How do I practice photo notes?

The most direct way to practice photo notes is through a focused exercise: Today, capture three things as photographs that you would normally try to describe in text: a whiteboard, a physical arrangement, a diagram, a book passage with margin notes, or an environment that triggered an idea. For each photo, add one line of text context (date, why it matters, what you were thinking). At the end of the day, review all three. Notice how much information the photos preserved that your text description would have lost.

Common pitfall: A camera roll with 400 unlabeled photos and no way to find anything. Visual capture without minimal metadata becomes a graveyard of context-free images. The photo preserves the visual information perfectly — and becomes useless because you cannot remember why you took it or what it connected to.

This practice connects to Phase 3 (Capture Systems) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.