Field Notes

Something happened, I noticed it, and I wrote it down while it was still sharp. That is the whole format.

A field note carries one observation and one takeaway. It does not carry a mechanism, because the mechanism is usually the part I would be guessing at. When a reading surprises me, the honest report is the reading and the surprise — not a confident story about why.

What that means in practice: candidate explanations stay open. If a meal spiked and I slept badly the night before, both are live and neither gets promoted to a cause. A single reading does not get to name its own reason.

Nothing in a field note should be risky to act on. The moment a piece contains a threshold, a dose, or a number someone might change their behaviour around, it stops being a field note and gets written as a discovery instead.