Limiting the length of your zettels can make them atomic

Zettels should capture an atomic concept, but knowing whether the concept that you have captured is atomic may be difficult. Limiting the length of your zettels will help make them atomic. When you can't fit your note into a predefined length, it's a good indicator that your concept contains multiple ideas and should be split into multiple zettels.

A6 paper is a good size when you're writing your notes physically. It is trickier to set a constraint your note length when you're writing your notes digitally though. One trick is to cont the number of words, or characters, or see if your note fits in a screen (Ahrens 130).

Constraining your notes to a certain length may sound very restrictive for a creative work like writing, but Creativity needs enabling constraints.

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References

Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (pp. 129-130).

I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited. By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict ourselves to just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later, Luhmann choose notes in the format A6. A good rule of thumb for working with the program is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.