Atomic Essays are perfect Evergreen Notes

In personal knowledge management (PKM), there's a powerful idea of Evergreen Atomic Notes. And the "Ship 30 for 30" course has introduced us to the concept of Atomic Essays.

You can supercharge your productivity and creative output by combining these two concepts.

Evergreen Atomic Notes

Most people only take fleeting notes - just writing things down in a journal or an app. The problem is that fleeting notes are disorganized, difficult to search through, rarely revisited, and don't help you to increase your creative output.

Apps like Obsidian and Notion enable us to turn the fleeting notes into Evergreen ones. Regularly revisit your fleeting notes, extract the most useful ideas, organize them into files, add tags, good titles, and links between them.

This is very powerful, because it creates a system that helps you to:

  • Make creative connections between different ideas.
  • Capture information in a way that's easy to discover.
  • Turn your notes into building blocks out of which you can assemble long-form content, making the process of writing articles and books much faster and easier.

Daily Atomic Essays

The idea of Atomic Essays is to capture one idea in 250 words or less, publish it as a blog post, and share it as an image on twitter.

This has some great benefits:

  • Producing and publishing something valuable every day is satisfying, it will motivate you to create regularly.
  • At the same time, writing 250 words is not intimidating, you know you can do it, and you have no excuses not to do it every day (nobody is too busy to write 250 words).
  • It makes your writing data-driven, you can see which ideas people respond to and double down on them, making sure you're writing things people want to read.
  • It helps you to grow your audience. Once you turn your notes and ideas into books or courses, you can sell them to your readers.
  • Rapid feedback loops help you to quickly improve as a writer.

Combining Evergreen Notes with Atomic Essays is powerful

These two ideas fit perfectly - think of your Atomic Essays as Evergreen Notes and vice versa to get the combined benefits from both.

Atomic Essays will help you to get the most value out of Evergreen Notes by giving you instant feedback on your ideas, improving your writing skills, building your audience, and motivating you to write regularly.

And the power of PKM apps like Obsidian will help you to organize your Atomic Essays, search through your library of ideas, find the connections between them, and assemble them into longer-form content.

And adopting the Evergreen notes creation process (creating Atomic Essays out of fleeting notes) will make it much easier to write and to have a lot of ideas, since you're not starting with the blank page but making your essays out of a library of raw material.

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