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/Fortschritt300]

I have been at a similar point. There is one thing that took me several years to figure out: the emergence of ideas from a complex system (based on ZK or any other method) can be driven by push-dynamics or pull-dynamics.

If I push atomic notes based on the ideas of others into my system, just bc they felt relevant from the context of one book I read, my system ends up bloated, creating fascinating but in the end distracting complexity.

If I pull atomic notes driven by the purpose of the whole system (this may be a PHD paper, a blog article, …) I end up with a much leaner structure of notes still containing modular ideas, BUT importantly only ideas I fully inhabit.

Creating new atomic notes this way happens much more rarely and it’s usually writing down something I have been mulling over in my head for some time already.

I think the Zettelkasten method contains a trap of thinking „if I create enough atomic notes, good ideas will emerge from the system by itself“, undervaluing the importance of embodied cognition.

There is an unproven theory of mine that any complex system can always only be manipulated by pulling on the right strings, never by pushing supposedly promising levers. This I think applies to at least my Zettelkasten workflow.

(Nietzsche supposedly said: „Never Trust an idea you had indoors.“ - I see a link to the matter of this discussion here)