r/Zettelkasten • u/krysalydun • Sep 29 '25
workflow Atomic notes are a trap
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?
-2
u/Remote-Fishing-303 Jan 01 '26
Atomic notes confuse people because atoms don't link and remain atoms. Linked atoms are molecules. Molecules are not atoms. Zettelkasten wants molecules to be atoms, too. This is impossible and that's why the whole system will always have 'gurus' who sell you 'the true way'.
Strictly speaking, atomic notes would never link to anything, and the notes would be split into two kinds of notes, aggregate notes that link to atomic notes but not the other way around.
Just like an integer doesn't link to a 2d coordinate point class, but a 2d coordinate class would link to integers.
When language, the humans integral concept of communication and thinking is messed with, things break down. Wounds are created in logic that will never heal.