Here's a pattern I see all the time, and I've done it myself.
You get excited about note-taking. You read, highlight, clip articles and save things. Your notes app fills up. A few weeks later you've got hundreds of notes and you can't remember what any of them were for.
You love the idea of a full and healthy Zettelkasten, but you've ended up with an imbalance: too many fleeting notes and not enough of anything else.
It's a flow problem
I find it helpful to think of the workflow as a series of queues:
- Things to read
- Fleeting notes to process
- Literature notes to process
- Projects to work on
A healthy system keeps notes moving through those queues. An unhealthy one has a bottleneck: one queue is overflowing while the next is dry. The most common version? Fleeting notes pile up waiting to become literature notes. And since nothing gets through, nothing reaches your permanent notes either.
Your fleeting notes are meant to be short-lived. If they sit there for months, they lose their meaning. I've often looked back at an old fleeting note and thought, why did I save this?
Five habits that help
1. Batch your work. Don't try to read, write literature notes, make permanent notes and have original ideas all at once. Treat each as a separate bucket and move things through one at a time. You'll reduce the mental load of switching.
2. Time-box. Small, regular chunks beat heroic weekend sessions. Spend 20 minutes turning fleeting notes into literature notes. Spend 30 minutes processing literature notes into permanent notes. You can often do just one of these in a day.
3. Look for imbalances. If fleeting notes are piling up, switch your attention to processing them before you capture anything else. A healthy system has steady, flowing activity in every bucket.
4. Prioritise. There are endless things to learn and not enough lifetimes. Decide which topics you're truly passionate about and spend your deep thinking time there. For the topics that are merely useful, do the minimum that serves you.
5. Make it fun. If you don't enjoy it, you won't do it. Appreciate the activity of moving notes through the system, not just the amazing work you might produce at the end. It should become part of who you are, not just something you happen to do.
And a bonus: trust the process. Like any new habit, it takes time. Commit to doing it properly for a while before you judge it.
You're working on many things at once, and that's the point
A surprising benefit of this approach is that you end up working in parallel. In a single week, I might be creating fleeting notes about psychology, writing literature notes on business and drafting a blog post on education. Each topic is simply at a different stage.
It sounds like a lot. But it's really just separate queues that don't depend on each other. And since you're not forcing one idea from start to finish before touching the next, you avoid the "heavy lift" of doing everything for one article in one go.
A five-minute health check
Count how many notes you have at each stage: to read, fleeting, literature, permanent. Which one is overflowing? Which one is empty? That's where to spend your next session.
What does a good weekly rhythm look like?
In Atomic Note-Taking I share a sample cadence for reading, processing, connecting ideas, assembling projects and writing, along with the Q&A where I answer the questions students ask me most: how to handle daily notes, old versions, outdated notes and more. If you've ever stalled, there's an answer in there.
