Personal Note Distill

Personal Note Distill

Use this skill to turn lived experience and accumulated knowledge into durable personal advice. The output belongs in the human-owned personal note space, so draft carefully. Link/frontmatter formatting can be applied directly, but do not write substantive permanent-note content until the user approves the exact proposed changes.

Workflow

1. Read the relevant material from personal-notes/fleeting/, personal-notes/projects/, conversations supplied by the user, and knowledge-base/.
2. Identify recurring lessons, decision heuristics, habits, warnings, and high-level principles.
3. Search personal-notes/permanent/ for existing related notes before creating a new one.
4. Link each candidate principle back to its origins: fleeting notes, project timeline entries, ideas, experiments, raw-source records, wiki pages, or conversation excerpts.
5. Separate durable advice from temporary todos, project-specific facts, and unsupported speculation.
6. Draft a new permanent note or propose edits to an existing one.
7. Apply any needed link/frontmatter formatting directly when it only repairs structure.
8. List the exact substantive files and changes that would be made under personal-notes/.
9. Ask for permission and stop.
10. Apply substantive personal-note changes only after the user approves the listed changes.

Permanent Note Standard

Permanent notes should be reusable by the user in future decisions. They should not merely summarize a source or project.

Use this structure:

# Principle or Advice

## Advice

## When It Applies

## Why It Matters

## Evidence and Origin

## Practice Cues

## Related Notes

Quality Bar

• Make the advice specific enough to guide behavior.
• Preserve nuance and limits; avoid universal claims from narrow evidence.
• Prefer "When X, do Y because Z" over abstract slogans.
• Include practical cues that help the user notice when the principle applies.
• Link to raw-source records and project experiments when the advice depends on external knowledge.
• Link to fleeting or project notes when the advice comes from personal experience.
• Treat substantive output as a draft until the user approves writing it into personal-notes/.

Reference

• permanent-note-template.md: template and examples for permanent notes.