The argument in brief
The question
How detailed should a permanent note be, and is it worth keeping the fleeting notes it came from?
The claim
Smaller, focused permanent notes are easier to reason about, update and link than one long note, and keeping fleeting notes gives you an audit trail back to the original source. Confidence: A personal preference from my own practice. No studies are cited.
The evidence
  • My own experience of writing permanent notes and Maps of Content with the Zettelkasten method.
  • A worked example: splitting a note on bootstrapping a business into five smaller notes.
The best counter
Long notes keep an argument whole and are quicker to write; splitting too finely can scatter context and leave a pile of fragments that are harder to read than one coherent note.
What would change my mind
Finding that I, or people using the same method, reason and write better from a few longer notes than from many small ones, or that I never actually follow the trail back through my fleeting notes.

The questionHow detailed should a permanent note be, and is it worth keeping the fleeting notes it came from?I’ve been getting questions lately about how to find the right granularity for permanent notes and Maps of Content when using the Zettelkasten method. I recently answered this in a comment on one of my YouTube videos, and I think it’s worth sharing here.

How detailed should a note be?

When it comes to how detailed your permanent notes should be, it really comes down to personal preference. Let’s say you’re writing an article about bootstrapping a business. Should you create one comprehensive permanent note about bootstrapping, which sits as a sub-topic of entrepreneurship, or should you break it down into smaller, more focused notes?

A competing explanationA long note keeps an argument in one place and is quicker to write. Split too finely and the context gets scattered, so you end up with fragments that are harder to read than one coherent note.Personally, Claima personal preference from my own practiceI find having smaller and more focused notes makes it much easier to reason about the topic. A single long note might feel right at first, but breaking it down into smaller pieces offers long-term benefits when it comes to reasoning about, updating and linking notes to create unique insights. For example, instead of one long note titled “Bootstrapping a Business”, you could break it into a collection of smaller atomic notes, such as:

  • What bootstrapping means
  • The benefits of bootstrapping
  • When to consider bootstrapping your business
  • The potential challenges of bootstrapping your business
  • How to bootstrap with limited resources

Breaking these ideas down into their own individual notes makes it easier for you to explain each one clearly and connect it to your own unique insights. A note on “Challenges of Bootstrapping”, for example, might link to others about “Time Management” or “Resource Management”. It’s about building a web of ideas instead of a stack of documents.

Why smaller notes matter

Having smaller, focused permanent notes (Atomic Notes) makes creating a robust Map of Content (MoC) much easier. Imagine you’re mapping out “Bootstrapping a Business”, and you have distinct notes that let you easily visualise how each aspect relates. In contrast, a single, lengthy note will be harder to dissect when you’re trying to create a broader MoC around something like “Entrepreneurship”.

Over time your understanding will evolve. Updating a long note to reflect this is much harder than updating a handful of small, atomically written notes. The more specific your notes are, the easier it is to connect them to other concepts.

Should you keep fleeting notes?

This is another question that comes up often. Fleeting notes are quick, disposable captures of what you’re learning, often as a bullet-point list. They serve as a way to jot down the key points from lectures, books or videos before refining them into literature notes, and then permanent notes. I used to think they were disposable, but now I see the value in keeping them around.

Why? They can act as a great audit trail, especially if you need to cite your references when publishing your own work. They help you trace back to the original source of where your ideas came from. For instance, you might take a bullet point from a fleeting note and turn it into a more fleshed-out literature note as its own atomically written note. This helps you refine your understanding of what the original material was saying.

That literature note could then evolve into a permanent note, linking to other parts of your Zettelkasten as you start to reflect on its impact on the wider body of knowledge you have. By keeping the fleeting note, you maintain a connection to the original material.

LimitsA fleeting note is only as good a trail as it is accurate. If the quick capture misread the source, it leads back to my misreading, not to what the author said, so for anything I publish I’d still check the original.This can be super helpful when you’re writing and want to cite a specific idea. With an audit trail that leads from a permanent note to a literature note to a fleeting note, you have a clear path back to where your thoughts originated.

As you evolve your permanent notes and add new sources that change your thinking, you can continue to add the literature notes that contribute to this change. Those literature notes in turn link back to the fleeting notes, which link back to the original material.

Wrapping up

It takes a bit of practice to find the right level of detail for your permanent notes and how to organise them in your Maps of Content. But I’ve found that breaking things down into smaller, more focused notes can really pay off in the long run. By keeping fleeting notes, you track the origins of your ideas, creating a better and more accurate knowledge system.

Books behind this essay

Not sources for any claim here. These are books I have finished that shaped how I think about this question. Where I rely on evidence, it is cited in the text.

The whole shelf