How do I practice refactoring ideas?

The most direct way to practice refactoring ideas is through a focused exercise: Find the longest or most tangled note in your system — the one that tries to say too many things. Read it once. Then decompose it into 2-4 separate atomic notes, each expressing a single idea. Rewrite the connections between them. Notice what you understand now that you didn't before the split. The difference between your understanding before and after is the cognitive value of refactoring.

Common pitfall: Treating refactoring as cleanup instead of thinking. If you're just moving text around — renaming folders, adding tags, shuffling categories — you're organizing, not refactoring. Real refactoring changes the internal structure of your ideas: splitting compound thoughts, merging duplicates into sharper formulations, rewriting weak connections as explicit arguments. If your understanding hasn't changed, you haven't refactored.

This practice connects to Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.