A note by itself can be useful, but isolated notes behave like loose scraps. They accumulate faster than they compound.
What makes a note durable is gravity. It starts attracting references, contradictions, examples, and neighboring ideas.
Connected notes change behavior
Once notes can point to each other cleanly, you stop writing only for the moment you are in. You start writing so the note can be found, reused, and revised later.
That changes the shape of the note itself:
- titles become clearer
- claims become more specific
- language gets easier to link
The note stops being a capture and starts becoming a unit of thought.