No. 116 Ideas are just information
Ideas are information + atomicity + reference notes + main notes + outlines + more!
Nos. 116 THP / 004 COMP • 09/19/2025
Dear readers,
Your niche can be divided into two groups: your audience and your readers.
Your audience is made up of all the people excited about your topic. They Google search your topic, YouTube search your topic, cast a wide net looking for any information on your topic. They’re interested in your topic, just not necessarily interested in what you have to say about it (because they don't know you or don't care to know).
Your readers are different. Your readers are the people within your audience who go out of their way to read what you have to say about your topic. They sign up (and open) your newsletters. They read your posts. They sometimes respond. They consider you an important voice in the scene, and seek out your writing.
Knowing your audience is important. Having readers is necessary.
Those of you who've been consistently reading my stuff, many for over fifteen years(!) are, whether you like it or not, "my readers." You open my emails (keeping my open rate near 60%, which is insane). You buy my books. You sign up for my courses. You keep me doing what I love doing, and I'm incredibly grateful.
So, I wanna hook you up.
My latest writing venture, COMPOSITION, is switching to a paid-only option in one week. But, before it does, I'm offering a pre-launch, "Just for My Readers," "I appreciate you" price. For $10/mo (less than half a "Cashew Kale Salad" in Brooklyn, less than one third a "Mezcalini" in Manhattan) you'll receive weekly, actionable insights on the reading + note-taking + writing + publishing pipeline from someone whose been in the game for over thirty years. You'll also get a monthly digest of everything that was covered, not to mention under-the-hood looks at some of the nitty-gritty that goes into my IRL writing process.
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Help me continue writing full-time by signing up for COMPOSITION, and I promise to pour everything I got into bringing insightful, useful, practical, heady, wild-eyed, non-normie, but always applicable takes on the creative process, always with an emphasis on output.
An idea is just information
Last week, I tried to define the word “idea.” Not an easy task, as Big Deal thinkers have been pontificating its meaning for the past twenty-five hundred years. Consequently, any definition of "idea" will inevitably remain fuzzy and nebulous, layered and less-than-exact. Admittedly, can be a good thing. There’s value in leaning into nebulousity, in letting the boundaries surrounding the “stuff” we read on the page remain somewhat "imprecise." This is especially useful when reading with a "soft gaze," looking not for any one thing in particular, but letting the relevance of the text slowly unfold. But, there's another way to understand the "stuff" of text when reading. A way that's particularly useful when struggling to decide what ideas are worth saving.
INFORMATION. From the Latin, informare, meaning "to stage or give form to," information is what Platonic "ideas"—those idealized, prototypical forms cloistered in the etheric realm—become once they hit the ground. In the fleshy, human realm, information cuts through the fog. It’s direct, practical, something you can point to and say, This is what it is, and here’s how it can be used.
What Information Is Worth Saving?
Everything you encounter in a text—and I do mean everything—is information. Information about the topic, about the author's way of discussing the topic, about how the text makes you feel, about what it makes you think or remember. It doesn’t matter what the genre is. All text is ideas, and all ideas are information.
This is great news, because it makes reading for insight forever actionable.
With information, you don't need to ask, Is this idea worth capturing? Instead, you can ask, Is this information useful? You can ask, What does this information speak to? How does this information contribute to what I believe? Does this information support what I'm writing?
In situ, these questions look like this:
- "Does this bit on chain saw safety add to my essay on homesteading?"
- "Is there a reason to talk about this author's super obvious hot take, or am I just being negative?"
- "Does this 🤯, but kinda tangential take on "vibe coding" add to the discussion or take away from it?"
- "Can I comment on this authors writing style, even if I don't like it?"
- "Does the memory induced by this text add to what I'm writing about?" (aka, "Does this personal story I’m now thinking about serve the piece?")
The next time you're stuck wondering whether an idea is worth saving, or how it fits in with your network of other ideas, flip the script. See it as information, and ask how can it be used?
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Are literature notes good places to store book reviews?
Questions about literature notes (aka reference notes) come from at least two places: misinformation (sorted out in chapter 2 of in A System for Writing) and a genuine desire to read effectively. Reddit user, u/MotherCanada, asks a question) which I believe stems from the latter:
"Recently I read a book that I had a lot of thoughts about. Not just about the ideas in the book, but about the book itself. Essentially I ended up writing a bit of review/summary of the book in the literature note.... Should something like this be a part of the ZK system?"
Anything that comes to mind that gives you pause when reading is capture-worthy. It doesn't matter if it's directly related to the topic you're researching, something already stored in your note-taking system, or not at all related to the book (i.e., a memory or thought about something else entirely). The only caveat might be length.
If you find yourself writing a long-form review of a book, which it sounds like the OP is doing, and it's something you find yourself doing often, you might consider setting up a separate compartment in your zettelkasten for book reviews. Remember, the zettelkasten is a container comprised of multiple compartments, each one containing a specific kind of note or file. Having a "Book Reviews" compartment containing reviews that could be linked to single-idea notes, reference notes, and writing output seems perfectly reasonable.
Atomicity as length of time rather than length of note
Richard Griffiths writes a short script flip on what it means to work with atomicity in note-taking:
"An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful. /// I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going."
Over the years I've become less bullish on the term "atomicity." While I think it served a purpose back in the day (twelve years ago), I think it's long overstayed it's welcome. It's the kind of term that's all convenience cred without the clarity cred. A term that's perennially confusing for (some) people.
What I can say is that the most useful definitions of the term tend to be the loosest. Something along the lines of: Atomicity is the smallest unit produced while still retaining its value and remaining useful. Griffiths' take on atomicity as a metric of time toes a similar line: "The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful."
Despite my aversion to "I can specify this down to its most granular and complex units," I'm still curious to see what Sascha comes up with in his soon to be released "Complete Guide to Atomicity."
Is it important how many daily main notes you make?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1nddnva/the_number_of_main_notes_you_make_per_day_doesnt/Regular r/Zettelkasten user, Quack_quack_22, provided some thoughts on their experience with trying to fulfill note-making quotas (which, you've probably guessed, did not go well). Quack's trajectory out of this trend went as follows:
- Daily processing of a "huge pile of fleeting notes" felt "draining," and was "eating up" their "free time."
- They seemed to engage with only "about 20%" of already processed notes.
- They decided to "completely stop the silly habit of writing six notes a day and clearing [their] inbox."
- They pivoted to only taking notes "for ideas that [were] missing from a draft, questions [they had], or ideas that truly impressed [them]," which resulted in processing "about one to two notes per day."
- They decided to leave unprocessed fleeting and reference notes until there was a need to turn them into main notes.
In addition to speed and efficiency (see "slow processing" below), "note-making quotas" have become another (dare I say "capitalist-informed") standard for judging one's practice. It's a bad idea for many reasons, and Quack has, in my opinion, chosen the right path.
The one caveat I'll give has to do with backlog. I've found over time, the longer fleeting and reference notes go unprocessed, the more likely they're to never get processed. Which is why I recommend regularly finding time (even ten minutes) to process main notes into your zettelkasten, whenever you can.
An unprocessed fleeting or reference note is less valuable than a quickly processed one. It doesn't take much to get ideas speaking to one another. Even if those ideas aren't fully formed yet.
Of course, the main goal is to have your note-taking / zettelkasten practice become a natural part of your day-to-day life, where it feels like something you just do. u/Andy76b speaks to this in the comments:
"It can become useful to turn the practice of our Zettelkasten into a habit, without necessarily imposing forced quotas or production requirements for the rest of our life. The goal is to make doing Zettelkasten feel “natural” in our activities. It’s true that producing at least n notes every day isn’t feasible, but probably if we write only one note per week, the system is unlikely to work.
Solid take.
When you haven't started writing, because you can't finish your outline
In the #creativity channel of the Obsidian Discord, user, "Chase (pls ping)," laments not having enough information ("knowledge," their word) to start writing:
"I suppose I don't want to start outlining until I feel that I have more of my knowledge in the system.... Like the scope of the book is, as of yet, poorly defined."
Here's something a lot of people don't seem to know....
Outlining is one of the means by which you understand what you want to say, what you can say, and what you need more information on to say it right. Not in the sense of "starting with an outline." In the sense of outlines give you a place to get stuff down on the page to see what you're thinking. Think of outlines not as static, but as super iterative. Outlines can and will change up to the final weeks of writing, and with books that's often years in the making. Outlines inform your writing. Your writing informs your outline. Back and forth. Like I say in the book (chapter 8).
If you want an IRL story about how mutable your outlines and books will be right up 'til the end, check out Ali Abdaal's interview with "Ship 30 for 30" founder, Nick Cole. This whole section is great, but pay special attention to Abdaal's description of how many changes went into writing his book, Feel Good Productivity, how long it took him to land on a title, and how it took him years to get comfortable with the concept the book is based on.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks they can jump the line by getting ChatGPT to write their book for them. I've read those books (unfortunately). They're garbage.
Leaning into your natural proclivity for "slow processing"
Interesting piece on how a "slow processing" thinker was able to lean into their way of doing things by engaging in activities that require methodical approaches.
"In a different vein, one of the areas I focused on in university was theoretical physics. I chose this due to the amount of geometry involved. I found that geometry lent itself better to my thinking style because it’s a picture that I can stare at for a long time."
One of the first things that struck me about the scene surrounding personal knowledge management and zettelkasten was how many people took as apparently inherent gospel "more efficient (more optimized, more quick, more scalable, etc.) = more better." This is just...not true.
Alas, the other day, someone on Reddit tried to tell me how taking notes on a phone was more efficient than keeping a pen + paper in your bag, because it sometimes takes a second to find the pen, and how sometimes the paper gets wrinkled.
A world where these are the metrics for "better" is not a world I want to live in.
Teacher embraces students marking up their work on digital platforms
This is a very short, very general "Here's what I do" from a teacher who's begun allowing students to mark up their assignments digitally. I don't have anything of value to add, but I bet there's a few teachers reading this who'd be interested.
H/T to Eleanor Konik who hipped me to this article.
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