Buffer Notes
- Buffer notes are notes used to temporarily store any content before it is moved to another place.
- This is analogous to the concept of data buffers.
- The main point of using the buffer note is to eliminate the friction of note taking by deferring the decision of note location or structure of the note from the note taking process that requires immediacy.
- For the buffer note to be useful, the note taking tool needs to support a way to flush out the content of the note in its entirety, or partially to another location easily when later down the line you have decided where the content should go.
- In the end, what it does is identical to scratch notes: it lets you quickly open up a document and jot down something.
- My reason for having one note to do this was that creating scratch notes are easy, but it's also easier to let the number of scratch notes grow.
- After a certain period of time, you would need to go in and prune them out since they will have already lost their context. I opted for a more immediate action for pruning, where I would have one note that I dump all my notes that I don't know where it belongs, and then at the end of the day (or whatever cadence makes sense), I will flush them out.
- If the piece of information is no longer relevant to me, I delete them.
- If I intend to keep them somewhere so that I can look them up later, I use this time to find it a suitable location.
- There is a lot of semantic overlap with scratch notes and would be interchangeable for whatever you intend to use it for, but buffer notes put emphasis on taking immediate action rather than deferring the organizational task to a later point.
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