One idea per note.
The links do the rest.

One idea per note: If a note contains two ideas it can only be linked as a unit, which makes the links vague. Splitting is almost always the right move when you cannot title a note in a short sentence.

Your words, not the author's: Rephrasing is the step that converts reading into understanding. A note full of quotations is a bookmark with extra steps, and it will be exactly as useless in a year.

Links with a reason: Write why two notes connect, not just that they do. Supports, contradicts, is a special case of, and reminds me of are all different relationships and the difference is where thinking happens.

Entry points into the box: Keep a few index or hub notes that point into dense clusters. Without them a large slip box becomes a place where nothing is lost and nothing can be found either.

Prompt against the whole canvas: Ask it to propose links between notes written months apart, cluster an untended region, or draft an outline from a group of notes you want to write from.

It suggests, you decide: A proposed connection you accept without examining is a link that teaches you nothing. The AI is useful for surfacing candidates from an archive too large to hold in your head.

Iterate without losing work: Re-prompt as often as you want. Notes you have written and linked stay exactly where they are while the AI builds around them.

Fleeting notes, deliberately temporary: Capture anywhere on the board and process them within a few days. Fleeting notes that are never processed are the most common way a slip box turns into a junk drawer.

Literature notes, tied to a source: Keep what a source said, with the reference, in its own region. These are raw material rather than thinking, and mixing them with your own ideas degrades both.

Permanent notes, the actual box: One idea, your words, linked into the network. This is the only category that compounds, and the only one worth being strict about.

Find the dense cluster: Zoom out and look for where the notes have accumulated. A dense region is a topic you have been thinking about for months whether or not you noticed, and it is what you should write.

Sequence the notes, then draft: Arrange the cluster into an order on the canvas before writing a word. The outline is already there; you are choosing a path through it rather than inventing structure.

The document opens beside the notes: Write in the built-in editor with the cluster still visible. Exporting notes to another application to write is where most people lose the connections they spent a year building.