The Missing Middle of Note-Taking: What Happens

Every guide to note-taking tells you how to capture information. They show you the apps, the shortcuts, the tagging systems. They walk you through highlighting techniques and quick-capture workflows. Then they trail off into vague promises about "building a second brain" or "connecting ideas."

None of them tell you what happens Tuesday morning when you open your notes app and face 47 half-formed thoughts you captured over the weekend.

Tris Oaten, who runs the technical YouTube channel No Boilerplate, has been working on this problem. His latest video tackles what he calls the biggest unanswered question in note-taking: "What do you do after you have taken notes?" It's a deceptively simple question that most productivity systems handwave away. Oaten doesn't.

His system—called FLAP, for reasons he admits are unfortunate—sits in the awkward middle between capture and output. It's built around something called atomic notes, small self-contained units of thought that can be recombined into essays, study materials, or any kind of knowledge work. The concept isn't new. It comes from Zettelkasten, the card-file system used by sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who produced over 70 books and 400 articles with the help of 90,000 interconnected note cards.

The Software Engineer's Take on Notes

Oaten's background shows through immediately. He describes good atomic notes using software engineering principles: "high cohesion and low coupling." The parts work well together but remain flexible enough to be reused in multiple contexts. If you've never written code, that might sound abstract. But the pattern matters—most note-taking advice focuses on organization schemes (folders, tags, graphs) without addressing what makes an individual note useful.

"Atomic notes are the compiler artifacts of our learning before they have been linked together into their final form," Oaten explains. Each note should contain your understanding of a single concept, written in your own words, simple but not oversimplified. The filename should be detailed enough to remind you of the contents next week. The body should be detailed enough to remind you in a year.

What makes this different from just writing down facts? Two things: you rewrite ideas in your own words rather than copying, and you physically place each note behind exactly one related note, creating a tree structure that mirrors how the concepts connect in your mind.

The tree matters more than you'd think. Graph visualizations of connected notes look impressive in screenshots but become useless once you have more than 30 or 40 notes—too crowded to read. A tree you can scroll through with a mouse wheel. Oaten uses the Vert Folder plugin for Obsidian to visualize this, but the underlying principle goes back to physical card files where you'd literally place cards behind each other.

The Processing Gap

The system has three stages: capture, process, write. Most guides focus on capture and skip to writing. Oaten spends 17 minutes on the middle part.

His processing workflow revolves around two types of raw material: fleeting notes (your own thoughts, tasks, observations) and literature notes (highlights from things you read or watch). Both need daily processing. Not weekly. Not when you feel like it. Daily.

The fleeting notes are especially time-sensitive because yesterday's you made a deal with today's you. As Oaten puts it: "Yesterday's self had the easy job. Throw some random words into a note and tag it fleeting or make some highlights while reading. But now you must process them."

This is where most systems break down. Processing every random thought you captured becomes overwhelming. You skip a day, then a week, then you're staring at an intimidating backlog and the whole system collapses.

Oaten's solution is genuinely weird: he misuses spaced repetition software. You know spaced repetition—the learning technique where you review information at increasing intervals to move it from short-term to long-term memory. Usually it's for vocabulary or exam prep. Oaten uses it to manage his fleeting note backlog.

Each morning, he reviews fleeting notes using Obsidian's Spaced Repetition plugin. For each note, he makes a quick decision: if it's a task taking under two minutes, he does it immediately. If it belongs to a project, he moves it there. If he can't figure out what to do with it, he snoozes it—marking it as "easy" or "later" in the plugin, which reschedules it for review days or weeks in the future.

The notes he consistently marks as "hard" (meaning urgent or important) bubble to the top. The ones he keeps snoozing eventually fade into longer and longer intervals until they either become relevant again or stop mattering.

"After a few days of doing this, you'll have a much shorter list only featuring the things you have consistently ranked as hard, i.e. urgent," Oaten explains. "Now is the time to slow down and actually do these tasks."

It's a triage system that scales. You're not reading through every note every day. You're only seeing the subset you've previously flagged as worth returning to, weighted by how many times you've flagged them.

The Literature Problem

Literature notes—things you highlighted while reading or watching—follow a different path. Some get expanded into their own atomic notes. Others get referenced in existing atomic notes. Many get snoozed for later consideration.

Oaten shows an example: a quote from Niklas Luhmann he highlighted resonated at the time. During his morning processing session, he expands it into a full atomic note, adds references to related concepts he's already written about, and slots it behind a related note in his tree structure.

The key is processing while the context is still fresh. Wait too long and you won't remember why you highlighted something or how it connects to your other thinking.

There's a category of fleeting notes Oaten treats differently: pure reference information like addresses, code snippets, or facts that don't need digestion. These get filed verbatim with sensible tags. No processing required—they're lookup tables, not knowledge.

The Maintenance Question

Does this system require too much maintenance? That's the tension running through the entire video. Oaten is explicit about the daily commitment. He borrowed the term "single trusted system" from David Allen's Getting Things Done, emphasizing that notes must live in one place and be processed reliably.

Multiple capture locations—Apple Notes for some things, Messages to yourself for others—guarantee failure. "Our eyes can only read one thing at a time and our brains know this," Oaten says. "Multiple places to check has us running around the hamster cage mimicking the sad state of social media where there are five apps with screenshots of the other four on."

But daily processing is labor. It's additional cognitive overhead. The spaced repetition trick reduces the burden, but you're still looking at 10-20 minutes most mornings. For some people, that's valuable reflection time. For others, it's another system to maintain until they burn out.

Oaten acknowledges this obliquely. His video is the second in a series; the first covered capture, this one covers processing, and a forthcoming third will cover writing. He's already offering the complete system as a downloadable Obsidian vault for his Patreon supporters. The fact that he's packaged it as a product suggests he knows implementation is the hard part.

The question isn't whether the system works—clearly it does for Oaten. The question is whether it works for people who aren't already inclined toward systematic thinking and daily practice. Zettelkasten has a reputation for being powerful but demanding. Oaten's digital version inherits both qualities.

What he's done is make explicit what most note-taking systems leave implicit: the unglamorous work of daily triage, the discipline of rewriting ideas in your own words, the necessity of making decisions about what matters. That's useful clarification even if you never adopt his exact workflow.

The middle stage exists. It requires attention. And maybe that's the real insight—not that there's some perfect system waiting to be discovered, but that knowledge work has always required this kind of regular, deliberate processing. We just kept pretending the apps would do it for us.

—Dev Kapoor