Working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places. Writing, then, will mean relying heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down.

you could settle for three notes a day and still build up a significant critical mass of ideas in a very reasonable time. And you could settle for less than one book every twelve months.

The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box. The former can be very brief as the context is clearly the text they refer to. The latter need be written with more care and details as they need to be self-explanatory.

Here, everything is about building up a critical mass of useful notes in the slip-box, which gives us a clear idea of how to read and how to take literature notes.