Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.

They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.

An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.

I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.

If you think about it, every note has to stop somewhere. So it’s not a big stretch to stop sooner rather than later, perhaps even before you’re really ready to stop… and to begin a new note.

But if your note-making practice is to write long notes making several points, then good luck to you, everyone finds their own working method.

You’ll still find several aspects of the Zettelkasten note-making approach useful.

For example:

  • giving each note a clear title,
  • linking your notes
  • creating reference notes so you don’t lose track of bibliographic information,
  • creating hub notes (or whatever you want to call them), to connect ideas together
  • enjoying just enough productive and creative mess

When I started I couldn’t see the point of ‘atomicity of ideas’. It was only gradually that I realised my long notes would be more useful if I made them modular.

There might be an analogy with what computer programmers call ‘separation of concerns’. You can build really big systems from simple components. It’s much harder to merge even just two complex components.

For a good illustration of this, see Herbert Simon’s parable of the two watchmakers.

Two watchmakers, Tempus and Hora, each make a watch with 1,000 parts. Whenever Tempus is interrupted or drops anything he has to start all over again. But the other watchmaker does it differently. Hora makes watches from assemblies of ten parts only, then assembling ten of these, then ten of these. So when Hora is interrupted, only a small part of the work is ever lost.

Reference

Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American philosophical society, 106(6), 467-482. PDF. Cited in W. Brian Arthur (2009). The Nature of Technology. What it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.

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