Why I am against Atomic Notes and Mini-Essays

[@DannyHatcherTech]

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[@carolinemathieson]

One company I worked for insisted on the STOP method. That's "Single Topic One Page". Their reasoning was that as this was a technical manual there was a limit to how much information a reader could absorb. I never did agree to that mechanism and have the same mind set as you. If a topic takes 5 pages to cover rather than 1 then so be it. As I write mostly technical documents with diagrams, it's pretty much impossible to keep to a single page. I think the same applies to notes, they are as long as they need to be and to split them up into artificially short notes is a waste of time. Given that you can link to a particular block or heading in one note from another note, i don't see any issue with having a long note. I rarely use block links.

[@DannyHatcherTech]

Agreed. As long or as short as needed... 😁

[@theflippantfox]

I keep both types of notes Long context based notes where I explore that topic in detail and the short Atomic Notes where I extract the one particular concept that I want to keep with me forever

[@Sismodium]

I largely agree with you, but my key learning outcome would have been a bit different. I have been looking critically at my notes from various parts of my life, and I have come to the conclusion that the length and depth of the note does not matter. The conclusion I have come to is that the whole thing boils down to the question: is this note fit for purpose. In that some of my notes are glossary type notes with short and precise definitions amounting to 2-3 lines. On the flip side some of my notes end up 1000-15000 words. All the notes are fit for purpose, otherwise they are amalgamated into another relevant note, or if they serve no purpose at all now, then they get deleted.

[@StevenMichels]

You are right about depth. Short notes run the risk of removing context and connections from longer pieces. It seems like the atomic method is designed for people who want to write quick blog posts.

[@Arrow333]

Your notebook, your rules. There are different reasons to use a note taking app and these lead to different types of notes nad maybe even different vaults. I started using Obsidian as a memory for my TTRPG notes which are usually pretty longform logs of each session (depending on the session up to 5k words), with additional notes on the places and characters we meet. I publish the session log to the other players and keep the notes on the other stuff for reference in future sessions. Since then and learning more about the tool I have expanded, starting journaling, and the daily and weekly notes follow a completely diffent structure than my TTRPG notes. Adding a learning and thinking aspect following the Zettelkasten and spaced repitition principples results in different notes, and the little task management section (I don't have that many private tasks, so Obsidian is sufficient for my purposes) also looks different. Guides are about how you CAN use your tools - but in the end it has to work for you. One benefit of digital notetaking is, that you can easily change the notes later on, so if you feel like there is one idea that stands on it's own and might actually be expanded upon to create another video, article or other publication about it, you can still extract it, reference it in the original space (or the other way around).

[@realgouravverma]

Maybe it is applicable for your style of note taking but in my workflow atomic notes work really well specially for creative emergence. Atomic notes work as a separate block piece and we can arrange different combinations of block pieces to create something new out of it. And so far it is working really well for me. Of course the detailed note on some topics is also important. But I think atomic notes on every single idea/exposition is much important to refer to that specific idea in our other notes. So yes everyone has a different style of their note taking.

[@PunLlarena]

The example seems to be just the projects/papers created by consulting the mini essays / zettlekasten. Based on my understanding, the purpose for such notes is to create a conversation with yourself. I'm still early in my note-taking journey so I don't have much input to this but I like that there are arguments for and against a type of notetaking and in the end, it all depends on the individual. Maybe having a project with clear structure works for one, maybe having multiple ideas that could be explored and have a deeper understanding by having a conversation through notes also works for another. There's also a video from @TonyRamella discussing why having the limit of 100-300 words was important for the analog method. The title is "What Obsidian Gurus Get Wrong About Zettelkasten." What are your thoughts about it? Cheers

[@DannyHatcherTech]

True - every context is different. A word constraint can help with a task, but as we expand the scale, the word constraint becomes too constraining leading to either merged files, duplicate text, or multiple links for navigation all of which require more energy to maintain. I would rather reduce the maintenance energy from the start.

[@markcoren2842]

First, thanks for the excellent calendar strategy link you shared with me in the comments last month. I've done a deep dive with it and it has added a useful dimension (pun intended) to my approach to time. As for this excellent video, I tend to take a build-up then break-down approach with the type of content you're describing. While I'm wrapping my mind around amorphous ideas, I work with a holistic note that allows me to explore, shuffle, and restructure what I'm absorbing, especially at an ontological level. Once I have that pretty well fleshed out, I extract/refactor into atomic notes (in the most reductionist sense of the term) the parts that are likely to be useful in other contexts. I then rebuild the original note with the embedded atomic notes i just created, replacing the bits of content I'd extracted to create them. As I've evolved this process, I've learned that starting from the holistic view like you've described keeps me from inflicting my assumptions about the topic before I've even started to understand it sufficiently. This has led to a notable improvement in both the quality and the pace of my learning. Secondly, it improves the usability and usefulness of the local and global graphs when I'm using them to find unrecognized and underused relationships.

[@ecoconatus8089]

Thank you for explaining! I'm still not sure I undertand why your example isn't a Map of Content named Trampoline that links to notes with all different main headings. All these still would not be 'atomic' but seems to help with more focus and less scrolling. By this I mean in the trampoline file you write the name of the 'trampoline cost' note and 'tampoline cost' note you link trampoline file. No name file to remeber later on. You can work on map of content for months and it builds organically. Really enjoy what you share. After two years or zettlekasten obsidian (often not atomic), I'm really curious to try new workflows fianlly stick with a timeblock calender. Maybe morgen will help ❤

[@Khoukharev]

I’m with you on most of this, but I do separate reusable pieces and link to them. This way if at some point I update that reusable piece, there is a link to my most current thinking on that in every other article that uses it. In your example, I would separate prices and fees so that wherever I need them, I only need to update them once to have everything in order in all my notes. That said, no point in separating notes into atomic notes just for the sake of it.

[@wilsonlamlyt7138]

Great video on the topic, Danny! I like the different voice but I don't agree with some of the points about atomic notes is 300-500 words or so on. I think it can be as long as the idea and the title of the note makes sense. For me, I would learn some concepts and topics in various ways. Let's say book A talks about this technique to do baseball, and book B talks the exact same technique to do basketball. When doing the long note method (let's say no interlinking), then it would be inevitable that you find yourself writing a popular concept more than once, and if you choose to not write it, you might forget it relates or how it relates to that note (at least for me), like how this technique works on baseball, and examples that this works so on. But on the flip side, I do understand and have fall into the trap of splitting notes into atomic chunks for the sake of it, it doesn't make sense if it is not a concept that will be reusable or you think you can elaborate on it. Let's say I read a book about Freud, and he talks about fixation, when I take notes on it, just [[Fixation]], but don't really talk or elaborate more on fixation is meaningless, as its just for the sake of it, like wikipedia to me, as I might not understand most of the things wikipedia has linked. So I do believe in some extent, they are not contradictory and their ratio has to be depended on the knowledge learnt, the outcome expected, and so on. Curious if you would met situations where you would need to repeat some concepts multiple times in different notes, just like how you would said that the evidence and questions might be the same. Although in the last example, no one would really put down every sports info. unless they are expected to do a business analysis for a long-time business (which then they might consider to make it atomic so they could regularly update them), in your case, you are doing a sudden thought about trampoline, so that is more of like a project idea or action idea, or so on, so it could definitely be on the go and not "atomic", because it makes no sense to make it atomic. For my use case, I could use both atomic and "longer" notes, like when in some important, reusable concept, lets say archetypes by Jung, archetypes is a big topic, but I could use a note called, how archetype affects modern people (whatever), and do a long note like you did, by linking all the information I get from this, but in an idea that I have read before or an article I have read, let's say "how the 8 archetypes affect the unconscious". I then make an atomic note about my thought on that. And then I use that atomic note's ideas on that long note, if I find needed, instead of thinking the whole process again, hopefully if I could retain that piece of knowledge. I'm still continuing to balance the ratio I hope, and hope to see what you think about that. Those are random examples but I think that could explain some of my ideas on this topic. Again, it depends.

[@AFGautonompunk]

i agree with this ansatz and also found myself wondering about that in zettelkasten, as mentioned in "how to take smart notes". but perhaps i haven't yet grasped the method fully. however, i would think this could be an entry point of an idea, that in zettelkasten would be linked / referred to through it's internal links (obsidian feature) and irrelevant, yet systematic name giving in permanent maps of content. this for me gives also a lot of linking tasks that could potentially be optimised. a positive i see for this though is that it could be more independently permuted and hence be more useful for general topics, over specialising in specific fields of interpretation. that is, the ambiguity of a jargon term, e.g. memory, not just in psychology / neuroscience, but also computer sciences. some features might align, others are inherently different and not comparable. therefore it could be of use to have a more general note style, to be more granular when coming up with ideas or essays built from them. for me i will probably have both inside my vaults, as i can see clear cases for one or the other being useful. and in the end that's what the writing is all about, being a tool for me thinking or creating something (r)evolutionary. and lastly, i notice that your videos are dense in useful information and this is something i often miss from other edutainment formats.

[@anneworks]

I'm now exploring new for me theories of learning. I find I feel it's rather arrogant to atomise the ideas in a theory in small one concept notes. A theory already made connections between its ideas. I want to capture those. My goal is to understand them first and for that I need keep their concepts and ideas together. So I summarise. Developing the expertise for me is a going back and forth between talking to people or trying out something in my teaching practice and the theory I have summarised. Then I start to write a bit about what I want to write about, structured in questions I try to answer. These are changing quite a lot as my understanding grows. Therefore I agree with there being a point to a note. But I also think the point will change because understanding deepens.

[@businessgeek1716]

Subscribed since you were doing Notion videos. I enjoy so much the evolution of your PKM preferences, although your approach is cognitively difficult for me to follow. I consume far less content, I am far less disciplined to cite everything (perhaps because I'm not a researcher) and I still don't poses the diligence of writing daily. Thus a pattern that suits me and my superficial knowledge is to have 5 categories of notes: resources (raw files, raw definitions, web embeddings, etc.), inbox (or fleeting notes), summaries, reflections (or summaries from a personal perspective, if you will) and publications. I don't care about the length of the notes at all, usually just summaries surpass my 5k words threshold. If I were to create something as big as what you did here, it would probably be in the publications folder and consist in embedding (bits of) summaries and reflections and bind them together via phrases that explain their linking. It works similarly to the idea of atomic notes, but I don't keep the atomic notes principle in mind at all when working with my PKM. But at the same time, I would never make files named "Ecological psychology", "Metaphysics", "Quantum entanglement" and so forth because they reference entire topics of knowledge and it is obvious such notes will be super big. I typically use tags for the topic names if the note has information related to those topics and sometimes I go an extra mile to make a small note file in the resources folder which consists in the definition of the word, without further details.

[@MarkieAurelius]

Just wondering, how do you decide what to write about or research?

[@DannyHatcherTech]

Great question. Simple answer - what I feel like. Complex answer - I periodize topics to constrain my attention.

[@MarkieAurelius]

@@DannyHatcherTech Thank you for your reply, I was considering doing the same thing, how long are your periods typically? Or is that dependent on how deep the topic is?

[@brian2007tube]

Very helpful… trying to create atomic notes has messed me up for the reasons you give.

[@lmao01]

If there is a person who believes they can create a truly 'atomic' (and everything that this name implies) note on a subject, only speaks for the person's ignorance. Wise is he who knows that he does not know.

[@TetrahedreX]

I feel like the more videos I watch about PKM/Zettelkastens/Obsidian, the less I know about how I should use it. That's why I just use Notepad 2/3rds of the time.

[@DannyHatcherTech]

Totally understandable!

[@PeterIntrovert]

I think you are contradicting yourself. No offense. :) On one hand you are admitting that there are different purposes. But on other hand you critizes something just based on fact that the thing you critizes don't support your purposes. Mini-esseys and atomic notes are about chunking information and conveying them. That simple. And you over-analyze it in irrelevant manner.

[@DannyHatcherTech]

No offense taken. 😁 I don't think I say that people shouldn't do mini-essays or atomic notes as we are all different with varying purposes, but if I did I misspoke. My critique is from my perspective, my experience, and my research into what is effective for myself and those I have worked alongside. > over-analyze it in irrelevant manner Over analyze. I am not sure what you mean. The depth at which I discuss in the video allows me to explain my experiences and reasoning. Irrelevent manner. If that is your perspective, ok. But for me, without the reflections which lead to the explanations, I wouldn't have developed my skills which have lead to more writing, more thinking and at the end of the day, developed my skills which doesn't sound Irrelevent to me 🤷‍♂️

[@PeterIntrovert]

@@DannyHatcherTech Hi. thank you for response. What I am saying is that both your way of making notes and mini-esseys/atomic notes are ok. They just don't fit together. Well you did good job to explain why those two forms don't fit your system. I also met with a method of creating cristilized notes from fleeting notes and hub notes to connect and summarize them. For atomic notes and mini-esseys it would be map of content. I just don't see a reason in creating videos about why I am against car seats when they don't fit my motorbike. :) Cheers ✌️

[@salman_babar]

I agree completely. Atomizing notes is only brain drain. I learned this the hard way. Even Obsidian's graph view is useless unless notes are atomic. At least i cant see any connection between ideas (hidden within files), just from looking at a visual connection of files (notes). Structuring notes does zero help understanding a topic, processing information does, which for many does not even require taking notes. But for those that do take notes, Obsidian can be leveraged for easy capture and recall, so essentially information can be processed in a more structured way. And yes Obsidian can handle any structure, but that always leads to too many or constantly changing structures. This just delays or hinders actual progress in processing information. Decide on a structure that works and stick with it. Processing messy notes is better than constantly restructuring without any processing.