The Principle of Atomicity – On the Difference Between a Principle and Its Implementation • Zettelka

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The Principle of Atomicity – On the Difference Between a Principle and Its Implementation • Zettelkasten Method

The deepest dive into the principle of atomicity on the whole internet.

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ehuddleston

What an absolutely fantastic post. In a coincidence, I had, for the first time, finished Bob Doto’s book yesterday. One of the notes that I took was:

The reason we’re able to relate ideas within different trains of thought is due, in part, to atomization, the practice of reducing ideas to their essential points.49 Atomicity makes ideas highly sensitive to context. The more “atomic” an idea, the more broadly you can employ it. The more complex an idea, the less surface area it has to be connected to others. ([Location 877]
- Note: I wonder if the right way to go is bottoms up (the pure zettlekasten way) where we have atomic notes that evolve into bigger threads or bottoms down, where a thread is developed and atomicy is a byproduct of the threads increasing complexity. Perhaps this is analogous to Milo’s architect/gardner concept. Does it relate to structure must be earned? If so, in which direction?

I originally used Obsidian when it first came out merely as a reference material store for my projects in OmniFocus. Then I recognized it could be the repository for the higher horizons of focus in the GTD methodology, which I had been unsatisfied with managing for decades. The “area of focus” pages that I created prompted me to add what I called “objectives” for each area as headings in the note. This led to a creative process of thinking about how I might guide myself to achieving the objective. The pages became long and complex, so the objectives became their own notes as soon as they had any heft to them and the musings about how I would achieve the objective evolved organically to became projects or reference material for projects and themselves turned into their own notes. This was a primitive bottoms up atomicy example.

Next, I recognized that the linked note metaphor was particularly valuable in my advisory work with CEOs (I sit on the board of directors of several tech companies). When I would be asked a question, I would create a note. Many questions were related which required me to rework the answer into more atomic units. It became clear atomicy was a desired outcome of this part of my linked notes system. As this became more mature, and I had more and more valuable atomic notes, I found that instead of answering a question, I would look for notes on similar topics and would compose them into an answer. The quality of the answers was significantly higher as the notes and the process of “colliding” them (hat tip Nick Milo), produced deeper insight.

As I perfected my thinking system, I discovered zettlekasten and realized there were people thinking deeply about the problem. Everyone seemed to be an academic focused on surviving the publish or perish environment, but my value was derived from linked notes as a thinking environment to improve the quality and accuracy of my understanding of my field.

I love that you are explicitly calling thinking out as a primary use case at the same level as writing. I also love that you are aligned on integrated the thinking process into the zettlekasten. The “idea emergence” diagram that Nick Milo created to describes this process (any version of this: https://x.com/nickmilo/status/1556989944744366080?s=61&t=d4avUKZro_xB7MgJ_b3foA) has always resonated with me. I find that most of my atomic notes are created not from scratch but from “breaking off” from a more complex thought(note).

Andy

Very good post, @Sascha! It's a good synthesis of various issues related to atomicity, pointing to how atomicity can contribute to the systematization and systematicity of our knowledge work.

@Sascha said:

The principle of atomicity in note-taking is from 2013, coined by Christian

I don't doubt that our hosts at zettelkasten.de deserve credit for popularizing the term "atomicity", and Sascha certainly should be expected to emphasize that. I would add, however, that in the academic research literature on hypertext and personal knowledge bases, the same principle is called "granularity" since the 1980s. For example, here are a couple of publications that I've mentioned elsewhere in the forum (here and here and here):

• Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005). Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. "First, we will use the term 'knowledge element' to refer to the basic building blocks of information that a user creates and works with. There is some variation across systems as to how granular these are and precisely what they contain, but every system has some notion of a fundamental unit that the user generates, manipulates, and rearranges to reflect their mental model."
• Max Völkel (2010). Personal knowledge models with semantic technologies. Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Wirtschaftswissenschaften (Dr. rer. pol.) von der Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften des Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie (KIT) genehmigte Dissertation von Dipl.-Inform. (Granularity is also discussed in earlier publications by Völkel that preceded his dissertation.) "A fact given within a document requires on average to read half of the document until the fact is found. The granularity of information thus influences its retrieval costs. The coarse granularity of documents leads to high costs for locating relevant parts of documents, e. g., for re-use, aggregate queries, or question answering. Data bases and ontologies allow for more structured access, i. e., browsing and searching. In contrast to documents, data bases and ontologies allow retrieving sets of items together with relevant properties. Ontologies (and some database systems as well) allow answering queries to which the answer has only implicitly been entered. It requires effort to structure and formalise knowledge to make it fit into a database or ontology, but retrieval abilities are also higher – ontologies are built for re-using knowledge."

And, for example, here are a couple of earlier publications from the 1980s (the second one is about IBIS, which I've mentioned often, and other publications by Jeff Conklin from the same period discuss granularity, which is important to any discourse schema like IBIS):

• Catherine C. Marshall (1987). "Exploring representation problems using hypertext". In: HYPERTEXT '87: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext (pp. 253–268). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. "The flexibility of a hypertext system is exercised in performing a representation task. In the course of developing a representation, a user may need to switch the granularity of the representation to reflect a growing understanding of which information should be embedded in the content of a node, and which should be made explicit in the network. It is also necessary to balance the semantic weight between network nodes and links."
• E. Jeffrey Conklin & Michael L. Begeman (1989). "gIBIS: a tool for all reasons". Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 40(3), 200–213. "[Notes about] discussions are clearer and the whole method works better if Issues are just a single question, Positions are just a single response, and Argument nodes each contain a single objection or supporting point. In this case, the strictly proper thing to do would have been to create a supporting Argument node which said 'Goalness is just a feature of certain ideas.' However, there are practical limitations to the degree of fine granularity people are willing to make explicit—if nothing else, there is a time and complexity cost to creating a new node. Thus, just as it is acceptable for the Issue node to contain a noninterrogative line of background material, Positions must be allowed to sometimes contain their own support (if it is very brief)."

@Sascha said:

I challenge you to review any source for so-called atomic notes for a good definition of what a knowledge atom is. I bet you won’t find any

Again, this can be found in the academic research literature such as the publications mentioned above, among which Völkel (2010) has a particularly rigorous definition.

Just like Sascha and his knowledge building blocks, people who have written well about such knowledge elements usually draw from existing knowledge in fields like analytic philosophy and argumentation theory. (I'm reminded of Dorian Taylor's joke in "The symbol management problem": "A side effect of spending too much time working with the Semantic Web proper is analytic philosophy.")

@ehuddleston said:

I originally used Obsidian when it first came out merely as a reference material store for my projects in OmniFocus. Then I recognized it could be the repository for the higher horizons of focus in the GTD methodology, which I had been unsatisfied with managing for decades. The “area of focus” pages that I created prompted me to add what I called “objectives” for each area as headings in the note. This led to a creative process of thinking about how I might guide myself to achieving the objective. The pages became long and complex, so the objectives became their own notes as soon as they had any heft to them and the musings about how I would achieve the objective evolved organically to became projects or reference material for projects and themselves turned into their own notes. This was a primitive bottoms up atomicy example.

Next, I recognized that the linked note metaphor was particularly valuable in my advisory work with CEOs (I sit on the board of directors of several tech companies). When I would be asked a question, I would create a note. Many questions were related which required me to rework the answer into more atomic units. It became clear atomicy was a desired outcome of this part of my linked notes system. As this became more mature, and I had more and more valuable atomic notes, I found that instead of answering a question, I would look for notes on similar topics and would compose them into an answer. The quality of the answers was significantly higher as the notes and the process of “colliding” them (hat tip Nick Milo), produced deeper insight.

@ehuddleston's first paragraph here is also a major way that I use my note system: as a way of doing what David Allen (GTD creator) called self-management. And I think the second paragraph here, about a workflow based on questions, again shows the similarity to IBIS, which I've mentioned often, where questions ("issues") are central elements.

GeoEng51

@Sascha

Excellent article - thank you!

I like your Shu-Ha-Ri model as a way of explaining where a person might be in their understanding and practice of the Zettelkasten method. This of course applies to pretty much everything we learn in life. It reminds me of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda trying to teach Luke Skywalker about the Force and how to use it

I agree with the idea that atomicity is something we strive for but can take a significant amount of time to achieve (depending on the subject of a zettel and our knowledge of it). Hence we need to be patient. I don't get too worried about when I've reached that point, although I do use various tags to indicate when I think a particular zettel is getting close.

FernandoNobel

Really good article :-)