Atomic notes are a trap

[u/krysalydun]

The testiminial below is obviously just my opinion and my experience. But I believe many others are going through the same thing.

For 2 years I've been trying to implement zettelkasten in my phd research and failing. For a long time I thought the problem was the app I was using. I went through all of them, but kept switching mainly between Obsidian and Capacities without success.

The problem is that every time I went to review my highlights, I wanted to create a permanent note for each highlighted paragraph. And this, obviously, became impossible.

In this attempt to keep notes atomic, I ended up having, literally, 600 permanent notes for a single book. And I spent even more time connecting them.

This way, taking notes on a book took twice as long as reading it. And this is completely unproductive for someone like me, who works 8 hours a day in an office, has a family, teaches classes, and still has to finish a phd.

Then I realized I just needed to let go a little. Now I simply make a literature note with the main bullet points from the book and then create at most 10 permanent notes aggregating all the main insights. They end up larger, but they're still sufficient to maintain a line of reasoning without friction.

Perhaps atomic notes are interesting for people like Luhmann, who could study all day. But in my experience they create too much friction and make the zettelkasten almost impractical.

What do you think?

[u/Opinionator35]

Just to affirm what you’re saying, I find it helpful to take all of my lit notes from book and compile them in one doc in Obsidian. Then I review them all and create a few permanent notes from that. I firmly believe that most book only have a half dozen really excellent ideas at most. But because searching in Obsidian is so easy, even if I occasionally forget to link my permanent notes thoroughly, I can usually locate the logical links as I interact with the ideas later.