A permanent note is kept for a long time. It’s easy to retrieve and provides value each time you read it. You take permanent notes to grow your knowledge, reduce its fragmentation, and have more ideas by combining notes. An effective approach to take permanent notes is to make them atomic. One note contains one concept, briefly and exhaustively explained. It has all relevant references but, first of all, there are your thoughts and inspiration about it. In its atomic format, a permanent note allows you to quickly remember the context and the ideas you had about it. It shows connections with other notes you have taken. It includes questions and prompts to make further research and connection. You can grow a digital garden of permanent notes by continuously refining them. Your slip-box, your note archive, is the place where you think, and you rearrange and refine your notes during your thinking. The paper is the thought. You need to follow a few rules strictly but without exception: all notes go in your inbox, and every day you must process them. Fleeting notes are taken to capture the inspiration of the moment. They have to be thrown away as soon as you have transformed them into permanent notes. You can take quick notes anytime you find something resonating with your interests and curiosity. There is no specific time. Permanent notes are part of your learning ritual. You make them when you stop to learn the content of your notes and deepen your research about the topic. While pen and paper are always working and frequently suitable for fleeting notes, your note archive should be digital. Always available, anytime, anyplace. Why not?

You create your permanent notes as a space to think, learn and ideate. There are exciting perspectives in opening your external brain to collective intelligence. How would you like to think with peers?