Atomic Note-Taking

by Martin Adams

Want to remember what you read? Are you studying and want to remove the stress of writing assignments? Maybe you want to write more, create impactful content or teach effectively and need a system to keep your ideas and insights organised.

Atomic Note-Taking will guide you through everything you need to know about the Zettelkasten note-taking method and how to use it to create your own atomic notes. You’ll use these to create the building blocks for your own knowledge system that will help you stay organised, think deeply and love learning.

266 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strong contender for the default guide to creating a digital (zettelkasten-type) note system in 2024. It focuses on core ideas, particularly how and why to create notes as single ideas and then combine them with links. Crucially, there is a strong emphasis on the experience of the individual and promoting what works for you — this pragmatic stance is significant advance over other guides which tend to be much more prescriptive. Clearly structured, with a long-running sequence of examples which gain complexity as new ideas are introduced. Paragraphs are a bit short for my personal taste, but the briefer, more journalistic style keeps it moving at a good pace. The book is agnostic about software, but provides a list of some options, including the author's own product, Flowtelic — it was written partly as an exercise in thinking through the limitations of current software offerings for the note-taking process.

Unlike Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes — the influence of which Adams acknowledges — this book focuses on many more kinds of media, and therefore broadens the interest for autodictats and general readers rather than merely academic note-takers focused on books and journal articles.

The book places a different emphasis on the distinction between literature and permanent notes than many other treatments. I found this interesting, and I don't know how it would strike the beginner without much knowledge of the area. I was in a position to see this as an interesting innovation, and I felt that Adams didn't evangelize too much about it, which is another strong point in the book's favour. To return for a moment to my earlier remark about pragmatism: another place where this comes out is in the eternal "numbering convention" debate. Adams' treatment of this is paradigmatic: he provides a neutral explanation of how each system works, what the benefits and drawbacks are, and then leaves it to the reader to decide which will work better in their case. Adams' willingness to be flexible about the terminology is also another huge point in his favour: he is willing to discuss the underlying ideas with whatever words are most useful or familiar to the reader.

Perhaps this more "modern" aspect is also a potential weakness of this book; central references are made to many Youtubers, and while it is useful context and bridges the terminology circulating online at this moment, it may be that in five or ten years the references to Maps of Content and so on may not be so memorable or enlightening. There is little of the history of zettelkasten in the book, nor many references to books published before 2020 — but this may not be required, and the inclusion of those things may have undermined the clarity of Adams' descriptions with imported discussions that do little to help readers understand. It is to the author's credit that he set out to create a clear and practical guide and succeeded: this is a book that deals with technique, and separate works can deal with the history.

[V Massaglia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated this book. It helped better understand how to take notes and link them together. His YouTube videos are awesome and extremely instructional. He’s been very influential of how I use Obsidian for my work on my literature review. His writing style is clear and very approachable.