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Fleeting Notes Vs Literature Notes Vs Permanent Notes
Understand the difference to help you leverage the power of the Zettelkasten system
When I first came across the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, I was confused. It took me a while to get a hold of it. I read every article on the web and watched every video on youtube. But even after so much research, one thing I couldn’t understand was the difference between literature notes and permanent notes.
Along with all the articles and videos I read and watched, Sonke Ahrens's book, how to take smart notes helped me get a better perspective on the difference between these different types of notes. In this article, I will try help you understand the difference between fleeting, literature and permanent notes. These in turn will make you a better note-taker.
Fleeting Notes:
Fleeting notes are the ideas or reminders that can pop into your head at any time. They are the everyday thoughts that you may think are important.
Ideas are like people and if you don’t capture them they will go away. To capture these fleeting notes, you can have a simple notebook or an inbox system on your device.
Fleeting notes don’t serve any purpose rather than helping you to develop permanent notes. They will eventually end up in the trash. Therefore, it doesn’t matter where or how you write these notes as long as you revisit them within a day or two.
If your thoughts are already sorted, and you have time you can skip the step of writing fleeting notes. You can directly write down your ideas as a permanent note.
Literature Note
Whenever you read, watch or listen to something create a note about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or what you can use in your own future writing.
Don’t just copy. Understand first and then write it in your own words. A literature note is your interpretation of what the author is trying to say.
In challenging cases, you may need to elaborate your notes while in some cases, just jotting down some keywords might be sufficient.
“Sometimes it is necessary to slowly work…
