The append-and-review note: a practical guide

The append-and-review note is a note-taking method Andrej Karpathy described in March 2025. You keep one note. New things go at the top. Every so often you scroll down, and anything still worth your attention gets copied back to the top. Everything else sinks.

I've written separately about why the method works and how it led me to build Gravity. This page covers the practical side: how to start, what a normal week looks like, and the small decisions that make it stick. You can do all of it in a plain text file. Gravity is the app I built to make it easier, and I'll say where it helps.

The three rules

1. Append. Put every new thought at the top of the same note. Don't choose a place, add a title or pick a tag.
2. Review. Now and then, scroll down and skim. You're not searching. You're seeing what catches your eye.
3. Rescue. When something still matters, move it back to the top. Leave everything else where it is.

That's the method. Karpathy adds a few details worth copying. He sometimes merges or rewrites related notes when he finds them. He rarely deletes anything. And he starts some entries with a word and a colon, like watch:, listen: or read:, so he can search for them later.

Your first week

Day one

Pick the tool you'll use and make it the easiest thing to open on your phone. In Apple Notes, that means one note called "notes", pinned. In Gravity, it's the app itself, which opens with the cursor already in the box at the top. Then write everything down: to-dos, ideas, a film someone recommended, the command you always forget. One line is enough.

Days two to four

Keep appending. Resist the urge to tidy. If a note feels too trivial to write down, write it anyway. You can't tell what matters yet, and filtering too early costs more than it saves.

Day five

Do your first proper review. Scroll from the top until you reach things you've already seen. Rescue two or three notes that still feel alive. If a to-do is done, delete or archive it. Everything else can stay put.

After that

Review for a minute or two most days, and scroll deeper once a week or so, when you have time. Some people do it with their morning coffee. I tend to do it when I open the app to write something and notice what's just below.

What to rescue

A note deserves rescuing when it gives you a small jolt, when it connects to something you're working on right now, or when you notice you've written the same thought before. Rescue unfinished to-dos you still intend to do.

Don't rescue out of guilt. If you pass an idea for the third time and feel nothing, let it keep sinking. It isn't gone, and you can still search for it.

Where Gravity helps

You can run this method in any text editor, and plenty of people do. The friction shows up in two places: rescuing, which in a single long note means select, copy, scroll to the top and paste, and reviewing, which in one enormous text block is hard to skim.

Gravity turns each entry into its own note in a single stream, newest at the top.

• To append, type and press Return twice. On the Mac, Option-Space opens a capture panel from any app. The home screen widget and the share sheet also drop new notes straight into the stream.
• To rescue, swipe a note right on iPhone, iPad or Android, or press R on the Mac, and it jumps to the top. Each note shows when you wrote it and how many times you've rescued it.
• On your phone, older notes fade a little as they age, and a rescue resets the clock. Editing a note doesn't move it, so fixing a typo won't bump it up.
• When you're done with a note, swipe left to archive, delete, share or copy. Archived notes have a page of their own, and search can include them.
• Start a note with read: or todo: and it gets its own colour. On your phone, searching for read: shows only those notes. There's more on how I use prefixes.

Doing it elsewhere

Apple Notes is what Karpathy uses. It's free, syncs through iCloud, and works well if you're happy to copy and paste to rescue. It's also full of folders and other notes, which makes it easy to drift back into filing.

A plain text or Markdown file, in any editor or in Obsidian, gives you total control and portability. Rescuing is cut and paste, and reviewing a very long file on a phone is awkward.

Drafts opens to a blank page and is excellent for capture. Its model is many separate drafts with an inbox and archive, so a single ranked stream takes some setting up.

If any of those already works for you, keep using it. The method matters more than the app.

Who it suits

The method suits people who have lots of small thoughts through the day and want them out of their head quickly. It suits people who've given up on elaborate systems. It doesn't suit shared team notes, research projects that need links between sources, or anything where you need a strict structure.

Questions

Is the append-and-review note the same as a Zettelkasten?

No. A Zettelkasten is a network of linked, permanent notes you build deliberately. Append-and-review has no links and no permanence. Notes earn their place by being rescued, and most are allowed to fade.

How long should a review take?

A minute or two is enough most days. If you find yourself tidying for twenty minutes, you're drifting back into maintenance.

What happens when the note gets huge?

In a single text note, scrolling gets slower and search does more of the work. In Gravity, notes are separate items in a list, so a long history doesn't slow anything down, and archived notes leave the stream.

Can I use it for work and personal notes together?

Yes, and I'd recommend it. Splitting them into two streams brings back the "where does this go?" question the method exists to remove. A prefix like work: is enough if you need to filter.

Gravity is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and on Google Play for Android.