When I create notes in Obsidian, I try to create them with atomic titles. Specific enough to be pointed; abstract enough to generalize a concept or idea. A note could be produced straight away from an idea I have. In that case I'll make a new file with a specific title, or sometimes a question I'm curious about. A couple I see right here in the sidebar as I'm writing this:
Markets are systems for discovery
Finding patterns in customer research is like looking at a magic eye poster
User research is about problems, not answers
Knowledge is the biggest constraint in product management
Why do people hate meetings?

Any of these I could link to from within other notes or clippings. I don't bother organizing them or writing at length in them as they're created, but often as one is generated I'll pop it open and jot down a few thoughts I'm noodling on as I make it — what's in my head that makes me think this is a thread worth following?
For example, looking at some of my highlights from the book Make to Know, I see several ideas that sparked new notes. This one was a thought from Steve Jobs in developing the design of Apple's retail stores:
I thought there was weight to the idea of building full-size prototypes. A concept worthy of going deeper on for myself.
Here's another from the same book, which if you've read some of my recent posts you'll recognize a recurring theme of Res Extensa:
Creating and building are fundamentally linked. It's an idea I run across in lots of work I read and think about.
With a format like this, each note is structured as a claim or idea, so it’s densely linkable inline within other notes. When reading a note, the cross-link to another idea appears seamlessly within the text. Using this method, we might find serendipitous connections we weren’t looking for. Andy Matuschak says:
If we read two books about exactly the same topic, we might easily link our notes about those two together. But novel connections tend to appear where they’re not quite so expected. When arranging notes by concept, you may make surprising links between ideas that came up in very different books. You might never have noticed that those books were related before—and indeed, they might not have been, except for this one point.
If each note represents a single idea like this — atomic and as self-contained as possible —we can find and stitch them into an interconnected web of ideas. We want composable building blocks.
Composability allows us stack, mix, and repurpose ideas: to correlate them or find the relationships between them. Prose is an excellent medium for consumption, for diving deep on a particular topic. But with extended prose format for documenting ideas, it’s hard to relate concepts between domains. Long-form articles are composed of many disparate ideas, making that collection of concepts easy to expand on and consume, but difficult to decompose into reusable parts. We can decompose an article into distinct reusable parts, like taking apart an engine. Decompose too far, though, say into individual words and letters, and the information becomes meaningless. There's an fitting middle ground that can effectively describe an idea in enough depth, but remain atomic enough to be decomposed and reused. We want idea Legos.
In this piece,
compares this process of using tools for thought to evolution — our tools should evolve building blocks:Your tool for thought should evolve building blocks. What if we saw our notes as building blocks for ideas? What are the qualities we might look for in a building-block note?
Building blocks encode a useful trait. A building block note encodes an idea.
Building blocks are atomic. You want your BB-notes to be as small as possible, but no smaller. This maximizes combinatorial surface area.
Building blocks are composable. BB-notes are focused on composition too. Big ideas are composed from smaller ideas, through hyperlinking and transclusion.
Aha! We’ve rediscovered the evergreen note pattern. The building block hypothesis gives us a explanation of why evergreen notes work so well for knowledge generation.
This evolution happens gradually as you read, review, take notes, write. Once you've built up a library of these evergreen building blocks, it’s a fun experiment to actually take a batch of 3-5 of these notes at random and look for relationships. When I’ve done this, pulling out 2 arbitrary notes, it often sparks new thoughts on them. And in the best cases, whole new atomic notes.
With a large enough archive of notes, there's a higher likelihood that recombination and serendipity will lead us to new concepts through this synthesis:
Grow the pool of building blocks. The bigger your pool of atomic notes, the greater the number of possible combinations. Each note expands your adjacent possible. Increase the population size to increase the likelihood of innovation.
Novel ideas come from concocting new recipes from existing ideas. Composable, atomic ideas make it more manageable to toss several disparate ones together to experiment with new combinations.