I really like that way of thinking. It’s easy to visualise, like following North on your quest but going East or West for side quests. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you so much for your kind words 🙏

I don’t have it available on Amazon unfortunately, but if you want the digital version, you can load the ePub version onto a Kindle.

WoW. It was a great insight. Thank you for sharing.

Excellent summary, thank you for sharing!

I would say you need to take your timer more with a book. You use your notes to have a conversation with the author asking questions, expanding on their ideas with your own, rephrasing what they say in your own world so it becomes your understanding.

Great question. In a technical context, I would say that fleeting notes is the capture of what steps you take, or rough notes on a topic. For example, installing an Apache web server, you might capture things as you’re doing it, but at some point you might discover some of those steps weren’t required. Literature notes (atomic nature of those steps) are your refined and more concise steps. Permanent notes is when you start to bring it into the wider ecosystem, such as adding a database, proxy server, adding secure certificates. The atomic nature of those notes is that you could link to individual steps where necessary. For example, forwarding your request to a PHP application could point to just the atomic step where you set up the routes in Apache. You add an intermediary note which says how to modify that file in Apache. Then it’s easy to swap that for Nginx for example. I hope that makes sense. Great question and I’ve been thinking about what would be some great videos to make specifically on creating technical notes.

@@Martin_Adams Thank you for the detailed explanation. I might not get it fully at first, but I'll take the time to practice and see how does it fit into my system. Love your content.

Thank you, really appreciate the kind words!

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. I have written up some further thoughts on writing atomic literature notes here: meda.io/how-to-make-atomic-literature-notes/ And of course, my most recent work with examples which goes into this is a *lot* more detail is my book Atomic Note-Taking: www.atomicworkflows.com/atomic-note-taking/

Great question. Yes, I actually like the Zero-Inbox approach which is what inspired a bit of the workflow I'm experimenting with my note-taking app Flowtelic. The idea is that you have the buckets of notes (fleeting -> capture, literature -> understanding, permanent -> reflection). Each of these are done at different stages of your workflow. I find that it's easy to create lots of fleeting notes, but takes consciously effort to process these into your zettelkasten. This is akin to using your inbox as a todo list (living out of the inbox) rather than processing the emails. As for linking to the fleeting notes, this is merely so you can trace your thinking right back to the original source. I might have a fleeting note as I'm walking, or I might have one as I'm reading a book. The book could link to the page/passage that inspired that thought. Simply deleting this link can mean you struggle to go back to where your ideas came from, especially if you discover that they may have in fact be incorrect. Did you misunderstand it, or did you learn from incorrect information? You can manage those references right into your literature and permanent notes, but where my exploration is going is chaining the references all the way from permanent, back to literature, back to fleeting, back to the original source. Maybe it'll be a good system, maybe it wont.

That will be my own note-taking app Flowtelic that I'm building. As for why not use Obsidian, I wanted to build curiosity of what I'm working on and invite anyone to follow along the app development journey.

Absolutely!

Thanks, appreciate the feedback

Thanks. Good question, but I’m unsure if you are referring to the UX course or the book Atomic Note-Taking. Short answer is it will be delivered in my sure atomicworkflows.com and the marketing strategy is to teach in KZfaq.

You’re absolutely right and that is a very great observation. This is a good example where the note fails to convey one atomic idea per note, and as such makes it harder to link to. Ideally the benefits could have been a map of content for each one in turn. Then if you’re teaching about the benefits, you can look at the map of content.

Yeah my teaching has been a little more refined as I wrote my book covering all this in more detail. In a nutshell, what I prefer to do now is have the fleeting notes as the quick captures. They are just to get the information into your system with minimal thinking. You're just filtering out the noise and keeping what's useful to you. I like bullet point lists for this. The literature notes is now my understanding of this fleeting note, written atomically with one key idea at a time. This allows me to make sure I fully understand it. I can ask open questions that I don't understand, link the concepts to together, and go back to the source material to make sure I do understand it. Then I take these literature notes and merge them to my slip box as permanent notes. For a new slip box, you wont have anything to merge into, so the notes will pretty much just copy over. But as time goes on, you're going to have to consider how these literature notes from say one book, not relates to all the notes you have from all the books you've read. This is where you do your reflection on it to see if it contradicts or enhances your existing understanding. It feels like more work for sure, because you're going from 1) capture 2) understand 3) reflect. The reason why I like this approach is the understanding phase allows you to let go of any biases you have based on previous reading and properly consider the new material at it's own merits. Great for critical thinking avoiding any form of confirmation bias where you filter out ideas because they don't align with other things you've read. Is this the right way to do it? No idea. Go straight from fleeting to permanent notes if you wish, but just be mindful of what the implications of that may be, such as confirmation biases or jumping to conclusions. Hope that helps.

​@@Martin_Adams thank you for the video and this explanation.

I often like to use the same format. The main thing to consider with literature notes vs permanent notes is in a literature note it's just your understanding of the material you just read, whereas the permanent notes considers all the material you've read. So while the format may be similar, the contents will evolve in the permanent notes over time.

Thanks. I like to consider that the index notes are a nice way to organise your ideas around a topic. Top level entries are the more abstract ideas, and the sub-entries are the more specific thoughts on it. As for the notes themselves, you may want to sequence them if it naturally continues, but you don't have to. The backlink to your index note will be enough to orient yourself with the other notes on that topic. At least this way, you can have a note that is shared across different index notes. For example, "Learning how to calculate interest rate calculations" could exist in your index note about mathematics, as well as an index note about "Calculating the earnings on savings" or "Calculating the interest on mortgage repayments". Same formula, different contexts.

Like this one? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/msiUmrCmp9bQh2Q.htmlsi=Jgc9OlgScq0pLvF2

I do understand. The only thing I suggest is to try it out, and observe what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to adapt it to make it your own.

You can if you want. But when you get deeper into the process and you have hundreds of permanent notes that already exist. If you are trying to understand what new material (like a book) is really saying, then the literature notes is like a sandbox you can play in to make sure you properly understand it. Only after you understand it, do you connect it to what you have previously learned in your permanent notes. The reason for this is to help avoid any confirmation biases or contractions that get in the way. I cover this a lot in my Atomic Note-Taking book. Here’s an example from the book. If you had read about wizards and made lots of notes about it, and your learning came from Harry Potter, then you would have an understanding of it through that lens. Then if you start to read about wizards from Lord of the Rings, you’d continually have to keep comparing it to Harry Potter before you’ve had the chance to fully understand what Lord of the Rings wizards are like. You’d have confirmation bias, it would slow you down and you would probably miss important key details and ideas. Using literature notes for you understanding of just your fleeting notes in isolation helps free you up to entertain different points of view, contradictory points of view of other things you read, and help you make sure you understand what the author was saying before you decide if you agree. You only make that decision when it comes to your permanent notes. Of course, doing it this way has a trade off of taking more effort. But at least you’ll understand what compromises you may be making if you go right to your permanent notes.

@@Martin_Adams Great explanation. Thanks!

Haha, amazing! 🤩

Thank you. I decided not to publish via Amazon for the time being because it’s not possible to offer the video course upgrade through their platform. Also, their fees are pretty high in that of the 70% or so they you keep, you pay the full print cost. So the fees are calculated on the sale price, not the profit. If it was a black and white book, I’d probably consider it.

Having your notes in a single vault means you can link ideas together across different fields. So it would be possible to link ideas of ‘relationships’ to ‘mathematics’ for example. I personally would separate technical notes from non-technical notes. Mostly because the disciples rarely overlap.

@@Martin_Adams tnx for the response. I have one query, the purpose of the zettelkasten method is to manage & link the atomic ideas for deep understanding and the same thing can be done with the concept /thinking map(linking the different ideas) wht is the difference btw these two visual encoding(Zettelkasten & concept map) technique ??

I’m not familiar enough with the thinking/concept map that you’re referring to. I suspect there might be a lot of overlap with how the Zettelkasten works and the use of Maps of Content to organise the notes for a particular perspective.

@@Martin_Adamsk... would suggest me some article ,web site where I can get some info abt (compare & contrast) thinking maps & Zettelkasten method

Sure thing, this is the track I purchased for the video: elements.envato.com/inspiring-innovation-RHVCYUM

All fair and valid points, thank you. Agree, I should have remembered to link to it, I will add that when I get the chance. As for future videos, the short answer is yes the book does feature as a topic of content while explaining something related. Yes, it is both convenient, and also helps promote the book. This will not always be the case though when I find what’s the right thing to focus on next. I take your feedback seriously and thank you for sharing.

@@Martin_Adams Links to the book would be useful... as for links to Google Notebook LM... odd, perhaps the commenter might use, er, Google to find their own links, no?

@@Martin_Adams - My apologies - I was very harsh. I too am a non-fiction author and so I know how difficult it can be to get the message out. Perhaps you could share how you use Ai for copy editing and proof reading, or some other related tasks? Keep up the good work!!