Atomic Notes
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He’s the creator of the Tinderbox notemaking app. ↩︎
Publishing means no more hiding
Revelation must be terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. – David Whyte
Publishing my book, I had the strange feeling of having crossed an invisible but very powerful threshold.
It was while signing copies at a small and very supportive gathering, that it dawned on me that the thoughts that used to be just in my head are now public and exposed to the world – and since I’ve lodged this work in every State Library in Australia, they’ll never again be totally private.
I had thought I just wanted to publish my words, to release my book into the wild, as it were, to allow it to find its readers.
So it never occurred that I might have been benefiting in some way from the obscurity of the drafting process.
Not that I want to hide my voice – far from it.
Nor that I’m expecting a million readers. Again, far from it.
But the knowledge that I now have one unique reader – you – with whom my words will perhaps connect whether I bid them or not, well that changes things somehow.
And it’s certainly a revelation to realise there’s no going back.
My book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, is out now. Please check it out.
I fell down a rabbit hole writing about Hypercuriosity! 🤯 Inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s work.
Read how being curious about everything defines my process: https://writingslowly.com/2025/09/30/curious-about-hypercuriosity.html
#Hypercuriosity #Curiosity #ADHD #Writingslowly
Having written about the need to create your own writing environment, I found this post showing the writing spaces of 12 Booker Prize nominees quite illuminating. Each one seems like a small but mighty theatre stage (HT: kottke.org).
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritersLife #WritingTips
Curious about Hypercuriosity
One reason I make notes and write is that I’m curious about everything.
I’ve written previously about how to be interested in everything. And I’ve also written about busybodies, hunters and dancers - three different styles of curiosity.
It was the ‘dancer’ style of curiosity that resonated most with me:
“This type of curiosity is described as a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”
So I was interested to see that Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments and founder of Ness Labs, Has been exploring what she calls ‘hypercuriosity’, which may be associated with ADHD.
Well, I guess I’m the living proof. I set out this evening to write about my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning for Artists and Fighters but I ended up writing about something completely different instead: hypercuriosity.
Come to think of it, that’s how the book got written in the first place, by pursuing my curiosity. And come to think of it, that’s how I do practically everything.
In writing the book I was particularly attracted by the value placed on the Japanese concept of shoshin (初心), ‘beginner’s mind’ - a quality often downplayed in Western contexts, where experts are supposed to already know everything.
I’m more interested in not knowing - and then going to great lengths to find out.
Links:
Brar, G. (2024, November 14). The hypercuriosity theory of ADHD: An interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Evolution and Psychiatry (Substack).
Gupta, S. (2025, September 16). People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity. Science News.
Le Cunff, A. (2024). Distractability and impulsivity in ADHD as an evolutionary mismatch of high trait curiosity. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 10, 282.
Le Cunff, A. (2025, July 15). When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built: How do we design a world that supports hypercurious minds? Ness Labs.
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📚Tsundoku emergency temporarily averted.
Keeping a diary is a way of living
“A diary is not only a text: it is a behaviour, a way of life, of which the text is a by-product" - French theorist Philipe Lejeune. Source: Arts & Ideas Podcast.
Exactly so. I have a journalling habit, which fuels my Zettelkasten, (my collection of linked notes), which in turn fuels my writing. This in turn affects my life, which I journal about. It’s a virtuous circle.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
And did you know you can sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest?
Zettelkasten podcast episodes
Here are a couple of podcast interviews where the Zettelkasten approach to making notes is discussed in detail. Enjoy!
William Wadsworth (Exam Study Expert) interviews Sonke Ahrens, author of How to Take Smart Notes. Apple Podcasts.
Sönke Ahrens on Niklas Luhmann’s writing process:
“The main part of the writing process happened in this in-between space most people, I believe, neglect. They write notes, they read, they polish their manuscripts, but I think few people understand the importance of taking proper notes and organising them in a way that a manuscript, an argument, a chapter can evolve out of that.”
Jackson Dahl (Dialectic) interviews Billy Oppenheimer, Ryan Holiday’s research assistant, on staying attuned for clues. Apple Podcasts.
“I adopted/adapted Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which he learned from Robert Greene. And it’s just literally boxes of 4x6 notecards. I’ve never seen Robert’s actual cards, but I have seen Ryan’s. His are filled with shorthands: a maybe a phrase, a word, or a single sentence that conveys a story from some book. They are little reminders capturing the broad strokes of something. You notate it with the book and page number so you can go back and find the specific details.”
“Niklas Luhmann also has another great idea about making notes for an ignorant stranger… Because that’s what you are when you come back to it. We think, “There’s no way I’m going to forget this story.” You come back to it, and it’s highlighted and underlined. You’re like, “What was I loving about this?” I try to make the note cards for an ignorant stranger. You should be able to pick one up and have enough context to make out what this thing is. And so in a similar way, in the margins of books, I try to do that for myself.”
An atomic note isn’t just about ideas; it’s about time. Start smaller, stop sooner, and your notes become easier to reuse and connect. ✍️ Post here: The shortest writing session that could possibly work.
#NoteTaking #KnowledgeWork #zettelkasten #writingtips
Back to the Information City? How knowledge visualisation shapes the journey
I was intrigued by Mark Bernstein’s1 co-authored article revisiting the concept of the city as a visual metaphor for information in the era of hypertext.
Intrigued, because I’m not convinced the city makes things clearer. In fact the first thing that came into my mind was Steven Marcus’s claim from way back that urban dwellers experience a particular kind of estrangement. They sense that “the city is unintelligible and illegible”. This appears in a collection of essays on the Victorian city, in an essay titled ‘Reading the Illegible.’ (1973:257).
This idea - that the city can’t be read - put me in mind of Jonathan Raban’s proto-postmodernist book Soft City (1974), where he contrasts the book with the city, the legible with the illegible.
“The city and the book are opposed forms: to force the city’s spread, contingency, and aimless motion into the tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood. There is no single point of view from which we can grasp the city as a whole. That indeed is the distinction between the city and the small town. A good working definition of metropolitan life would center on its intrinsic illegibility. (p. 219)
As it happens, it seems that the article authors' conclusion is that the Information city is not a particularly promising metaphor to guide the navigation of complex information structures:
“It seems clear that the Information City is better suited to constructive than to exploratory hypertext.”
This ties in nicely with my take on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view that creativity is more about ‘itineration’ (wayfinding) than ‘iteration’ (making an object).
Would it be possible, then, somehow to depict the wayfinding process in and of itself without in advance also reifying the landscape? I’m imagining a walk through an unfamiliar place, which through repetition gradually becomes familiar, and may be rendered yet more familiar by establishing idiosyncratic markers, the way Ariadne’s thread guided Theseus through the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
*[Image source]: Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.*
The authors say of their attempted information visualisation:
“The Information City may be superb for some and intolerable for those who might prefer to work in a Piranesi dungeon.”
My view is that despite the efforts of UI creators, we don’t really have a choice in this matter. We are already living in Piranesi’s dungeon, in which meaning is lost and found and lost again, and where forgetting is as important as remembering.
That said, I’m as wary of the dream of information legibility as I am of the dream of urban legibility. The metaphor that works for me is of an immense and unknown forest, the deep forest of accumulated knowledge. Though travelers may have no sense of the ultimate extent of the forest, and even if there is no thread, they can make one as they explore. They may still provide a report, like a travel journal:
“Here is the route I took, and here are the landmarks I discovered on the way.".
This deep subjectivity allows for a limited form of objectivity:
“with my report in hand you too can follow this path through the trees.".
*[Image source: Hasui Kawase], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*
References:
Bernstein, Mark, Silas Hooper, and Mark Anderson. “Back to the Information City.” Paper presented at HT 2025: 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Chicago, IL, September 15–18, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3720553.3746664.
Dyos, H. J., and Michael Wolff. The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 1. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
Ingold, Tim. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042.
Raban, Jonathan. Soft City: The Art of Cosmopolitan Living. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974.
Use case for the Zettelkasten
Why use a Zettelkasten? Why indeed? Geeky online legend Gwern was rather negative:
Most people simply have no need for lots of half-formed ideas, random lists of research papers, and so on. This is what people always miss about “Zettelkasten”: are you writing a book? Are you a historian or Teutonic scholar like Niklas Luhmann? Do you publish a dozen papers a year? Are you the 1% of the 1%? No? Then why do you think you need a Zettelkasten?
He argued that tools for thought don’t actually aid thought and that the obviously useful alternative is ‘systems that think for the user instead’.
Wait, what? Systems that think for the user?? I disagree with this very strongly. Sure, it’s true that as they stand, ‘tools for thought’ are no substitute for humans putting in the effort. But I don’t see that as a valid criticism.
The human effort is the part that matters. The effort of thought is actually a feature not a bug. Human thought is preferable to AI computation not because it’s more efficient (although it very often is) but because it’s more human, and humans warm to the activity of other humans.
For instance, in early 2025 a Lithuanian explorer attempted to cross the Pacific Ocean in a one-man rowing boat. He made it to within 740km of the Australian coast, when he was assailed by a cyclone and prevented from sleeping for several days straight. In extremis he finally set off his SOS beacon and the Australian navy came to rescue him, despite the 16-metre-high swells they had to brave. The adventurer only just made it out alive. Returned from the dead, back on shore and reunited with this wife in a photogenic moment he sank to his knees as she embraced him.
Now this was all very interesting, despite the fact that the very ocean water that was trying to capsize him routinely crosses vast distances with no problem. No one cares about the brine, no one feels for its plight and the media never report on its travails. Did you ever see a headline like this:
“Alone and exhausted, a desperate ocean wave makes it gratefully to shore”?
No you didn’t. That was a rhetorical question. Human interest stories work because it’s humans that we’re interested in.
*Won't someone think of the poor wave?*
Improbably, this wasn’t the only Lithuanian paddler to survive a run-in with Australian waters in recent years. The previous year a Lithuanian kayaker slipped into some rapids on Tasmania’s Franklin River, where he was jammed between rocks and pinned down by a flow of 13 tonnes of water per second. Again, he was the subject of a daring and extreme rescue. Meanwhile, no one thought twice about how the water felt.
And no one cares either when it’s AI that’s supposedly doing the ‘thinking’. It’s inanimate. But they do care quite a lot about a solitary Lithuanian in mortal danger. And so on.
I’ve never visited the Franklin River, which this photograph I took in New Zealand clearly illustrates.
Getting back on track, the thought that goes into making notes matters, quite simply because thought just does matter. Conversely, when ‘systems think for the user’, well, whatever that is, it’s not thought.
But beyond this, I can’t help wondering why we need to justify at all a practice so basic as simply making notes and linking them. My half-formed thoughts might not be as good as Gwern’s (OK, they definitely aren’t), but at least they’re my half-formed thoughts.
In a co-authored conference paper, Mark Bernstein, creator of the Tinderbox app, makes what ought to be an obvious point:
“It may frequently be the case that we ourselves do not know the ultimate uses of our notes, yet still find note-taking rewarding.” - Bernstein et al., 2025, Back to the Information City
Reflecting on Gwern’s dismissal of the Zettelkasten approach, I’m reminded of self-help guru Oliver Burkeman, who had a different criticism to offer. He said he had tried a Zettelkasten but found it too organised. That got me wondering, how much mess is just enough?
For what it’s worth, I’ve found the Zettelkasten approach very practical and quite productive, despite my not being particularly organised. Here’s a book it helped me write and publish: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
And of course, my Zettelkasten is helping me to carry on Writing Slowly. You can follow the frenetic action with the weekly digest - a blog magically transformed into an email. Amazing!
See also: From tiny drops of writing great rivers will flow.
Reference:
Bernstein, Mark, Silas Hooper, and Mark Anderson. ‘Back to the Information City’. Paper presented at HT 2025: 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, September 15–18, 2025, Chicago, IL, USA. 2025. Preprint PDF.
#Zettelkasten #PKMS #notetaking #toolsforthought #Lithuanian #HT2025
Is there a Zettelkasten method?
Quite a few people write and speak about the Zettelkasten, a simple way of maintaining a note making system, but is there really any such thing? Some reflections on the seemingly obsolete practice of writing notes on small slips of paper and arranging them so they can be found again.
Open, free and poetic
The Web is 34 years old! Following on from Plenty of ways to write online, here are some really practical resources to help you create your own presence online :
Keeping the Web free, open and poetic.
Old hands will probably find a few useful tips here too.
Oh, and here’s another great big list of useful personal website stuff. Actually, I’m making a note of this for my own ‘going down the rabbit-hole’ purposes:
Resources List for the Personal Web
It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.
*Image source: Public Domain, Wikimedia.
#indieweb #webwriting #worldwideweb #blogging
Plenty of ways to write online
Writing online is more accessible than ever. We can maintain control of our own work by publishing on personal websites while also syndicating content to social media. And as I’ve discovered, it’s also easier than ever to publish a book..
Watch in awe as a fleeting thought becomes a lasting note
I describe in detail how I wrote a blog post and then repurposed it as a permanent note in my Zettelkasten collection. This is the opposite of my usual workflow, where I create publishable writing from my existing notes.
Hot takes on our future with AI
Here are eight ‘hot takes’ on the latest problems, questions and opportunities large language models are giving us. It was going to be just three, but the hot takes are coming thick and fast right now. These links are shared alongside my personal reflections on the impact and future of AI that does your writing for you while cosplaying as a human.
If there's more than one way of seeing, there's more than one way of organising
💬 “Our eyes are built for two perspectives. During the daytime we rely on our cone cells, which depend on lots of light and let us see details. At night the cone cells become useless and we depend on rod cells, which are much more sensitive. The rod cells in our eyes are connected together to detect stray light; as a result they don’t register fine details. If we want to see something in bright light, we focus the image on the center of our retina (the fovea), where the cone cells are tightly packed. To see something at night, we must look off to the side of it, because staring directly at it will focus the object on the useless cone cells in the fovea. The way we see in bright light differs from the way we see in shadows. Neither is the ‘‘right’’ way. We need both.” - Gary Klein (2009) Streetlights and Shadows. Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision-making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
On reflection, more can be said along these lines. Another way of looking at this ‘double perspective’ of human vision is to note that it constantly depends on some kind of accommodation between our two eyes working simultaneously and in concert.
So although vision is actually several processes taking place at once, we insist on perceiving it as one unified process. We can’t help it. We’re made to synthesize. But that doesn’t mean it is one process.
The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!
Update: I did it. Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is now available. I hope you enjoy it!
#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction
💬 On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts
Once we’ve let our thoughts mature for a while, we’ll want to produce something for other people to look at, an artifact.
Exactly so.
As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.
I designed a book in three and a half hours
A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.
Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.
Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.
