What is refactoring notes?

Refactoring notes is a concept in personal epistemology: Restructuring your notes restructures your understanding.

Example: You have a note titled 'Project Management Best Practices' that's 800 words long. It covers estimation, stakeholder communication, and risk mitigation — three distinct ideas tangled together. When you split it into three atomic notes and rewrite the connections between them, you don't just reorganize the text. You discover that your actual insight is about how bad estimation causes stakeholder mistrust, which creates the very risks you were trying to mitigate. The restructuring revealed a causal chain that was invisible in the original blob.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.