How to take notes that stay useful

Write notes for the person who will read them in six months. A method for capturing, rewriting, linking and pruning notes, with an example from a meeting.

4 min read

Notes stay useful when you write them for the reader who will open them in six months: you, with no memory of the meeting, the book or the idea. That reader needs a title that says what the note holds, a few sentences in plain words, where the information came from, and a way to reach related notes.

#The method in a few lines

1. Capture fast. Get the thought out of your head, into one place, without sorting it.
2. Process it soon. Within a day or a week, rewrite what matters as a note that makes sense alone.
3. One note, one idea. The title states the idea, not the topic.
4. Link. Connect it to related notes and to the project it serves.
5. File by use. Keep notes where you will look for them when you need them.
6. Prune and act. Update notes that change, delete what you will not use, and turn decisions into tasks.

#Why it works

Collecting is not learning. In their 2013 review of study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting, underlining and rereading as low in utility, and practice testing as high. A page of highlights feels like progress and produces little recall. A note worth keeping makes you do something later: act on it, answer from it, or turn it into a question.

Two well-known systems point the same way. Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist, kept a slip box of about 90,000 notes written between 1951 and 1996, now held by Bielefeld University. Sönke Ahrens described the approach in How to Take Smart Notes (2017). Andy Matuschak's evergreen notes list similar principles: notes should be atomic and concept-oriented, densely linked, organized by association rather than a strict hierarchy, and written for yourself by default.

You do not need to follow either system to a letter. The shared point is that a note is useful when it is small, written in your own words, and connected to other things you know.

#How to do it, step by step

Take a client call.

A skeleton that works for most meetings:

## Client call
**Date:** 2026-11-12
**People:** Anna (client), me

### Decisions
- Delivery before the 15th, because of the trade show

### Next steps
- [ ] Send the revised plan by Friday
- [ ] Ask Anna for the logo files

### Source
Call notes, 12 November

The same shape works for a book or an article. The title is the idea, the body is in your words, and a line says why it matters to you:

## Spaced study beats one long session
The same hours, spread over several days, give better recall than one block.
The best gap grows with how long I need to remember.
Why it matters: start revising weeks before the exam.
Source: Cepeda et al., 2006
Related: [[Retrieval practice]], [[Exam plan]]

The note is short, it says one thing, and it points to its neighbors. In a year you will know what it says, where it came from, and what else to read.

#Mistakes to avoid

• Saving without reading. A pile of clipped articles is a reading list, not a library.
• Writing for the moment. Abbreviations and "as discussed" make sense today and nowhere else. Write the full name, and say what was discussed.
• Titles like "Notes" or "Ideas". You cannot find them and you cannot link to them.
• Copy-paste instead of rewriting. If you did not put it in your own words, you probably did not process it.
• No source and no date. In six months you will not know if it is still true.
• Deep folder trees. The deeper the tree, the more often a note has two possible homes. Use a few folders by project or area, and links for the rest.
• One long note per topic. It grows without a shape. Short notes with links stay readable.
• Notes that never lead to action. If a note holds a decision, a task should exist for it.
• Never revisiting. A note you never look at again was not a note, it was a capture.

#In Prior

Prior's Notes space is plain Markdown, so a note stays readable anywhere and you can export it.

• Capture and structure. Type / for blocks: headings, task lists, tables, callouts, toggles. In Live mode you see the result as you type, and Source shows the Markdown. The note editor lists the blocks.
• Start from a template. An empty note offers Meeting notes, Project brief, Weekly review, Comparison and Budget. See Note templates.
• Link. Write [[Note title]] to link notes and #tag to tag them. The inspector shows the Outline and the Backlinks, the notes that link here, and the graph shows how your notes connect.
• Turn text into action. In a block's menu, Create a task from this makes a task from that block, and Ask Prior AI about this opens the assistant on it.
• File by use. Folders, favorites and search organize your library; see Organize notes. Every project has a Notes tab for the notes that serve it, covered in Project notes.
• Write together. Notes of a shared project are edited live by every editor. Shared notes explains roles and the Share with the project action for personal notes.
• Keep what you need to recall. Turn a fact worth remembering into flashcards. Spaced repetition explains why.

Notes overview shows the whole space. Deleted notes go to the Trash, so pruning can be undone.