I feel less alone now after hearing Nori’s story of falling out with Zettelkasten1 and then rediscovering ZK for herself.2
I was also turned away by the principle of Atomicity or how I understood it. I thought every note had to be atomic, otherwise it’s not a “proper” Zettelkasten. “One idea per note,” begging the question, “What constitutes a single idea? What’s the boundary?” Past Me™ didn’t really understand this and the principle felt more like a noose than a guiding post.
This was turned around when I finally connected the questions I had with “Atomicity is the end result, not the starting point.”3 Past Me™ was already onto something with that line of questioning! It’s about getting to the boundary of that idea, being clear with the shape of when an idea ends and another begins.
Not having atomic notes as a building block to start with is okay (and the more
I think about it, obvious). In fact, the point is not to do the thinking
outside of ZK and then bringing a fully-formed idea into your
vault. No, you do the messy thinking inside your ZK, create the note, let
it be however many words long and a jumble of spaghetti. You’ll feel that the
note is too cumbersome once it reaches some absurd length and naturally feel
the need to slice it up into smaller pieces. It’s only after Sascha made the
connection with Software Engineering that things started to click for me.
We’re basically refactoring the one big note into their own, smaller
modules notes with individual functions ideas.
We’re just applying Separation of Concerns,4 but for the Zettelkasten.
I wouldn’t blame Past Me™ for missing this, since he didn’t yet have the experience I have now. However, this became even clearer after re-reading the principle of Atomicity that Chris wrote on the Zettelkasten site.5