Jeremy Wells

In A System for Writing, Bob Doto (2024) presents an explanation of atomicity that made the concept finally click for me:

Whenever we pull a note into a writing project and have to edit out complexity, writing becomes triage. No longer are we bringing an idea into our paper to be handled, manipulated, and interrogated within the context of the piece … Instead, we’re sifting through excess verbiage and syntactic transitions to find what we’re looking for. In short, long-notes containing divergent ideas create added steps and confusion.

Atomicity makes notes more useful across various contexts and topics. An atomic note—one with a single, specific idea—can potentially connect to many other notes without much (if any) work to parse out the related ideas.

The chunkier a note is, the less conducive it is to making connections with other notes.

I had a ZK breakthrough today: I’d been struggling making notes because I’d get hung up on where the note fits in to the folgezettel. So I started using Obsidian’s “unique note” core plugin, setting a new note’s initial title to be a timestamp. Now I title the note after it’s written. Much better!