How to write better Smart Notes

Smart Notes work best when “permanent notes” are judged solely by one outcome: how effectively they set up future writing. The core shift is away from producing long, near-verbatim summaries and toward creating short, atomic ideas that are abstracted from their original context and rewritten in the note-taker’s own language—so they can be reused, recombined, and expanded later.

The process hinges on elaboration as a two-step transformation. First, the idea must be abstracted from the source text so it becomes malleable—“atomic” enough to detach from the original context and connect to other concepts. Without that abstraction, the note stays trapped to the material it came from, limiting how it can merge into new arguments. Second, the note must be expressed in the note-taker’s own words. That personal phrasing isn’t just stylistic; it prepares the mind for writing by turning borrowed information into something usable.

A contrast makes the point. An earlier “good” permanent note—based on a deep work idea by Cal Newport about multitasking—was treated like a successful digestion exercise. It was lengthy (286 words) and took a long time (around 30 minutes), but it functioned more like regurgitation: the idea was close to the original, and the note’s value didn’t translate into faster outlining or clearer drafting. The new approach keeps the idea but compresses it into a reusable form. In the example, the permanent note is built from a brief literature note (“multitasking has no benefits”) and expanded into a shorter permanent note (94 words) that can support multiple future pieces.

The multitasking example also shows why atomic notes matter. The new note doesn’t just restate Newport’s claim that multitasking lowers both the quality and quantity of work. It adds a second layer by connecting the idea to information overload—multitasking becomes a reactive strategy people use when overwhelmed. That extra linkage is what makes the note portable across contexts, enabling it to support different arguments rather than only one.

This portability becomes a practical writing workflow. Instead of building elaborate hierarchies of notes that are hard to navigate and slow to translate into drafts, the shorter permanent notes can be laid out and skimmed—previewing key sentences to reload information into working memory while drafting in Ulysses. The argument for Smart Notes in nonfiction and technical writing is that writing isn’t a single linear act; it’s research, understanding, note-taking, editing, and iteration. Atomic notes let the argument accumulate before committing to a topic, letting interests and knowledge drive what gets written.

Finally, the method is framed as a mental re-training. The creator links the improvement to Nicholas Carr’s discussion of artificial versus biological memory: computers store copies, while human memory keeps processing information after it’s received. A technology background previously encouraged a “file structure” habit—copying and cataloging information wholesale. Unlearning that copy-first approach, and instead processing and rewriting ideas, produces higher-quality permanent notes that better prepare writing.