I wouldn't say that. Rather, Dendron's recommendation is to only break notes down to atoms when you need to - aka amoeba: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/e780000d-c784-4945-8e42-35218a3ecf10.html When you first study about a new topic, its often not clear a) where the boundaries of different topics are b) how you will use those topics in your work Instead of predicting what things might be atoms, you can refactor things later when you find that its useful to do so. In architecture, there's this concept of a "discovered path" where you don't lay down trails in the fields in the onset but give people a chance to walk over it for a year. Afterwards, you see where the grass was most heavily treaded and put down paths along trails that people have made through use (vs trying to predict how they will use it at the onset) The amoeba pattern is the PKM equivalent of that