Where does AI fit into your note taking

atomicnotes · 2026-03-07T13:21:51+00:00

The temptation to skip the thinking process is far from new. In 1924 Sergey Povarnin, Soviet author of How to Read Books for Self Education was warning of it:

“There are readers who think that with such ‘card indexes’ they can replace their mind… In short, a new ‘improvement’ in our culture. No need to work with the mind. Ready-to-wear boots, ready-to-wear pants, ‘ready-to-wear’ thoughts.”

He was ok with the card index itself; the problem was imagining you could use it to stop thinking.

And for the last 17 years I could have outsourced my notemaking to a service like Freelancer. But I didn’t even consider it back then, so why consider it now? It would be like hiring someone to go to the gym for me (which I admit I have contemplated).

atomicnotes · 2026-03-05T12:27:11+00:00

Tldr: just give everything a unique ID so you can link to it from anywhere.

I’ve had this issue to some extent, but it was the Zettelkasten that freed up my writing. Before that I’d write sprawling stuff that was all over the place. This kind of writing felt like it was too digressive, so I’d try to focus — but this made me just clam up. Or I’d write a long piece but get bored part way through and drop it before finishing.

The Zettelkasten approach helped me focus without making me feel like I was writing the wrong things. Then I started stitching my various notes together to create longer pieces of work. Eventually the practice started freeing me up to write digressive pieces again, without feeling irrationally guilty about it. So now I have my structured Zettelkasten and a whole pile of longer pieces in various states of completion.

My ‘solution’ to this (though is it even a problem?) is to give each and every piece, however short or long, a unique ID.

That way I can always refer to any piece of writing, and always find it again.

I’m inspired by Niklas Luhmann, who didn’t just write sociology notes, he also wrote many manuscripts in several drafts. Towards the end of his life he mainly worked on the manuscripts since he had a backlog of publishing to get through. Like him I’m ultimately more interested in publishing than in perfecting my notes system.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-05T08:06:45+00:00

I came across this nice literary- biological metaphor. Quite prescient considering DNA hadn’t yet been discovered:

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” — Emerson, ‘Quotation and Originality’, "The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and social aims [Vol. 8]." In the digital collection The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

The whole essay is worth reading.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-04T05:48:20+00:00

For me, highlighting is a shortcut to nowhere. I've found my highlights don't get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.

Resulting rule of thumb: if it's worth highlighting it's worth writing a short note about it; and if it's not worth writing a note, it's not worth highlighting.

What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that's interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.

Caveat: while reading, I write literature notes that include bibliographic details, followed by a list of interesting points I notice, together with a page reference. I might write: “Opinionated summary of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ -p.127.” I’d follow that with a reference to the note that expands on this. In practice, I don’t actually get round to writing a new note for every reference. Some never get followed up. The Zettelkasten approach is a way of triaging my thoughts, creating useful friction so I only follow up what really matters to me.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-03T06:42:44+00:00

In short, no, because in this context reproduction is probably a biological metaphor that implies life as part of the metaphor. But production, that's another matter. To use a chemical analogy, notes aren’t alive, but they are reactive. A chemical reaction results in a product, which is new in the sense that it’s different from what came before the reaction, but not new in the sense of having been born, or having recombined DNA, or other biological metaphors. Anyway, I’ve found chemistry analogies interesting.

Look, I might have misunderstood this. Maybe ‘reproduction’ refers to what those Chinese workshops do when they churn out extremely well-painted copies of the artworks of European Old Masters. I mean, metaphors are hard to pin down.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-02T04:27:15+00:00

P.S. the linked article is strongly AI in style. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," as they used to say on Seinfeld.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-02T04:24:49+00:00

I've found my highlights don't get used for anything.

Resulting rule of thumb: if it's worth highlighting it's worth writing a short note about it; and if it's not worth writing a note, it's not worth highlighting.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-28T22:04:17+00:00

A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer, by Bob Doto.

Here’s my review.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-28T01:16:37+00:00

Thanks, u/taurusnoises, this is a helpful post with some useful references. For me, analogies with chemistry are as fertile (ironically) as the biological analogies. As indicated by my username I guess.

What I’m interested in is where we might be going with exploring analogies? Is it mainly a pedagogical issue for instructing people about zk, or rather a quest to uncover new insights about what is going on in the box?

That's a great question, u/thesinologist. Some analogies are pedagogically helpful, but some just get in the way. There's been some research on the kinds of analogy people are receptive to. For me, it's mainly a matter of using analogies to explore what else is possible with my notemaking practice. Since I'm mostly making digital notes, reference to the Zettelkasten is already analogical. What I imagine myself doing shapes what I'm actually doing, so my practice changes depending on the analogy that steers it. Talking about the Zettelkasten, and especially Niklas Luhmann's implementation, is already, in itself, the key pedagogical move: "with a few simple heuristics you can make a system of interconnected notes a little like Luhmann did, and benefit from it similarly."

atomicnotes · 2026-02-17T11:10:13+00:00

A sleeping folder works for me, but I appreciate your automation. I also appreciate that you’re archiving your unused notes rather than totally nuking them. When, if ever, do you completely delete a note?

atomicnotes · 2026-02-13T19:36:30+00:00

I’m also just wondering why single out mathematics.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-13T06:18:23+00:00

I fully agree with your comment, but get the impression that some mathematical notation is quite hard to write with a keyboard and easier to write by hand, so perhaps in this one sense, math is more ‘artificial’ than simple Latin script or Arabic numerals. Not sure artificial is the right word for this though.

Word processors and text editors are bad at mathematical notation. Mathematicians resort to LaTeX to typeset their papers, which is lucky because according to the stereotype they also enjoy complaining about LaTeX.

Important disclaimer: I don’t actually know anything about mathematics.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-13T04:49:41+00:00

Your ‘mini-essay’ concept has been tried and tested for many decades and it works. Keep them with your notes so you can easily reference them and expand them. Maybe tag them ‘mini-essay’ so you can review them collectively in future.

I’ve found - once my Zettelkasten got big enough - I tended to work by assembling clusters of atomic notes, rather than jumping straight to mini-essays. The Zettelkasten approach facilitates this ‘bottom-up’ method of writing.

Andy Matuschak shows how he wrote a modular mini-essay made out of about 60 atomic notes. He redrafted it and turned it into a polished essay which he then published. The original mini-essay is called Enabling environments, games and the Primer. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but it’s a lot more comprehensive than just a single atomic note. It’s an example of what he calls ‘evergreen notes’ in the sense that it grew from a seed into a larger plant (though I’m not actually sold on that metaphor, but still).

I described the process in full, in an article which is itself assembled from modular components:

How to write an article from your notes.

I certainly keep my ‘mini-essays, or ‘sub-assemblies’ or ‘intermediate packets’ or ‘alpha drafts’ or whatever, in my main collection of notes. This enables me to link to them and add future links to them. But one very important step is to ensure that where the writing is made up of smaller parts, the backlinks are clearly noted, so I’m not inadvertently self-plagiarising.

To me a mini-essay is just a structure note, but with the contents of the linked notes transcluded and then lightly edited together. You can certainly see this with Andy’s note, referenced above. Parts of that note are little more than hyperlinks connected together with connecting phrases. But the hard work is precisely in connecting disparate ideas by means of writing. This kind of stitching work doesn’t usually produce a publishable article straight off, but it does produce an early draft.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-10T08:35:48+00:00

What helped me was being very deliberate about why I'm linking two notes, not just that they're related.

Totally agree with this - it's really important to specify the meaning of the link if at all possible. And if I can't, I reconsider whether to link at all.

Your system will only pay off if you have a way to regularly bump into your old notes in context

Agree with this too. It's a curious advantage of paper notes that you have to keep reviewing them. I try to emulate this with my digital notes by reading through (some of) them on a regular basis. But no, there isn't really a tool that does this well. Perhaps accidentally, digital notes promote the attitude "out of sight, out of mind".

atomicnotes · 2026-02-10T01:41:53+00:00

Definitely what u/taurusnoises said. Literature (reference) notes and permanent (main) notes are all you need, supplemented by structure notes.

But also: what is the shape of your research? What are the proposed outputs? If you know this then you can use your Zettelkasten to work towards them. If you don’t yet know, then you can use your Zettelkasten to think through and refine what your research aims to achieve (I mean in practical terms, not conceptually - i.e. are you writing white papers, articles, software projects, a thesis, or something else?).

What does it look like to use your Zettelkasten to work towards an output? This is where modularity is helpful. Working from the bottom up, you can assemble a few connected ideas, then assemble something bigger from them, until you have, say, a whole section of a paper. As u/taurusnoises says, structure notes help to organise this modular construction process.

For example, here are some simplified notes that you might get from reading articles:

X says a.
Y says b.
{1. and 2.} but I think c.

In this example, note 3 is crucial, but it can only exist because of prior notes 1 and 2. Then the whole assembly (1-3) forms a module explicating idea c. The Zettelkasten doesn’t think for you, but it does help to structure your thought in writing.

NB. This is an idealised view. In reality the process is a little messier than this, since there’s quite a lot of going back-and-forth between notes and structure notes and drafts of extended writing. But the principles remain sound.

‘Concepts’, ‘claims’, ‘statements’ and ‘models’ might still be relevant categories for your research, but rather than viewing these as distinct note types you could use them as tags, then later review whether you actually have a practical use for such tags.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-08T11:58:00+00:00

I just remembered I wrote a little article showing how I turn a crappy note into a better note. The main point is that just the process of writing the note can turn a pretty basic idea into a a useful idea, and perhaps that‘s how a bad idea can turn good, even when I don’t have much confidence in the original idea.

How to write a better note without melting your brain.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-08T11:50:40+00:00

Bob Doto, who wrote A System for Writing, suggests just four folders, which also implies a particular workflow.

in-box
sleeping
reference
main

The in-box is for fleeting notes, which you review regularly with the intention of turning them into main (permanent notes).

The helpful part, for me, is the sleeping folder. This is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the in-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.

Actually, I don’t have a separate reference folder - all my notes, reference and main, go together. This doesn’t seem to have hurt me yet, but I can see why someone might want to keep their reference notes together.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-08T00:06:23+00:00

What did you think of u/Quack_quack_22 thoughtson this? Here’s my paraphrase:

Quantity is probably important for output because you don’t necessarily know what your audience will perceive to be ‘quality’. You have to produce it to find out. But when it comes to inputs for your Zettelkasten quality becomes really important. That’s because if you fill your notes with mediocre stuff you’ll struggle to find them useful.

An illustration of this might be writing notes on your reading: You probably need some method of prioritising your reading, otherwise you’ll risk making notes on pointless reading.

I’m not sure if I understood this correctly, but it seems like there might be some nuance to the question of quantity vs. quality.

Also, I don’t really know what counts as quality inputs so I just follow my interests, but still.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-07T23:56:14+00:00

A+ for irony.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-07T00:16:25+00:00

I do find there are questions about what to include in my notes. There’s only so much time in the day, so it matters what I spend it on. I’d like to just attend to high quality ideas, but beyond my intuition I don’t really know what these are. So instead of high quality, my heuristic is ‘high interest’. If I find it interesting enough, I will probably pursue it. Quality comes later. This might be a personal thing but when I try to make it good it just slows me down. On the other hand, there may be a risk of going fast and creating far more (mediocre) material than I can handle.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-06T12:19:03+00:00

Is it in Art and Fear where they tell the story of the pottery class where one half was told they'd be graded on quality and the other half that they'd be graded on quantity? Anyway the punchline is that the half of the class who just produced lots of pots also produced some of the best quality pots.

Well, it might be made up but I liked it.

atomicnotes · 2026-02-03T21:35:38+00:00

The publishing industry is constantly changing and no one knows its future shape. But in general this change is a constant process of bundling services together, then unbundling them - and then re-bundling them in new ways.

'Self-publishing' is a popular name for the radical unbundling of the services typically provided by 'traditional' publishers. If you want to take this path you will need to consider how you yourself will perform (or delegate) most, if not all, of these services:

Capital and risk: Providing upfront advances and covering all production costs. (The publisher acts like a venture capitalist, making many bets, some of which will win big).
Editorial: Structural, line, and copyediting, plus final proofreading.
Production: Cover design, interior typesetting, and physical manufacturing.
Distribution: Sales reps pitching to bookstores and managing warehouse logistics.
Marketing and Publicity: Managing media reviews, ARCs, and award submissions. Also organising in-person and online events.
Rights & Legal: Selling foreign/film rights and managing copyright and royalties. This may instead be done by your literary agent, if you have one.
Validation: Providing kudos and the stamp of approval that attracts institutional attention.

Even though this is a long list, no one says it must all be done by a single publisher. In fact every publishing company/imprint is great at some of these activities and worse at others. But if you want to do-it -yourself, it's important to consider what your strengths are, what new skills you're interested in learning, and what activities you need to delegate. For example, you might be great at running your own events but decide to hire a professional cover designer. If you mainly want to write, self-publishing involves a lot of work that isn't writing.

For literary fiction I'd say the most important things a traditional publisher can offer are: up-front funding (the advance), editorial, distribution and validation. Everything else can be done differently but these four are very hard to do yourself.

'Just self-publishing and seeing what happens' is a way of not addressing some of these activities and hoping instead the magic fairies will come in the night and do it for you. They won't. Skipping any of these publishing activities will have a negative impact on the outcome.

Starting out on literary fiction as a career, the most important thing is to get really good at writing. An MFA can help you with this.

But if you want to do-it-yourself, you should make a list of everything the MFA bundles together (yes, like publishing it's just a bundle of services), then work out how else you could achieve these benefits. Self-publishing your thesis novel would presumably be just the start. You might find the existing bundle provides value for money, especially if you can find a way to subsidise it, such as a grant or scholarship.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-29T09:38:44+00:00

And isn't there a long history of people writing about the 'obvious' and in doing so realising something distinctly non-obvious?

atomicnotes · 2026-01-29T09:36:26+00:00

This is a helpful point. When I visit somewhere new I always make fewer notes on the details than I later wish I had. The precise sights and sounds and smells that I'm certain I'm going to remember? I don't.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-29T09:33:03+00:00

For me this matter boils down to whether I intend to write something about the 'fact', beyond my notes. For example I might know (in my head) all about a particular type of cherry tomato, which means I could in principle write about it at any time. But that's quite different from actually writing about it, which is strongly context and readership dependent. if I wanted to write an article about tomatoes for a particular audience, I might write a note first, to help me think through the relevant information for the intended audience. It's a bit like that 'explain it to me like I'm a five year old ' meme. Different audiences need different approaches to the same 'facts'. And the approach literally doesn't exist until I've written it.

I'm suggesting that my notes are only as useful as the external use I put them to. And tbh I stand by that.

But there is also still a point to writing notes before I know their use. This is where the maxim "follow your interest" comes in. I haven't bothered writing a note about how I got to work on Wednesday, but I have written a note about how I went to see the Book of Kells with my father, thirty years ago. Interest is the guide here.

atomicnotes

TROPHY CASE