Why does evergreen notes fail?

The most common reason evergreen notes fails: Treating context as overhead rather than structure. You tell yourself you'll 'remember what this means' or 'add context later.' You never do. Three months later, you've got a graveyard of orphaned fragments — technically captured, practically useless. The failure isn't that you took bad notes. It's that you took contextless notes and mistook storage for understanding.

The fix: Open your notes app and find a note you wrote more than three months ago. Read it cold, as if someone else wrote it. Can you understand what it means, why you wrote it, and what you were supposed to do with it — without opening any other document? If not, rewrite it right now: add the source, the date, one sentence about why it mattered, and one sentence about what it connects to. That's the minimum context an atom needs to survive on its own.

The underlying principle is straightforward: An atomic note should carry enough context to be understood without its original source.