Hi all,
in the last months I’ve come to question whether atomic notes are actually a rational choice in the obsidian environment. I didn’t find a lot of debate about their effectiveness; on the contrary, they’re usually proposed as a clever solution.
This opinion actually stems from my personal experience with evergreenish notes, which led my past self to create hundreds of notes in a increasingly specific manner, to the point where there was little text involved apart from the 2-lines long titles.
This is not necessarily everyone else’s experience (yet), but I feel that this problem is intertwined with the impossible definition of “atomic note”, and eventually everybody would run in the unresolved atomic question.
So, the question is, why atomic notes in the first place?
Background
As far as I know, this is a decades old solution originating in the Zettelkasten method, to help us create meaningful connections in our note base.
It is still a pre-digital era solution though, and while Obsidian lacks an outliner or block reference capability (which circumvent the need for atomic notes, although in an unelegant manner), it is nontheless capable of doing lots of things paper based zettels can’t.
…Backlinks being the main one.
As most of you know, thanks to backlinks, a file is pretty much a tag with its own page where we can write stuff. This actually means that when we create a link, the reciprocal backlink already points with perfect precision to where the concept related to that page is, that being, to what you’re writing right now. It doesn’t actually matter if it sits or not in an atomic note.
The problem atomic notes try to address lays at the opposite end of the connection, being that we can only directly link with the degree of precision allowed by how subdivided are our notes.
e.g.
If I have a single note about the whole anatomy, I can’t direct link to “kidney” if needed, however if I link something else from the kidney part of the anatomy page, the reciprocal backlink will point to the precise argument by virtue of its position)
So I started fragmenting more and more my notes, but the reality is there is virtually no end to how far you can go, and it’s difficult to think ahead to what degree of precision you will need in a particular topic.
But, what if we didn’t try to shape the note around an ill defined element like an atomic concept? What if we turn to something simpler, like the number of characters or likewise metrics?
A note, in the end, is just a container. I can pour my knowledge in whatever kind of note, it is not going to change because of that, and as long as I put a meaningful label on every jar I will find it when I need it.
In this setup, instead of declarative titles which are supposed to capture what the note says in one line, I limited myself to describe what is inside (e.g. social impact of HIV). This wuold even result in different topics sharing the same note (e.g. social impact of HIV + developement of mRNA vaccines)
You might think it’s a mess, but as long you stay within the character limit, you can link to that note from wherever else, and when you read it you know what you’re referencing, because it has a decent resolution (meaning my notes are enough subdivided to allow precision linking) and it takes almost no time to read it.
This is possible in the long term because obsidian allows to merge and split notes too. Although not everybody does it the same way, so I will leave my method here.
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if a note title declares a scope that overlap with other notes (e.g. epidemiology of car crash related trauma and incidence of car crash injury) you straight up merge those notes.
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if a note grows larger than the character count (or whatever metric you’re using) you split part of that note in a sub-note, which means to leave a link behind. This still allows that note to be referenced by the old links to the parent note.
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if a note with 2 or more subnotes does not have any content of its own left, you can delete it from the vault with this workaround: rename it to
sub-note 1]]; [[sub-note 2. This will effectively destroy the links to the parent note, leaving behind a list of direct links to the subnotes. (I would also throw in a tag to help remember your future self that this action was automated and some link may need to be eliminated to increase accuracy).
This whole process might become more frictionless in future, if it’s possible to get Note Composer to auto-update links [1], [2]
The ability to split and merge effectively allows a note to grow over time in this kind of cycle, which ultimately leads to “mytosis” and terminates the note itself
In opposition to atomic notes, this highlights the difference between the container and the knowledge itself.
A direct consequence on how I organized my notes also needs to be noted: they are now categorized in “pages” which have a short title and acts as entry point for a topic via the backlink pane, and sort of work like tags, and “notes” which have a long title as discussed above and actually contain informations.
For all pourposes each page has the potential to become a little MoC, although all the relevant information is already avaliable indipendently of how much energy I put into organizing it. As a result MoCs are slowly being namely reconverted to pages of broad topic, which they are.
Workflow
From my personal sperimentation, chopping up some class notes in paragraphs of defined lenght and quickly describing what they are about is a lot faster than individually trying to define how to group the topics in atomic notes (which is always an approximation anyway, but takes time to be constructed in an acceptable one).
Of course I would try my best to minimize fragmentation of topics, but you can’t respect both rules at once. The note is not supposed to last forever anyway, and it will eventually split as soon as a topic gains enough weight to become a note of its own.
The raw notes are revised via the backlink pane from the various pages at a later time, identifying possible merges and adding connections between notes.
Discussion
In my view there are at least two straightforward argument against this workflow:
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It is possible to argue you could do the same thing with atomic notes, as long as you keep an eye on the character count, to which I respond:
- focusing only on the character count keeps you from creating one-liner notes before it’s actually necessary, which in my experience always defaults to efficiency loss.
- you would still need to drop the declarative titles, which are part of atomic notetaking, in order to efficiently merge notes, which is kind of mutilating the original intent of atomic notes in the first place.
- If implementing this workflow, the value of defining ahead of time a topic is greatly diminished.
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Another possible objection might be in regard of the degree of automation in creating new entries into the permanent stash of notes. Most people here have a multi-step workflow to filter what they want to keep in order to maximize insight.
- This however is not desiderable in some use cases, possibly a consistent minority, especially when dealing with large quantities of trusted informations, such as when reading from a textbook.
In the end this is personal knowledge management and it is not my goal to change anyone’s mind; however the lack of proposed alternatives prompted me to make a post about it and ask you all: How would this apply to your way of using obsidian? Which role did atomic notes play until now for you? Could this improve your experience?
I tried to come up with something readable, but as you might have guessed I’m not a native speaker. Sorry in advance.
TL:DR
Atomic notes are an old answer for improving the meaningfulness of connections between notes. Obsidian-based notetaking gives us enough tools to change this paradigma resulting in both improved precision and faster workflow. A graphic example of this kind of approach
and Encycopedia’s are now available on line :):)