- a note can be thought of as any artifact which captures, communicates, or otherwise allows you to interact with some point of data. - you can have notes on books or trips or dreams, even if you call them something else – book summaries, dream diaries, traveler’s journal… - at their most basic, these are *notes*: some record of some information that you can interact with over time. - notes are the smallest unit of information in [[personal knowledge management is a practice of contextualizing one's life|personal knowledge management]]. - although extremely broadly defined, [[{4.1a} atomic notes|atomicity]] is valuable in practice.