No. 117 Last of five free COMPOSITION emails
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Nos. 117 THP / 005 COMP • 09/26/2025
Dear readers,
We've come to the final of five free weeks of COMPOSITION. Enormous thanks to everyone who's been signing up. Anyone who'd like to do the same, taking advantage of the pre-launch price of $10, can do so here.
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If, however, you're still on the fence wondering, What does $10 a month really get me?, here's a list of everything I've covered over the last four weeks:
- The Playful Struggle of Defining an "Idea" >>> It's nearly impossible to explore the concept of "ideas" without finding yourself mired among the weeds. No. 003
- An idea is just information >>> Information is what Platonic ideas become once they hit the ground. In the human realm, information cuts through the fog. It’s practical. You can point to it and say, "I can use this." No. 004
- Have we finally moved beyond "What's a literature note, and what's it used for?" >>> I'm psyched to report that the question, "What's a literature note?," along with the usual barrage of ridiculous answers, is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Email | OP
- "Should I use a zettelkasten in school?" >>> The question, "Should I start using a zettelkasten in school?" is a regular of the zettelkasten subreddit, answers to which usually ping-pong between, "Wait 'til you've graduated" and "Wait 'til you've graduated." So, basically, wait 'til you've graduated. Email | OP
- "May I have s'more 'atomicity,' sir?" >>> It's been twelve years since the term "atomicity" was introduced into the zettelkasten lexicon. How are we doing with it? Email | OP
- New folgezettel plugin coming to Obsidian? >>> Discord user, ladle, has been "harnessing their hyperfocus" playing around with ChatGPT to make a folgezettel plugin (it seems mostly for fun). Email | OP (see "Email" link)
- Zettelkasten and commonplace book mash-up >>> YouTuber, Robyn Rose Lark, demos their paper-based commonplace book + zettelkasten workflow with some clear-quality, top-down cam footage. Email | OP
- Watch Stephanie's hands write out note cards in total silence >>> There's an audience for this, and it ain't me. But, I like knowing people in the web-i-verse vibe with silent hands writing indecipherable notes on index cards. Email | OP
- Do city metaphors work for ideas? >>> Richard Griffiths considers Mark Bernstein’s re-considering of "the city as a visual metaphor for information in the era of hypertext." Email | OP
- A guide for setting up Obsidian for academic work that doesn't read like every other guide for setting up Obsidian for academic work >>> A deep-dive into setting up Obsidian for academic work by someone who's been at it for not-two-weeks (four years to be quasi-precise). Email | OP
- Is Thymer just Obsidian in a different package? >>> Thymer is a new, fancy-looking text editor that reads like Obsidian on MDMA after a code-friendly candy flip. Email | OP
- How do you value your zettelkasten practice? >>> Last week, u/ManStan93 asked the r/zettelkasten subreddit four questions. Email | OP
- Using technical metrics to measure creative thinking can be fun, but is ultimately a farce >>> The zettelkasten.de forum produced a good ol' fashion debate in the comments of Sascha's post "The Principle of Atomicity – On the Difference Between a Principle and Its Implementation." Email | OP
- The difference between wanting and wanting to want >>> This post speaks to something you will no doubt encounter in this digest time and time again: the difference between wanting to do something and wanting to want to do something. Email | OP
- ADHD and the zettelkasten >>> Many people in the PKM, zettelkasten, and knowledge work scene live with varying levels of ADHD. Which is awesome, because it means people have access to a slew of insight from others with similar experiences. Email | OP
- The incorporation of rebellion into convention >>> Nice convo clip of David Bowie and Thomas Vinterberg (of Dogme 95 fame, and the great film The Celebration, discussing cooptation, recuperation and the defanging of rebellious art movements. Email | OP
- Complete books to Bases workflow from a true PKM mensch >>> Mike Schmitz of Practical PKM just released a complete walkthrough of his "entire reading workflow" detailing how he creates book notes using Obsidian Bases. Email | OP
- How are those NFTs doing? >>> As someone who only pays attention to crypto and crypto-coded enterprises from very much afar, and only does so when the writing and insights are top notch, I perk up when I get an email from Zeneca. Email | OP
- A PhD student facing difficulties with his 6 months ZK >>> TriboKiv brings up four issues they're having with implementing their zettelkasten IRL while getting their PhD. Email | OP
- Getting to the bottom of atoms >>> Sascha Fast continues to work on his Complete Guide to Atomicity. Email | OP
- Woes of getting lost in notes >>> Common concerns about getting lost among your notes. Email | OP
- Are literature notes good places to store book reviews? >>> If you find yourself writing a long-form review of a book, and it's something you find yourself doing often, you might consider setting up a separate compartment in your zettelkasten for book reviews. Email | OP
- Atomicity as length of time rather than length of note >>> The most useful definitions of "atomicity" tend to be the loosest. Something along the lines of: Atomicity is the smallest unit produced while still retaining its value and remaining useful. Email | OP
- Is it important how many daily main notes you make? >>> "Note-making quotas" have become another unfortunate standard for judging one's practice. It's a bad idea for many reasons, and Quack has, in my opinion, chosen the right path. Email | OP
- When you haven't started writing, because you can't finish your outline >>> Outlines can and will change up to the final weeks of writing, and with books that's often years in the making. Email | OP (see "Email" link)
- Leaning into your natural proclivity for "slow processing" >>> A "slow processing" thinker was able to lean into their way of doing things by engaging in activities that require methodical approaches. Email | OP
- Teacher embraces students marking up their work on digital platforms >>> Title says it all. Email | OP
Honestly, I was a bit surprised when I compiled this list. There's so much. Now, imagine getting all this (and more, once I start uploading interviews, coaching sessions, who knows!), spread across four weekly emails. No drama. No circular debates. No gate-keeping. No unfounded hype. Just clear, concise, to-the-point intel.
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To read the last of five free editions of COMPOSITION, read on!
Working with ideas as information
Last week, I talked about some of the benefits of seeing ideas not as formless ephemera, but as information. Information that can be identified and applied to our thinking and writing. This week I want to show what this looks like in practice.
To start, let's look at a passage from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I underlined over twenty years ago:
"Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence...."
Every page of Freire's seminal text on the relationship between oppressor and oppressed contains at least three or four passages worth citing. It's just that kind of book. Highlights, underlines, circles, and arrows everywhere. Were I to handle each as an ephemeral idea, a passing thought, or curious notion, I'd struggle to know which to save in my zettelkasten, having little to no appreciation of their use-value. However, once I consider the quote as information, everything starts making sense.
I begin by asking two questions:
- Does this information add to anything I've already captured? If so, how?
- Does this information benefit anything I'm currently working on? If so, how?
Considering how the quote might connect with something already stored in my zettelkasten, namely note 1.8b3a1 People in lower income brackets are more likely to have their performance evaluated by algorithms, I find myself rephrasing Freire's passage in slightly different terms:
Recognizing one's privilege, while a necessary step in the process of solidarity with those less privileged, does not necessarily lead to structural change.
I then consider how this and the algorithm note above relate. Is there a connection that can be made? How can I best articulate it? Does this connection lead to more connections?
The resulting note looks like this:
I then consider what if any of my recent writing the above might contribute to. On first glance, not much. I stopped writing on privilege and white supremacy about five years ago (by the way, two of my absolute favorite subjects to discuss). But, that's not the only context in which the idea can take shape. These days, I'm writing about the relationship between writer and reader. Perhaps there's something in Freire's thinking that informs how I discuss this topic. I make a note of it in one of those pieces, and come back to it when ready.
One quote. Multiple levels of ideation. Various use cases.
Here's what I didn't do:
- Endlessly ponder whether the idea was important
- Stew over whether the idea had value
- Get bogged down in analysis paralysis
- Worry about whether I captured the idea's "essence"
I simply asked myself in which situations the information could be useful, applied the information to those situations, and moved on. No fuss. No muss.
How "revolutionary" is adding visual elements to zettels?
I was one click from pulling this Reddit post on a hunch it was AI-generated. I left it, because people's responses, which did not seem AI-generated, brought value to the discussion.
It's not uncommon to see questions about including images in notes. On the whole, they tend to be in regards to technical stuff: What's the best way to do add an image? What platforms handle .jpgs best? That kind of stuff. Once in a while, though, someone comes along trying to extoll the "profound" and "revolutionary" nature of doodles. Fair enough. But, when people start claiming that pictures are somehow more informative than text, more "immediately meaningful" than writing, this is where I call BS.
u/ManStan's comment says it better than I can, so I'll just put that here:
"If you study with images instead of text, of course you’ll get a different perspective, but that’s not some deep cognitive breakthrough, it’s just because you changed the input channel. It’s no more revolutionary than saying:
- Looking at a chart is different than reading about the same chart
- Hearing a bird song is different than reading the word “bird”
As for Zettelkasten, sure, sketches, diagrams, icons can help. But there’s little to no resistance to adding images into notes. People already do this. It’s not a new category of “thought shaping,” it’s just adding another sensory cue to memory. A Zettelkasten with drawings is still doing the same job: storing notes and connecting them. This is taught in kindergarten.
The 'visual hooks' or 'spatial layouts' you mention are just mnemonic or organizational tricks. They’re fine, but they’re not mystical."
"Prove it to me."
The post, "Why is zettelkasten helpful?," can be summed up thusly: What's the purpose of a zettelkasten? How can it help? Convince me. Typically, this sort of "feed me" post is gonna get nixed. But, as with the previous example, the community came to its rescue.
u/Odd-Echo9697 on the benefits of articulation:
"There is a principal that says that you learn something better when you try to teach to someone else (google that $h1t). I write every note like I make a YouTube video or I am trying to teach the thing I learned to someone else and this is were the connections between notes come from. Like questions and answers that me or the imaginary person that I am teaching has and there is no better system to connect notes than zettelkasten"
u/clutch_me on the importance of establishing relationships between ideas:
"The act of placing the cards makes me think about the branching of thoughts and the flow from one to another. For me, it's not enough to write a thought, it's just as important to relate it to other thoughts. The creation of the main zk is probably the most important act in the process, because if you are going to "have a conversation" with your zk, you had better spend some time giving it the wherewithal to engage in dialog."
Lawyers and paralegals using zettelkasten
An important evolutionary step is learning to embrace "not knowing" (this is especially true for men, who are socialized to "always know"). As an example of my own slow growth into not-knowing, I can admit I don't know what to say when people ask how a zettelkasten can benefit lawyers.
From the post:
"I'm very early in the learning phase of ZK..., but I was curious if any other lawyers find it useful for writing complex/lengthy briefs? I'm always trying new methods to take sometimes dozens of cases and excerpts from Westlaw/Lexis, organize the salient points/quotes, and then compile them into a coherent outline, then final product."
Because I use the zettelkasten almost exclusively for creative, non-life-threatening writing (in that, someone else's legal issues are not my responsibility), it's hard for me to articulate how a lawyer might use this same practice. That is, other than recommending they speak with Sascha Fast (see below) who does not seem to embrace the "non-ordinary, heterogenous things" that Luhmann and I do.
Do you have any words of wisdom for Important People With Important Jobs who want to start using a zettelkasten?
To read another Reddit thread on "lawyers 'r' zetteling," check out this Reddit post, where u/Barrycenter0 gives some cautionary words to professionals:
"I would also suggest that time is really a problem with a ZK methodology. It's one thing just to have a repository of searchable reference notes with some tags and links - which is easy and simple vs. a purposeful set of directed sequencing of atomic notes (which requires breaking down concepts, indexing and organizing information when adding notes and not even using them yet).
As I noted above in another comment - if I have a time constraint (typically), I ignore the ZK and just focus on draft notes in a PKMS, rearrange them in the order I want and export them all, in order, to a single draft document to write the final publication (in Word or Pages)."
From complex idea to complex connections
It's not every day I point to a Sascha Fast piece and say, "This is so clear. You need to read it." But, as the post-911 NYC ads used to say, "If you see something, say something."
Sascha's recent video on the process of atomization is in fact both very clear and very actionable. It's also long overdue:
The basic gist is this:
- Start with however broad of an idea you need to, including any thoughts that may diverge from the idea. Basically, whatever you need to work out your thinking, put that in.
- Go back and parse out whatever feels like an idea unto itself.
- Turn those ideas into their own main notes.
The takeaway here, which will be a pretty big takeaway for those who experience non-atomized notes as kryptonite, is that notes don't need to arrive to the zettelkasten pre-parsed / pre-atomized. Instead, you can start broad and pare things down as you go.
But, why are we even having this discussion?
Recently, Sascha caught a fair amount of (imo, unwarranted) flack on Reddit for supposedly promoting "non-atomic" notes. (See here and here). Part of the misdirected shade came from people not realizing Sascha, having been in this game for almost a decade-and-a-half, probably didn't feel the need to explain why his / his coachee's notes looked the way they did: complex, long-ish, and seemingly "non-atomic." This got people's hackles up.
What people didn't realize is that Sascha uses his notes to work out his thinking. (Hence his emphasis on the zettelkasten being a "thinking environment"). He develops his thinking on a topic in the note, parsing the ideas as he goes.
This is not unlike Nick Milo's laissez faire approach to atomicity, where parsing happens only after complex notes "collide" due to too much complexity, and thus must "cleave" into smaller bits (see the "Atomic Notes" section of this article).
By contrast, with the zettelkasten, we typically don't wait for issues of complexity to arise, instead preemptively deconstructing complex notes into smaller, single-idea units. The "and/but" section (4.5) in A System for Writing alludes to this.
Sönke discussing the difference between fleeting and permanent notes
The confusion caused by Sönke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes, is the stuff of legends, to the extent where I basically had to write over two dozen articles and an entire book just to clear it up. Half of this confusion seems justified, as Ahrens' book has got some unfortunate internal discrepancies (see here). But, the other half is simply people misreading HTTSN. Or worse, letting others who've gravely misread HTTSN (ugh, this) color their reading.
So, it's great to see Ahrens setting the record straight:
For the full video, click here. It's good.
Feeling overwhelmed by all the fleeting notes you need to process?
For some, grokking the best way to market a new business idea is creatively stimulating. For others, it's the worst thing ever. For some, carving out time to process fleeting notes is the best, most "writerly" thing they could do. For others, it's straight up panic attack.
Cue this post in the subreddit:
"It has been a week and now I want to convert my fleeting ntoes [sic] into permanent notes. /// Problem: Overwhelmed /// I do not know what tag I should use, and I cannot tell if a note should be archived or turned to permanent note."
Overwhelm is subjective. So, when people say they're feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of converting incomplete fleeting notes into useful main notes, all we learn is that for them this is an emotional lift. Therefor, if we want to speak to the real issue, we need to speak to the emotional stuff that's coming up. Few are in a position to do this. Fewer still in a Reddit forum.
Setting aside the emotional component, here's what I suggest for those with limited time or limited capacity to navigate feelings of overwhelm:
- Don't worry about what unprocessed fleeting notes you can and can not get to. (The note you didn't process isn't the note that was gonna make you your first cool mil. It doesn't work that way).
- Process only the fleeting notes which seem most relevant to your current thinking.
- Put everything you don't process in a "Sleeping Folder." (Section 1.5 in ASFR).
- Do something else. If you haven't forgotten about the sleeping notes after a few days, process some more. If you have, they weren't that important.
- Scan your "Sleeping" folder every few months. If something jumps out at you, process it. If not. Shut the "Sleeping" folder, and go back to step 4.
When "No Boilerplate" speaks, we listen
Tris of No Boilerplate is a total YouTube gem. Whenever an interest of his crosses an interest of mine, I listen. His voice, his tempo, his thoroughness, his slides.... It's just great. In this video, Tris discusses Obsidian, with a nod to yours truly and GTD.
Honored to be featured.
And, that's that! See ya next week.
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