Interest on your ideas.

A note you write once and never open again is just a record that something happened. That’s about all it’s good for.

Make reviewing a habit. On Friday, skim the week’s meetings and pull out what’s worth keeping. Link it to what it relates to, look at what’s coming up next week and the notes behind it, and check nothing is still waiting to be written up. Weekly, it takes half an hour. Leave it for a quarter and it takes a day, and you’ll have forgotten why half of it mattered.

The second time you use a note, the thinking’s already done. If you review every Friday, you start each new project with months of what worked and what didn’t, in your own words. If you don’t, you start from scratch.