Ideas over time
Ideas over time looks across all your notes and groups them into threads: notes about the same thing, written over weeks or months. It then shows how each thread has grown and changed.
It needs the same small model as search by meaning. Turn it on in Settings → Finding connections if you haven’t yet. It works best once you have a few dozen notes.
The page
Click Ideas over time in the sidebar. Threads are sorted into sections:
- You keep returning to: threads you’ve written about in three or more different months.
- Ideas forming: threads whose first note was in the last 45 days.
- Dormant ideas: threads with no new note for 90 days or more.
- Other threads: everything else.
Each thread shows a few words that sum it up, how many notes it has, the months it spans, its main label, and a small bar chart of notes per month.
Two more sections appear when there’s something to show:
- What you read that seems to have shaped your thinking: a source note followed, in the same thread, by a related note of your own.
- Questions you haven’t come back to: questions you wrote down with no later note that picks them up.
A thread, month by month
Click a thread to read it in order. Each note is listed under its month, and small cues show how it connects:
- May build on… a source note that came before it in the same thread.
- Returns to your note from… an earlier note of yours on the same idea, at least a week before.
- May rethink when the later note pushes back on the earlier one (“but”, “not sure”, “tension with”).
- Asks a question when the note contains one.
Ask how your thinking on this changed… at the top starts a chat limited to this thread.
How much to trust it
Threads and cues are worked out on your computer from the meaning of your notes, your labels and dates. No AI writes any text here, so nothing is made up. But the grouping is a best guess, and the wording (“may”, “seems”) says so. Open the notes to judge for yourself.
The page updates on its own as you write, at most once a minute.