Knowledge work shall accrete instead of being left over (like great emails in “sent” folder, wikis unlinked):
Scratch notes are valuable as well because it is a typical procedure starting from messy thoughts and solidify them later. A lot of great people work like this.
Also, leaps of insights appear after huge prior thoughts, iterations.
Accumulating, reviewing and re-thinking, researching on our knowledge base is compound return on knowledge.
Examples
Reading does not have to be linear, we could trying to answer a specific question when reading
Reading on phone is dangerous because we cannot write