Atomic Notes
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In-box
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Sleeping
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References
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Main
“You only come to know these things in hindsight – when you look back and see the precarious chain of events, happenstance, and good fortune that led to wherever you are now. Before you reach that point, you have no way of predicting which idea will make a difference and which will die on the vine. That’s why you record them all. No matter how random, how small, how half-baked, how unfinished it may be; if you have a thought, record it right away.” ― Antony Johnston, The Organised Writer.
I found a way to create order from my jumbled ideas
From a single idea to many, to networks of linked ideas to reconfigured networks of knowledge.
This is a model of how students learn, devised by educational psychologist John B. Biggs and presented in his co-authored book, Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does.
The key concept here, ‘structure of observed learning outcomes’ (SOLO), is summarised quite well in Wikipedia.
(Image source: Biggs and Tang, 2011: 91.)
To me this diagram clearly relates to the process of writing and developing short, clear notes.
From a single note to many, to networks of linked notes, to reconfigured networks of knowledge.
The first, prestructural stage, though, isn’t simply empty in my experience. Instead I begin from a whole heap of ideas and thoughts jumbled together like pick-up sticks.
Image source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File…
The problem is it’s too easy to stay in this prestructural stage, where thoughts and ideas are plenty, but they’re a jumbled mess. That’s because even when we make notes, our notes remain either poorly organised, or else well-organised, but set up according to some pre-established schema that hinders further conceptual development.
This metaphor of straightening and sorting a convoluted mess is also key for computer programming. For example, it’s evident on the cover of a well-known book, A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout.
The first stage proper, the unistructural stage, in my estimation, relates to the capacity to create an atomic note, that is, a note that identifies, isolates and deals with just one thought, idea or concept. This is the key move, and the reason I like to refer to ‘atomic notes’ as the leading idea.
The second, multistructural stage refers to the ability to do this repeatedly, reliably, and systemically.
According to Biggs and Tang, these early stages involve increasing the quantity of knowledge. In my adaptation, this simply means making more atomic notes.
The third, relational stage involves the process of making meaningful links, which is at the heart of the Zettelkasten methodology, and is also crucial for wikis.
The fourth, extended abstract stage relates to the ability to reconfigure networks of concepts to create new knowledge and insight.
According to Biggs and Tang, these stages move beyond the quantitive acquisition of knowledge and towards the qualitative:
“This distinction between knowing more and restructuring parallels two major curriculum aims: to increase knowledge (quantitative: unistructural becoming increasingly multistructural); and to deepen understanding (qualitative: relational, then extended abstract). Teaching and assessment that focus only on the quantitative aspects of learning will miss the more important higher level aspects. Quantitative, Level 1, theories of teaching and learning address the first aim only, increasing knowledge.” (Biggs and Tang, 2011: 90)
This is how I move: from jumbled thoughts to clearer single notes, from single notes to many, from many to meaningful links, and then—if I keep going—to something new.
The SOLO taxonomy shows why this progression matters. It’s not just about gaining more knowledge, but about transforming it. Make modular notes, link them, and let new insights emerge. This isn’t just a way for me to remember what I’ve learned—it’s a way to learn what I didn’t know I knew.
And if it still feels like pick-up-sticks in your head, don’t worry, there’s time—the game is just beginning.
Now read: Atomic notes and the unit record principle.
Reference:
Biggs, J and Tang, C. (2011): Teaching for Quality Learning at University, (4th Edition. McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, Maidenhead). ISBN: 78-0-33-524275-7. PDF
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“It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much."—Leonard Woolf. Source.
My take: Choose your own race and finish it. The image is an example of how AI already looks unfashionable.
From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow
In his book, 📖 Writing Tools, veteran journalist Roy Peter Clark teaches that writers should break long projects into parts. In fact, that’s how he wrote his book. It started life as a year-long series of online posts, one per week, until finally he’d written fifty of them (I guess he took a couple of weeks off 😁).
It’s an obvious piece of advice that’s surprisingly hard to remember. Conversely it’s easy to feel daunted by big projects, forgetting that they are always made out of smaller pieces.
My working philosophy of creativity is that from fragments you can build a greater whole.
One small part joins up with another and another until soon, like rain, a trickle grows to become a flood. Clark says:
Tiny drops of writing become puddles that become rivulets that become streams that become deep ponds.
This is why I make short notes and join them together to create longer pieces of writing. I’m daunted by the larger task but not at all daunted by the quiet joy of writing one short note followed by another, and another.
This is what I call the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
It may be short, but it’s endlessly repeatable. And the results can be quite impressive.
Clark also mentions that he sometimes asks his new writing students to indicate how many of them have run a marathon. Usually only a couple have, but when he asks how many think they could do it, if they were given a much longer period, nearly everyone raises their hands.
This reminded me of the rather lovely short film about the Australian farmer who ran his own marathon, one piece at a time. In this case he did just one mile every hour until the whole distance was run. And he did a whole lot of other work too. Improbably, this guy’s name is Beau Miles.
OK, that’s great and all, but how exactly do you do it, one drop at a time?
Here’s my take on how to write an article from your notes.
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Have you ever read a book by mistake?
Revisiting a backup file of my old notes reminded me of the time I was reading what I assumed to be a novel by Ruth Ozeki, but it turned out to be a novel by Cynthia Ozick, published in 1987, called The Messiah of Stockholm.
Anyone could have made that mistake, I submit.
At least, anyone who, like me, failed to read the cover properly.
And every single page with the author’s name in the footer.
In any case I loved the book, even though it wasn’t written by Ruth Ozeki, which I didn’t realise at the time.
It’s about a man who believes he is the son of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was murdered by Nazis and his magnum opus, The Messiah lost. Although it’s (fairly) clear he can’t really be the great writer’s son, a bookseller, Mrs Eklund, goes along with the man’s story. They strike up a relationship in which she ‘believes’ his paternity claims while he believes, or at least doesn’t question, her repeated claim that her husband, Dr Eklund is inside the flat above the shop.
Is he? Is he really?
And then Adela turns up, claiming to be the daughter of Bruno Schultz, carrying with her the manuscript of the lost book. Are they going to ‘believe’ this too?
So in a way it was appropriate that I should have mistaken Ozick for Ozeki. Displaced identity was the theme. I did wonder, though, why the Ozeki writing style about which I had read was not much in evidence in the novel actually in front of me.
So there is still the genuine Ozeki to be read. Let’s hope I don’t pick up by mistake a novel by Julie Otsuka. Unless that too proves to be excellent, in which case I’ll be happy.
Over to you. Have you ever read a book by mistake? And was it an unforeseen calamity, or an unexpected joy?
Writing notes is much more than just writing notes. Done right, it’s a way of working with ideas:
I’m organising my notes right now and stumbled over this quote:
You’re not building a note-taking system, but rather a way to capture, explore, and generate ideas. by Jorge Arango on page 181 Duly Noted
The future of the humanities is wide open
The humanities within universities are facing decline and financial prioritization, yet interest in liberal arts thrives outside academic institutions.
To understand the future of AI, look to the past
The hype about AI isn’t new. In his day, Victor Hugo was breathless about the book.
Why not publish all your notes online?
Contemplating whether to publish personal notes online reveals both the potential benefits of motivation and community engagement and the drawbacks of self-doubt and privacy concerns.
In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public edwinwenink.xyz.
These notes are a constant work in progress and not necessarily intended for your reading. Nevertheless, I submit them to your “voyeurism.”
(HT: Annie)
And previously, Andy Matuschak has recommended working with the garage door up.
But where’s the limit?
Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:
It’s a great time to be writing the future.
Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?
They just innovate harder.
Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.
Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.
Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection
Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?
1. Write notes in your own words
It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.
Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.
2. Refer to the Internet Archive
Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is
Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.
Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.
3. Create your own personal archive
A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.
Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.
Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.
With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.
4. Don’t worry, be happy
Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.
More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?
Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?
5. Sow and then reap
The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.
Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.
None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.
I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.
Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes
Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.
These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.
Here’s a very brief summary of the process:
The In-box
Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.
Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.
The Sleeping folder
The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.
The Reference folder
The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.
The Main folder
Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.
Taming the chaos
That’s it.
Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.
Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.
💬 This is a quiet space…
Moving to Sydney offered cheap train travel compared with Europe. “Never mind arriving,” I would say, “it’s great value just for the view.”
Looks like they’ve finally worked out the real value proposition.
Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to
It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?
I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.
Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.
He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.
Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:
“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”
By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.
That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.
“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’
According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.
In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:
“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”
Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:
“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”
Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.
If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.
That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.
In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.
Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.
The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:
“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”
Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.
So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.
Footnote:
Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.
“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion
Acknowledgement
Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?
References
Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.
Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.
Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…
Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary
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The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive
Georges Didi-Huberman’s extensive collection of over 148,000 notes exemplifies the enduring relevance and creativity of the Zettelkasten method in art and philosophy.
Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes
Note-taking should mainly serve as a means to enable writing rather than being an exhaustive record of knowledge. At least, that’s my approach.
My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts
Writing is a messy, iterative process involving rough ideas, multiple drafts, and the challenge of balancing note-taking with drafting to ultimately create coherent work.