Atomicity is the end result, not so much the starting point.1
The more I read, the more I see the similarities between Zettelkasten’s Atomicity and Software’s Separation of Concerns.2 3
My misunderstanding has been on the idea of how an “Atomic Note” can only contain one idea. Instead of focusing on Atomicity as the goal, I think of Atomic notes as a pre-requisite to building a Zettel. This results copy-pasting articles, quotes, videos for the pieces—thinking that they’re atoomic—to build the actual note. But I end up falling into the Collector’s Fallacy,4 without ever really making anything out of those reference notes because I feel overwhelmed by all the things I’ve gathered to make sense of them all.
In contrast, Sascha is saying to make Atomicity the goal. Zettelkasten is a practice of clarifying your thoughts so that they can be reused in the future.5 Pick a topic, set aside some time to think about that topic and that topic only, you have a thinking canvas where you can lay down all your thoughts freely. I’m feeling the resistant to write down my thoughts now, “Why is this a jumbled of connected mess? Shouldn’t it be atomic?” But a level of messiness is to be expected, in fact, that’s the whole point – to get out the jumbled mess in your mind so that you can re-arrange them to make sense to you, externalized thinking.6
Footnotes
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🎙️ Zettelkasten — Regaining Depth With the Zettelkasten Method ↩
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📄 Dijkstra, Edsger W (1982). “On the role of scientific thought”. Selected writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective. New York, NY, US: Springer-Verlag. pp. 60–66. ISBN 0-387-90652-5. ↩
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📋 Zettelkasten – Create Zettel from Reading Notes According to the Principle of Atomicity ↩