Bob Doto

UPDATE | 02-14-26

The more (and more and more) people I encounter totally confused by the terms "atomic," "atomic note," and "atomicity" in regard to note-taking, the more I feel these terms should be retired. We don't need them. There are far better and more interesting ways to discuss what constitutes the "single idea" captured in a main note.

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BOOKS

• A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly—A Zettelkasten Primer

• Sitting with Spirits: Exploring the Unseen World In the Margins of Christianity

• The House of I Am Mirrors: And Other Poems

• The Power of Stretching

• Acupressure For Beginners

2026 WRITING

• Serendipity and the Zettelkasten

2025 WRITING

• Reading Ideas as Information

• How I Start a Book Project Using a Zettelkasten

• Folgezettel Will Not Necessarily Create Discrete Topical Sections in Your Zettelkasten

2024 WRITING

• The Difference Between Hub Notes and Structure Notes Explained

• How a Collaborative Zettelkasten Might Work: A Modest Proposal for a New Kind of Collective Creativity

• What Do We Mean When We Say "Bottom-Up?"

2023 WRITING

• Inspired Destruction: How a Zettelkasten Explodes Thoughts (So You Can Have New Ones)

• Doing What Matters Most: Personal Project Management for the Burgeoning Homesteader

• Keeping the Zettelkasten in Mind When Creating New Notes

• Using Diaries and Journals as Source Material for Zettelkasten Notes

• How to Handle Facts in Your Zettelkasten

• There is No "One True Meaning" in a Text: Reading as a Communal Act

• How to Use Folgezettel in Your Zettelkasten: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

2022 WRITING

• What is a Permanent Note?

• Don't Ditch Your Old Notes: An Argument for Holding onto Abandoned Ideas

• What is a Fleeting Note?

• Folgezettel is Not an Outline: Luhmann's Playful Appreciation of (Dys)function

• "I just finished reading a book and took lots of notes. Now what?"

• The New Convert and the Old Devotee

• What is a Literature Note?

• A Zettelkasten is Not for "Making Connections"

• Zettelkasten, Linking Your Thinking, and Nick Milo's Search for Ground

• Linking New Notes & Fearing Lost Ones

• Quotes are Not Notes: Creating a Zettelkasten of Ideas

• A scraped knee is never just a scraped knee

• Friction-free does not lead to more free time

• My former alter ego

• How I Use CLOGs to Organize My Writing Files

• User-Centric Means Labor-Invisible

• Decentralization is Inevitably Centralized

• The Spectacle Always Recoups Dissent

• Resonance over scale

• Misconceptions About the Relationship Between Permanent & Evergreen Notes

• Folgezettel is More than Mechanism

• Tensions Between Zettelkasten & the Productivity Scene

• Obsidian Publish Should Not Cost $198 a Year to Use

• How to Be a Good Teacher

• Is NYT's Acquiring Wordle the End of an Era?

• The Five Levels of Hype

• Mindsets that Prevent(ed) Me From Ever Making Money as an Artist

• Cars feeling creepy dystopian

2021 WRITING | still being uploaded

• The Spirit of Productivity: Channeling Inspiration Into Doing What Matters Most

• Hidden Relevance: Where Seemingly Dissonant Ideas Meet

• I Wanna See Writing Gangs!

• The Predicament of Bourgeois Anticapitalism

• Is "Conscious Capitalism" Still an Option? Was it Ever?

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