"Evergreen Notes" are the notes that you revisit on a regular basis -- usually at least once per week.

In most note-taking systems, Evergreen Notes make up approximately half of the notes that an average user will visit on a day-to-day basis.

Examples of commonly-used flavors of "Evergreen Note":

What do these types of notes have in common? You will probably visit them more than 10 times per year. You will progressively, incrementally improve (or at least update) them as you collect new information. You (usually) remember them, so they tend to regularly receive new incoming tasks, from the Quick Task Bar and other task entry avenues.

linkRecommendations for Evergreen Notes

If you use your note taking app to collect task and coordinate your calendar, you will visit your Evergreen Notes over and over again. In fact, the presumption that will you repeatedly visit Evergreen Notes is directly baked in to Amplenote's Task Score algorithm -- the multiplier for how much a task's attributes will boost its Task Score is determined by how many days on which the note is opened. It is a safe assumption that, for your top Evergreen Notes, you will see them 10 or more times per week.

linkAesthetic

That's why it can make a lot of sense to invest a minute to personalize your Evergreen Notes. We highly recommend visiting the Note appearance settings page to glimpse the interesting ways that you can strike an inspiring mood on those numerous occasions where you will open your Evergreen Note.

open_in_new

The author's Evergreen Task Inbox note uses a blue background color and a picture he took on vacation

linkTagged #canonical

Per our most popular help article, it can be useful to use a specific tag to designate the notes that you expect to return to over-and-over again. You can tag them canonical, evergreen, or something else that implies they are in a category of their own.

This can be especially useful to locate and review connections if you use Note Graph View: Visualize and create new note connections.

linkDismiss aggressively

If the Evergreen Note is a task list, you are likely to encounter all the same problems that generations of note takers have suffered through when trying to maintain a long-term todo list. We have two specific recommendations for keeping a healthy Evergreen Task note.

First, pick a maximum limit for tasks you want to see in the note. That way, you will always have instant visibility into whether you should be actively concerned with paring back the non-essential tasks that your list has absorbed. You can also hide tasks to get back under your "Task limit," but that is a treadmill that becomes increasingly hard to stay on top of.

Consider Amplenote CEO Bill Harding's take on the "Dismiss" vs "Hide" question:

"If it's truly an amazing, great idea, you'll return to it. Most of my best ideas occur to me at least 3x. That means you'll re-add it, and it won't be lost, even if you dismiss it now."

"When I hit my note's 60-Task Limit, I endeavor to dismiss 2/3rds of the least important tasks, and snooze the other 1/3rd. Usually the ones that would delight me if only I can find time to work on them"

-- Bill Harding, Amplenote Founder & CEO

If you don't set a task limit and pare aggressively, your Evergreen Todo list is almost certainly destined to become a graveyard of the hopes & dreams of your past selves.

That's not a terrible thing -- every long-term note taker has some Todo List graveyards in their past. But they probably had some valuable tasks on that list. Still, people will eventually abandon a list if it makes them feel too guilty about all the obviously important tasks that they just can't bring themselves to work on.

If you repeatedly can't bring yourself to work on a task, try to break it into smaller parts. If you can't do that, ask yourself it there is too much risk/uncertainty that can't be reduced (that might be why your brain's intuition is telling you to "steer clear"). Spend 30 seconds contemplating whether you can imagine waking up on a future morning and choosing to start working on the task. If not, Dismiss. 🔪 Your future selves will be grateful you did.