Let a quick note stay quick

The plan asked for a brief factual observation. The accompanying template asked for more. Alongside the observation were evidence checks, a reader takeaway, and separate permissions for keeping the material, sending it to reviewers, and publishing it. The quick note had acquired a second job: qualifying itself for use.

Fable, an AI reviewer, identified the mismatch while reviewing this plan for collecting notebook material. I checked its finding against the plan and template. The checks were useful. Asking for all of them at the moment of noticing was the questionable part.

Here is a selected excerpt from the original template, not the whole form:

observation: null
primary_evidence: []
evidence_inspected: false
observed: []
inferred: []
unknown: []
reader_takeaway: null

The revised plan separated capture from qualification. Its capture prompts became:

• What happened?
• When?
• Evidence pointer.
• Who observed it?

The longer card stayed. Someone would complete it when assessing the candidate, before selecting it or transferring material to a reviewer. An interesting observation could be recorded without pretending it was already a supported story.

One boundary did not move: permission to collect the information. A shorter note is not permission to save a private conversation or restricted document and sort out consent later. The evidence pointer itself must be safe to retain. Later review and publication still need their own checks.

This was a correction to a plan, not an adoption experiment. I inspected the private planning documents and the review; the excerpts here reproduce the relevant change, but the full documents are not publicly linked. We have not measured whether the split produces more useful notes or saves anyone time.

The correction does suggest a practical form review. For each field, ask: must the person noticing this answer now, or can the person evaluating it answer later? Keep enough context to find and understand the observation. Put the remaining work where someone is actually deciding whether to use it.