Atomic Note Taking
Atomic design principles – and why you should use them for note taking.
I seem to be obsessed with note taking workflows and productivity hacks. So obsessed that I spend more time looking for productivity methods than actually being productive. As exams approach, I’ve been looking at ways to improve my note taking so that I can effectively organise my course content for study and revision. One of the things I love doing is UI/UX design for the various app concepts I have and, after researching multiple design systems, I stumbled upon the atomic design principles. These principles boil down UI designs into smaller pieces that are modular and interchangeable, and it led me to ask the question, why not use these principles for note taking. After a quick search on Medium for “atomic note taking”, it seems no one had explored this topic. So, I set out to implement these principles in my note taking workflow and now I’m sharing it with you in my first Medium article….
Atomic Design Principles
If you’re already familiar with what atomic design principles are, feel free to skip this section. Atomic design principles break down design into fundamental pieces. These pieces are atoms, molecules, organisms, templates (which we won’t be using) and pages. Atoms are the core aspects of a design. These can include things like colours, font sizes and shapes. Molecules combine multiple atoms to create more complex structures such as form fields, search bars, buttons etc. Again, organisms combine multiple molecules to create even more complex elements like forms, navigation bars and product cards. The final step is to combine multiple organisms into a page, which is the final UI design. So now lets use this concept, of breaking up a design into smaller components, in our note taking.
Atomic Note Taking
Atomic note taking is not only a way of taking notes, but also a way of organising them.
Pages (Topic)
It may seem odd to start at the highest level of the design system however, when we take notes, we are already presented with the information in it’s entirety. The goal for atomic note taking is to break down these pages into atoms.
Organisms (Subtopics)
The best way to think of organisms is to look at the subsections of the overarching topic. If there are no subsections, you can think of organisms as the key concepts that are involved in the topic. They are still broad but categorise the topic into different key points and roles.
Molecules
Molecules describe the different key points and roles that make up an organism (Subtopic). They provide us with more detail about what exactly the organism consists of.
Atoms
Finally, the atoms are what describe the molecules. They may define the molecule and/or describe how the molecule operates within the organism.
Putting It All Together
Now for a practical example. As a computer science student, one of my courses that I’m currently studying is Discrete Structures so lets look at how to apply atomic note taking to this.
Pages
For this example, I've chosen the topic of Sets. The first step is to create this folder which will contain our organisms. Pretty simple so far.
Organisms
Once again, creating the organisms are a pretty simple step as they refer to populating our folders (pages) with files (organisms) that will then contain the information about our molecules. The most difficult part of this step is identifying the organisms. Luckily for me, the organisms are in the form of subsections.
Molecules
Molecules are in the form of headings which describe the key information, descriptions or different types that make up our organisms or even questions about the organism.
Atoms
The atoms are simply examples, keywords, definitions etc. in the form of bullet points that are contained within our molecules. The goal is to define and/or answer the headings (molecules).
[EXTRA] Protons, Neutrons and Electrons
If you stumble upon an atom with subcategories, that's okay. Using sub lists, we can describe this information as protons, neutrons and electrons, the components that make up the atoms.
[BONUS] Mind Maps
If you’re more of a visual person, fear not. Due to the nature of this method being about breaking down larger topics into smaller building blocks, the information can be easily translated into different forms of visualisations such as the mind map below.
Conclusion
By taking notes this way, we develop a much deeper understanding about the topics and their core concepts. Once we’ve identified the building blocks of the topic, the next step is to rearrange these blocks to develop new connections, information and methods which can be used to answer questions about the topic. I hope you give Atomic Note Taking a try just to see how effective it is, not only as a way of note taking but also as a way of structuring notes.
