It eliminates the distraction of other ideas which can and ought to be considered independently. It excludes things. It introduces boundaries.

Second, it allows you to use the idea. It has a clear title that turns it into a single chunk in your mind. It provides an interface which allows it to be used elsewhere. When your writing takes the form of chaotic mountains of text, the good ideas are hidden among the bad and irrelevant ones, and tend to die a quiet death because it is so difficult to come across them again.

Third, it forces you to put related, but distinct, ideas into separate notes that you link to. This makes the connections between these ideas clear and explicit - and also very limited and easy to understand.

Being forced to create a title means that you sharpen the idea and try to make a single point (and not a different point).

Keeping one’s notes small and self-contained is a challenge, but I think it’s one that’s creative and interesting, and entirely different from trying to work on a large and complex text. The first thing is to simply notice when a note is too long, complicated, and hard to work with. As a rule of thumb, if the entire idea can’t fit on screen, it’s probably too big and should be split up. The real challenge is figuring out how to split it up. The goal is to end up with two or more separate notes which each contain a single complete idea which can be considered on its own.

In some cases, this may be as simple as cutting and pasting a chunk of text into a new note, but often the process of dividing things is more involved. The two separate ideas might be all mixed together and have to be separated, and maybe restated so they are independent. Also, the ideas can change in the process of breaking them up. Each note may become more specific and focused, and the titles can change. This is very much like refactoring code. Once you’ve got everything in place, you can make it much clearer and simpler, although the initial process of creation is quite messy.

Since these ideas started off in a single note, they’ll almost certainly be closely related, and one (or both) will link to the other. Also, it’s often useful to add an idea to a small outline in a separate note (which is tagged as an outline). Often, one ends up working with a collection of ideas in a handful of related notes, and switching between them.

References

• The Life of a File, Evan Czaplicki
• Scaling Elm Apps Richard Feldman