How to Split Long Notes into Atomic Notes: A Comprehensive Guide
A comprehensive guide on splitting long notes into atomic notes within a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, highlighting the benefits, and practical steps
In this article, I want to share ideas about how to split long notes into atomic ones. This practical guide should help you enhance your Knowledge Management practices.
Introduction
The concept of atomic notes deserves more attention from those seeking to create more valuable notes that optimize their information retention/retrieval processes and enable connecting ideas together (i.e., create valuable Knowledge Graphs).
As we'll see, atomic notes are much more interesting than long and linerar ones.
The Downsides of Long Notes in Personal Knowledge Management Systems
While long notes are sometimes useful or unavoidable, their drawbacks in the context of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) systems are clear. They hinder quick retrieval, contribute to cognitive overload, impede the creation of a connected knowledge network, limit the system's flexibility, and are less suitable for sharing.
PKM systems are designed to enhance the way we capture, organize, retrieve, and use knowledge. The ultimate goal is to create a dynamic ecosystem of information that supports learning, decision-making, and creativity. However, incorporating long notes into a PKM system can introduce several challenges that may compromise its usefulness, effectiveness and efficiency.
Here are some of those challenges:
1. Makes it harder to retrieve information
Long notes, by nature, tend to contain multiple ideas, insights, and pieces of information clustered together and intertwined. This density can make it difficult to quickly find specific pieces of information when they're needed.
2. Leads to Cognitive Overload
A core principle of effective PKM is minimizing cognitive overload by organizing information in a way that aligns with how our brains naturally process and retrieve data.
Long notes, with their complex and often convoluted structures, can quickly become overwhelming. They make it much harder to absorb and recall information. This is counterproductive to the learning and creative processes that PKM systems aim to support.
3. Impedes Linking and Connectivity
One of the strengths of a robust PKM system is the ability to create connections between different pieces of knowledge. Long notes make it challenging to establish these links because they blur the lines between distinct ideas, making it hard to see how they relate to other concepts within the system.
Atomic notes, on the other hand, facilitate creating a network of interconnected ideas, enhancing understanding and discovery.
4. Limits Flexibility and Adaptability
While long notes and documents are generally able to express complex ideas in a linear way, they're far from ideal.
PKM systems thrive on flexibility and the ability to evolve over time. Long notes are static and rigid. They don't easily allow for the addition, modification, or reorganization of information. This rigidity can stifle the growth of your knowledge base and limit its adaptability to new insights or changing needs.
Isn't there a way to take Smarter Notes?
At this point, we can probably agree that long notes and documents are far from ideal from a Knowledge Management perspective. Still, it's all we get taught. At school we're only taught the basics of linear note-taking, writing essays and summarizing information. It's no wonder that the default for most people is to reuse the same approaches throughout their lives...
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to DeveloPassion to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.