Evergreen record
- Industry term
An evergreen record is a lasting note built around one reusable idea, titled by that idea, and revised whenever new experience or evidence changes it.
Notes written on the day are organized by when things happened, so a lesson sits among the bookings and errands of that day, hidden until someone rereads it. Written as its own note, the lesson can be found by what it says and linked from wherever the same question comes up again.
Where you’ll meet it
Your assistant read five years of family trip notes and wrote lessons for planning the next one. One says "Rental car pickup at this airport takes an hour." Only one note mentions it, from a trip that landed on a holiday weekend.
What to do
Ask the assistant which trips each lesson comes from. Keep the lessons that held on more than one trip, each linked to those trips' notes, and leave a single-trip lesson in that trip's note until another trip backs it up.
Easy to mix up
| Evergreen record | Decision log |
|---|---|
| Before a similar task, to reuse what was learned | When someone asks why a past choice went that way |
Check yourself
Two of your notes, written a year apart, give opposite advice on how early to book a party venue. What should happen to them?
Go deeperThe practice comes from linked note systems built for reuse
The term is best known from Andy Matuschak's public working notes. The practice draws on the Zettelkasten, the linked box of index cards the sociologist Niklas Luhmann kept for decades and credited with much of his writing.
Matuschak compares a note's title to an API, a fixed handle other notes can call without opening the body. So the title states the claim itself. A link to “Morning flights leave the first day free” tells the linking note something, while a link to “Flights” only sends the reader off to reread.