How can I allow my thinking to accrete over time?

I am a big fan of the concept of Evergreen notes from Andy Matuschak. I very much believe in Build systems to revisit ideas over time – the unit of knowledge work should be non-transient, accrete over time, actively sharpen your thinking, and allow connections between ideas to emerge organically.

However, every time I have tried to write notes in this format, it has felt like an uphill battle. I end up with some notes but it feels like I am forcing myself to write them.

My interests right now are in the research realm, where I believe judgement about which questions to ask & pursue, the sharpness of those questions, and overall question quality are key. I find questions more interesting than answers, and want to Treat answers as tools more.

So for now, I am trying out organizing my thinking primarily in the form of Evergreen questions (called probes), with standard Evergreen notes (called traces) as the building blocks for these longer question-notes. Probes are still intended to be (relatively) atomic, concept-oriented, and densely linked, as the original Evergreen notes prescribes.

One potential failure mode is ending up with a ton of vague untestable questions, which may be worse than useless because Ideas are not knowledge until they are tested or experienced. I don’t yet know how to solve for this, but I will keep it in mind & revisit once the terrain is more populated.

My default framing of the value of these kinds of interconnected notes is that writing, revising, connecting the notes is thinking. But is that true? Could this be a case where there might be Unpredictable upsides of cognitive offloading?

• My voice memo parser is an experiment in this direction – I ramble and an LLM extracts ideas & suggests where they go in the notes & how they connect