Atomic Notes
- How to think in writing, part 1: The thought behind the thought by Henrik Karlsson.
- Chase your reading by Robin Hanson.
- Learning by writing by Holden Karnovsky.
- How to make writing less hard by Oliver Burkeman.
- When to begin writing by Sheldon Richmond (it’s an old one but a good one).
- Plain text (Markdown) notes.
- Each note is a single idea with a unique ID.
- Each note deserves a clear title.
- Notes link meaningfully to other notes.
- Tiago Forte’s summary of How to Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens
-
Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia
-
Document your journey through the deep forest
-
Avoid inert ideas
-
Converse about what really matters to you
-
Imagine, then build, new knowledge products
-
Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from
-
An example
-
If you’re not sure what website feeds are, see IndieWeb: feed reader and how to use RSS feeds. ↩︎
-
Does the index box distort the facts?
-
Can you create coherent writing just from a pile of notes?
-
Perhaps you should keep your notes private
-
Make it flow
-
To create coherent writing, make coherent notes
-
Begin with fragments
-
From smaller parts build a greater whole
-
Join your work together
-
Do it seamlessly well
- If you’ve enjoyed it so far, you can just keep doing what you’ve been doing, collecting all the things. Why not?
- But if you like, you could start doing it more deliberately. For example, at the start of a new year, you could say to yourself: In 2023 I seem to have been interested in a,b, and c. Now in 2024 I want to explore more about b, drop a, and learn about d and e.
- How to be interested in everything
- Don’t you need to start with categories?
- It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories
- To build something big start with small fragments
- Thoughts are nest-eggs: Thoreau on writing
- This article is adapted from a comment on Reddit
-
There are exceptions. A few people have tried to video their whole lives. And at least one person, Lion Kimbro, has tried to write down all their thoughts. But its not sustainable. ↩︎
-
Which way is up?
-
Try seeing the trees and the forest too
-
Hierarchy, heterarchy, homoarchy… am I just making these words up?
-
Get linking to get thinking
-
The key questions
-
What if I really just want a fixed structure?
- A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree.
- Manuel Lima on The power of networks (it’s a cool video!)
- Top image source: The Card System at the Office by J. Kaiser, 1908.
- Free-form note-making. In this mode, you start with no expectations and just make notes whenever something grabs you. This is great when you don’t yet know what you want to focus on. The risk is you try to read everything, only to discover it’s like drinking the ocean. Ars longa, vita brevis, so you’ll ultimately need to narrow down your field somehow.
- Directed note-making. In this mode, you already know, broadly, what interests you, for example, Richard Hamming’s 10-20 problems. So you make notes whenever something you read resonates with one of your predetermined interests. I used to think I was interested in everything, like Thomas Edison. But after writing notes on whatever took my fancy for a while, I observed that really, I kept revolving around a fairly limited set of concerns. So mostly these days I make directed notes, or else engage in the closely related purposeful note-making.
- Purposeful note-making. This mode is more focused still than directed note-making. Here you have a specific project in mind, such as a particular book or article you want to write, and so you make notes whenever your reading material chimes with what you want to write about. If there’s a risk to this kind of note-making, it’s that in your focused state, you’ll miss ideas that you might otherwise have found worth making notes about.
A minimal approach to making notes
I want a minimal approach to making notes.
I don’t want anything fancy, just enough structure to be useful.
When I see people’s souped-up Obsidian note-taking vaults my head spins (OK, I’m jealous). I also wonder, though, what extra result is achieved with a fantastically complex system. Having said that, I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them, and I do admire people’s creativity in this area.
I just can’t be bothered to do it myself.
When discussing the Zettelkasten approach to making notes, it seems there are a lot of different note types to consider, which confuses people. The extensive discussion about different types of notes caused by reading Sonke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes makes me think this multiple-note-types approach is just too complicated for me. So what do I do instead?
Five useful articles about writing
Here are five links with worthwhile writing advice. 🖋️
A forest of evergreen notes
Jon M Sterling, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, has created his own ‘mathematical Zettelkasten’, which he also calls ‘a forest of evergreen notes’.
He maintains a very interesting website, built using a tool he created, named, appropriately enough, Forester.
The implementation of his ideas raises all sorts of ideas and questions for me, almost all enthusiastic. Here are a few in no order at all:
Make your notes a creative working environment
“Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?”
This is a question Manuel Moreale regularly asks his guests on the People and Blogs newsletter. The answers are always fascinating and well worth a read.
This got me thinking about my own working environment and maybe I overthought it. It looks like I’ve totally ignored Barry Hess’s reminder that you’re a blogger not an essayist.[^1] Anyway, here goes.
Note: This post is part of the Indieweb Carnival on creative environments.
When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, likes to keep his notes messy1:
“‘Messiness’, in this context at least, is just the state of not being so hubristic as to imagine that you know, in advance, precisely what’s required in order to do or to create something worthwhile. Which, of course, nobody does.” - The life-changing magic of not tidying up
I really appreciate the benefits of serendipity, but I also need some structure, which is why I’m happy with making atomic notes, densely linked. You might call it a Zettelkasten. Burkeman says he tried a Zettelkasten approach to his notes, but found it too organised.
That’s not at all how I’ve experienced it.
The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost.
It’s almost magical.
So instead of being obsessive, I just have a few simple rules that I mostly stick to.
And while this little system might not result in much tidiness, it’s still really neat.
Don't make a Zitatsalat out of your writing
Zitatsalat? What does that even mean?
Yes, Zitatsalat. I found this lovely but rarely used German term in the title of a book by the journalist Stephan Maus. The book’s name is Zitatsalat von Hinz & Kunz.[^1]
I love the rhyming rhythm of this compound term, but what does Zitatsalat actually mean?
Well, Zitatsalat translates as Quote Salad. It’s not a compliment.
Zitatsalat, by Stephan Maus (2002).
But what’s wrong with quoting other writers?
Work as if writing is the only thing that matters
“Work as if writing is the only thing that matters. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you consume information completely changes the way you engage with it. You’ll be more focused, more curious, more rigorous, and more demanding. You won’t waste time writing down every detail, trying to make a perfect record of everything that was said. Instead, you’ll try to learn the basics as efficiently as possible so you can get to the point where open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about. Almost every aspect of your life will change when you live as if you are working toward publication. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to present your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately, thinking several steps beyond what you’re reading to consider its implications and potential.”
The card index system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it?
Niklas Luhmann, the famed sociologist of Bielefeld, Germany, wrote of how he saw his voluminous working notes (his ‘Zettelkasten’) as a kind of conversation partner, which surprised him from time to time. But he wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s notes might be in some sense alive.
At the end of the Nineteenth century there was a massive explosion of technological change which affected almost every aspect of society. People marveled at new invention after new invention and there was a tendency to see mechanical and especially electrical advances as somehow endowed with life. The phonograph, for example, was held to be alive and print adverts even claimed it had a soul.
How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive.
💬"At what point does something become part of your mind, instead of just a convenient note taking device?"
A question discussed with philosopher David Chalmers, on the Philosophy Bites podcast.
🎙️Technophilosophy and the extended mind
So much of this depends on what ‘the mind’ means. Meanwhile, we do seamlessly interact with our note-making tools, to achieve more than we could without them.
Give it, give it all, give it now
Mark Luetke shows how he uses a Zettelkasten for creative work (‘zines!)
“The goal here is to create an apophenic mindset - one where the mind becomes open to the random connections between objects and ideas. Those connections are the spark we’re after. That spark is inspiration.”
Atomic notes - all in one place
From today there’s a new category in the navigation bar of Writing Slowly.
‘Atomic Notes’ now shows all posts about making notes.
How to make effective notes is a long-standing obsession of mine, but this new category was inspired by Bob Doto, who has his own fantastic resource page: All things Zettelkasten.
The Atomic Notes category is now highlighted on the site navigation bar.
And if you’d like to follow along with your favourite feed reader,there’s also a dedicated RSS feed (in addition to the more general whole-site feed).1
But if there’s a particular key-word you’re looking for here at Writing Slowly, you can use the built-in search.
And if you prefer completely random discovery, the site’s lucky dip feature has you covered.
Connect with me on micro.blog or on Mastodon. And on Reddit, I’m - you guessed it - @atomicnotes.
See also:
Assigning posts to a new category with micro.blog
How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought
It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.
One potential problem associated with making notes according to the Zettelkasten approach is Verknüpfungszwang: the compulsion to find connections. It may be true philosophically that everything’s connected, but in the end what matters is useful or meaningful connections. With your notes, then, you need to make worthwhile, not indiscriminate links.
Another potential problem is Fetzenwissen: fragmentary knowledge, along with the illusion that disjointed fragments can produce integrated thought.
Almost by definition, notes are brief, and I’m an enthusiast of making short, modular, atomic notes. Yes, this results in knowledge presented in fragments. And in their raw form these fragmentary notes are quite different from the kind of coherent prose and well-developed arguments readers usually expect. You can’t just jam together a set of notes and expect them to make an instant essay. So is this fragmentary knowledge really a problem for note-making? If so, how can determined note-makers overcome it?
From fragments you can build a greater whole
Everything large and significant began as small and insignificant
This is my working philosophy of creativity and I’m trying to follow it through as best I can. Starting with simple parts is how you go about constructing complex systems.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system”. — John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, p. 71.
Bits and pieces put together to create a semblance of a whole, by Lawrence Weiner
How to decide what to include in your notes
Before the days of computers, people used to collect all sorts of useful information in a commonplace book.
The ancient idea of commonplaces was that you’d have a set of subjects you were interested in. These were the loci - the places - where you’d put your findings. They were called loci communis - common places, in Latin, because it was assumed everyone knew what the right list of subjects was.
But in practice, everyone had their own set of categories and no one really agreed. It was personal.
Since the digital revolution, things have become trickier still. There’s no real storage limit so you could in principle make notes about everything you encounter. But no matter what software you use, your time on this earth is limited, so you need to narrow the field down somehow1.
But how, exactly?
You might consider just letting rip and collecting everything that interests you, as though you’re literally collecting everything.
Lion Kimbro tried to make a map of every thought he had.
As time passes, you’ll notice that you haven’t actually collected everything because that’s completely impossible. Even Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, wasn’t interested in absolutely everything, although he tried hard to be. If you do a bit of a stock-take of your own notes, you’ll see that, really, you gravitate towards only a few subjects.
These are your very own ‘commonplaces’.
From then on you have two choices.
You could create an index, with a set of keywords, and add page number references to show what subject each entry is about, and how they relate. Or not. Of course, it’s your collection of notes and you can do whatever pleases you. That’s the point.
Bower birds collect everything, but with one crucial principle.
Where I live we have satin bower birds.
The male creates a bower out of twigs and strews the ground with the beautiful things he’s found. Apparently this impresses the females. The bower can contain practically anything, and it really is beautiful. Clothes pegs, pieces of broken pottery, plastic fragments, bread bag ties, lilli pilli fruit, Lego, electrical wiring, string - even drinking straws, as in the photo above. The male bower bird really does collect everything. But what every human notices immediately is that every single item, however unique, is blue.
I enjoy collecting stuff in my Zettelkasten, my collection of notes, but like the bower bird I have a simple filter. I always try to write: “this interests me because…” and if there’s nothing to say, there’s no point in collecting the item. It’s just not blue enough.
See also:
Images:
Sacha Chua Book Summary CC-by-4.0.
Peter Ostergaard, Flickr, CC NC-by 2.0 Deed
Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
What does it mean to write notes ‘from the bottom up’, instead of ‘from the top down’?
It’s one of the biggest questions people have about getting started with making notes the Zettelkasten way. Don’t you need to start with categories? If not, how will you ever know where to look for stuff? Won’t it all end up in chaos?
Bob Doto answers this question very helpfully, with some clear examples, in What do we mean when we say bottom up?. I especially like this claim:
“The structure of the archive is emergent, building up from the ideas that have been incorporated. It is an anarchic distribution allowing ideas to retain their polysemantic qualities, making them highly connective.”
Ross Ashby's other card index
During the Twentieth Century many thinkers used index cards to help them both think and write.
British cyberneticist Ross Ashby kept his notes in 25 journals (a total of 7,189 pages) for which he devised an extensive card index of more than 1,600 cards.
At first it looks as though Ashby used these notebooks to aid the development of his thought, and the card index merely catalogued the contents. But it turns out he used his card index not only to catalogue but also to develop the ideas for a book he was writing.
Even the index is just another note
It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories
At some point in your note-making journey you’ll notice that quite a few people like to place their notes in fixed categories according to some scheme or other. The ancient method of commonplaces held that knowledge was naturally organised according to loci communis (common places). Ironically, no one from Aristotle onwards could ever agree on what the commonly-agreed categories were. Assigning your notes to categories is consistent with the ‘commonplace’ tradition, but that’s not what the prolific sociologist Niklas Luhmann did with his Zettelkasten, and furthermore it runs exactly counter to Luhmann’s claim in ‘Communicating with Slipboxes’, where he said:
“it is most important that we decide against the systematic ordering in accordance with topics and sub-topics and choose instead a firm fixed place (Stellordnung).”
But there’s no need to despair, there is a way through the impasse! After all, what exactly is a subject or category? The subject or category index itself, it turns out, is nothing other than just another note. Here’s a real-life example:
“i have this note that basically functions as an general index and entry point for my ZK: it has every index card plus a People index and every main card.” - u/Efficient_Earth_8773
When everything’s a note, even the categories are just notes
Why does this matter? If even the index is just a note, then you haven’t constrained yourself with pre-determined categories. Instead, you can have different and possibly contradictory index systems within a single Zettelkasten, and further, a note can belong not only to more than one category, but also to more than one categorization scheme. Luhmann says:
“If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link [or reference].”
When even the index is just a note, a reference to a ‘category’ takes no greater (or lesser) priority than any other kind of link. This is liberating. Where a piece of information ‘really’ belongs shouldn’t be determined in advance, but by means of the process itself.
The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison.
Some people want an index, like folders in a filing cabinet, or subject shelves in the library. Well they can have it: just write a note with the subjects listed and make them linkable. Some people don’t want this, and they can ignore it. I personally don’t understand why you’d want to set up a subject index that mimics Wikipedia or the Dewey Decimal system, or even the ‘common places’ of old. I’m neither an encyclopedist, a librarian, nor an archivist. What I’m trying to do is to create new work. I want to demonstrate my own irreducible subjectivity by documenting my own unique journey through the great forest of thought. My journey is subjective, because it’s my journey. I’m pioneering a particular route, and laying down breadcrumbs for others to follow should they so choose. It’s unique, not because it’s original but because the small catalogue of items that attract me is wholly original. As film-maker Jim Jarmusch said:
“Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” (I stole that from Austin Kleon).
But that’s just me (and Luhmann).
Make just enough hierarchy to be useful
Having thought a bit about this I’m inspired now to sketch my own workflow, to see how it… flows. In general, I favour just enough data hierarchy to be viable - which really isn’t very much at all. I’m inspired by Ward Cunningham’s claim that the first wiki was ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’. Come to think of it, this may be one of the disadvantages of the way the Zettelkasten process is presented: perhaps it comes across as more complex than it really needs to be. As the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra lamented,
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - On the nature of Computing Science (1984).
If you must have hierarchies like lists and trees, remember that they’re both just subsets of a network.
Source: I don’t know. If you do, please tell me ;)
See also:
Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile)
I finished reading Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra on New Year’s Eve, so it just scraped into my reading for 2023. And while reading I made notes by hand, as I’ve done before. Although there aren’t very many notes (just eleven, plus a literature note that acts as a mini-index), they’re high quality, since I found the book very interesting.
I don’t mean I’ve written objectively ‘good’ notes. Rather, I mean the notes are high quality for my purposes. Everyone who reads with a pen in hand is an active reader, so the notes one person makes will be different - perhaps completely different- from the notes another person makes. In any case, no two readers read a book the same way.
Reflecting on this it seems to me there are at least three fruitful ways, or modes, of making notes while reading, as follows: Free-form, directed, and purposeful note-making.
Each of these note-making modes has its place, but in this particular case I was reading Finding the Heart Sutra with a very specific project in mind. So the notes I made were also quite specific. I imagine that someone else would be surprised by the notes I made, since they don’t really reflect the contents of the book. For instance, my notes are definitely not a summary of the book’s contents. Nor do they even follow the main contours of the book’s themes. Instead, I was making connections while reading with the main concerns of my own project. Each of my notes stands in its own right and could potentially be used in a variety of different contexts, but collectively, they make sense in relation to my own preoccupations. They fit into my own Zettelkasten, and no one else’s.
“Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten. I must warn you, however, that the importance of the result is not the measure of the importance of the problem. The three problems in physics—anti-gravity, teleportation, and time travel—are seldom worked on because we have so few clues as to how to start. A problem is important partly because there is a possible attack on it and not just because of its inherent importance.” - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research. Sources: pdf; YouTube; Gwern.net.
If you want to know more about how to read a book, you could do worse than read How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. It’s not the last word on the subject, but it’s a good starting point.
And it’s a warning against a fourth mode of note-making that I don’t advise: encyclopedic note-making. This is where you read a book and try to write a summary that will work for everyone. First, it’s hard work, and secondly, it’s probably already been done. If you open the link above you’ll see that the Wikipedia entry for How to Read a Book already includes a summary of the book’s contents. There are circumstances where the careful and complete summary is worthwhile, but I suggest you only start this task with the end - your own end - in mind.
If you have thoughts about making notes while reading, I’d be very interested to hear about it.
See also:
A note on the craft of note-writing
Learning to make notes like Leonardo
How to make the most of surprising yourself
How to be interested in everything
Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters?
And to keep up to date, you can subscribe to the weekly email digest.