"Fleeting" Is Not a Note's Type, It's a Note's Stage
The term "Fleeting Note" is lingua franca in PKM, but it means different things to different people.
When your eyes read the word “note”, a handful of your brain’s regions construct an image of a text blurb on a physical or digital medium. It’s a fair association because, in most cases, you’d grab a sheet of paper and scribble a quick note to avoid forgetting it.
But this is only one of the ways to remember a brief thought. You could record a voice memo, send yourself an email, or mark a cross on your wrist, to name a few.
A Fleeting Note is a placeholder for when you have noteworthy thoughts you don’t want to forget. Such notes contain one idea, yours, as opposed to another’s. They’re brief and contain just enough seeds for your future self to fall back on your feet. The grammar doesn’t matter; it can be as cryptic as necessary, but not more.
In his interview with , Malcolm Gladwell admits to sometimes failing to decipher his Fleeting Notes. The link will parachute you right into this passage.
The consensus is that a Fleeting Note’s lifespan is relatively short. This is why they’re called Fleeting, to begin with. Once you’ve captured your idea and it transitioned into your staging area, there should be only a few days before you pick it up; remember what it was for, beef it up in a more formal data vault and discard the original.
There’s also a school of thought suggesting that it’s crucial to preserve the data lineage of any given artefact in your knowledge repository, which indicates that you don’t discard the Fleeting Note and don’t alter it but keep it in its original form and link it to things it gave birth to.
Both are variations of a scenario that reminds me of my school days when teachers forced us to think on drafts and port them to legible, proofread versions for final submissions. The original could be kept in your archives or discarded.
But numerous cases go beyond the scope above.
For example, imagine you stumble upon something that triggers a random but valuable thought. You could pick up your camera or a smartphone and snap a picture. That picture could later be used as-is in a permanent product. Some would glue it to the pages of a commonplace book, and some could use it as a blog post header.
UK’s controversial Pete Doherty keeps his used syringes to integrate them into his paintings.
Besides being used as-is, Fleeting Notes could morph into more polished, presentable versions of themselves. The “fleetingness” of a note is not a binary attribute. It’s a continuum.
employs bourgeon iconography to describe the stage of development of a note or an essay on her now iconic website.
My Fleeting Notes are caterpillars, too. They start as shapeless digital or analogue blobs but gradually evolve into clean Atomic Notes I can reference from/to other notes to form highly interconnected graphs and unlock the
.I could version-control Markdown files in Git, use Scrivener’s snapshot feature, and duplicate files. But my early days of multi-track music recording made me appreciate committing to points of non-return: bouncing everything to a single track and never looking back. Modern knowledge managers are often driven to paper, pens and typewriters where this limitation is non-negotiable.
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So, a note is Fleeting until it’s not. When I’m talking about Fleeting Notes, I’m referring to the lifecycle stage of an idea captured on any medium. Not everything’s worth keeping, and many of the notes will be discarded without being promoted to something more evergreen, but some will turn into the so-called Permanent Notes. But we’ll cover those in future issues.