For notes to be searchable, they need an afterlife. The key to creating an afterlife for my notes — which live in both the analog and digital worlds — is keywords. Keywords that I create when revisiting my notes hours or days later. Keywords I attach to portions of notes, rendering them searchable on my computer. Keywords, like bow ties, are cool.

Teaching and research produce hundreds of thousands of annotated documents. We can all use searchable coolness when trying to find what you’ve already noted amidst that ocean of scribbles.

Notes are fantastic. They help in the moment. Writing is thinking after all. Notes especially help to connect ideas to one another, often in messy and complex ways. They’re useful because they’re flexible.

And notes are truly useful when you revisit them, often months or years later. To compare to what you’re doing or thinking in the present to more longstanding ideas you’ve recorded. They’re also useful because they’re searchable.