---
title: Q- Why do people prefer to structure later or not at all
tags:
- question
---
This page can be thought of as a contextual index page - so point to other pages while discussing how that's relevant to the common forms of structure people add to their notes. This is a hypertext hub.

[[It takes too much work to create structure]]. Adding structure up front can be too restrictive, preventing people from [[My tooling gets in the way of working at the speed of thought|work at the speed of thought]]. [[If I’m thinking too hard about structure before I write the note, I forget what I was going to write down]]. If they don't add structure later, it's because [[Adding structure later feels like a chore]].

[[C- Context is necessary for knowledge reuse]], but [[C- Specifying context for future reuse requires predicting trajectories of future reuse]] and [[C- Predicting trajectories of future reuse of information objects is hard]]. [[C- Specifying context for future reuse is costly]] and [[C- It is difficult to predict whether structure now will be worthwhile later]], so people determine that it is unlikely to be worth the effort. People will often prefer to leave ideas "percolating" in their head, as this allows for a more rapid and open flow of thought than writing it all down, which feels like prematurely closing their mind.

Through all of this, an underlying problem exists in most tools: [[C- An increasing amount of structure leads to entropy]].

For more, see [[R- Formality Considered Harmful]] and [[C- Incremental formalization can mitigate risks of formalism in interactive systems]].