Building Confidence Levels Into Your Notes
Launch library · evergreen read
Not every fact sitting in a research file deserves equal trust, and marking each one with a rough confidence level, such as confirmed, likely or uncertain, keeps that important distinction visible throughout the entire drafting process rather than letting it dissolve quietly into a single undifferentiated pile of notes.
This habit pays off most clearly under real deadline pressure, when the temptation to treat every note as equally solid is at its strongest, since a clear label makes it obvious at a glance which claims are genuinely ready for publication and which still need another source before they can be safely used.
It also creates a natural to do list for the final stage of a project: chasing down corroboration specifically for whatever claims remain marked uncertain, rather than spreading the limited remaining time evenly and inefficiently across everything all at once regardless of actual need or genuine risk of error.