Kept links each note to the ones before it, and brings old ideas back when they become useful again.
Type [[ to link one note to another. Kept writes the backlinks in the margin for you, so nothing you save stands alone.
Tuesday, 14 May
Locke kept his notebook by subject, with an index at the back so any entry could be found again in a minute (see Locke on indexing).1 The point was never the copying. It was the finding.
Seneca gives the same advice about reading: gather from many books, then blend what you gathered into one taste of your own.2 That is the part folders never did for me.3
So, fewer categories and more links. Let the index do the work.
A shortcut from any app, the web clipper, your phone’s share sheet, or a voice memo that arrives as text. Highlights from what you read land in your daily note.
As you write, the Related panel brings up older notes on the same idea. The graph shows how it all connects.
You ask: what did I decide about folders?
You stopped using them in 2023 and moved to links, because entries were easier to find through an index than a hierarchy.12
Ask your notes answers from your own writing, and cites every note it used.
“I used to lose the best lines in a drawer of notebooks. Now they find me while I’m drafting.”
“Three years of fieldwork, and Kept still connects an interview from the first month to what I wrote this morning.”
“It answers my questions with my own notes and shows its sources. That is the only kind of answer I trust.”
Every note is a plain Markdown file in a folder you choose. Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so only your devices can read it.
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2026-05-14
[reading, method]
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# On keeping a commonplace book
Locke kept his notebook by subject, with an index
at the back. See [[Locke on indexing]].
> Gather from many books, then blend them
> into one taste of your own. (Seneca, Letter 84)
#commonplace #retrieval$0
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