas that pop into your head and can range from being brilliant to dreadful. These notes are not meant to interrupt an action that you are making, since you have to be brief to continue what you are doing. Always have something to jot these ideas and thoughts that pop into your head and store them on an inbox or scratchpad. You can utilize a notebook, your phone, a voice recorder, whatever works for you. At a later time, you can process them, making them into [[Evergreen Notes]] unless you do have the time and space to properly write one. Avoid collecting fleeting notes on ideas you don't have time to process later because it will dilute the value of the [[Evergreen Notes]] in your [[Digital Garden]]. The information is not meant to be collected, but used to create new ideas, contradict them or unite them. If you can't use them or lose context, it is better to delete them to avoid adding a backlog that is chaotic. I [[Keep an Engineering Daybook]], but also write down about my day-to-day experiences, ideas, gratitude entries, feelings, etc. By having a medium where I can express my thoughts, it helps with being more precise when I speak to other people on ideas instead of bombarding them. It also reduces the amount of wasteful notes I add to my [[Digital Garden]]. When converting fleeting notes into [[Evergreen Notes]] utilize a [[Cognitive Tools]] to organize your notes, ideally in a day or two after you wrote the fleeting note, to preserve the context. Observing how these notes relate to your [[Evergreen Notes]] ideas, concepts, and research starts forming a picture in your [[Digital Garden]]. --- ## References - Ahrens, Sönke. _How to take smart notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers_. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017. - Khan, Al. “Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Smart Notes (A Beginner’s Guide).” LEANANKI, May 20, 2020. <https://leananki.com/zettelkasten-method-smart-notes/>.