Sounds like you're doing what Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren would call "inspectional reading" and outlining the space of your topic. This is both fine and expected. You have to start somewhere. You're scaffolding some basic information in a new space and that's worthwhile. You're learning the basics.

Eventually you may come back and do a more analytical read and/or cross reference your first sources with other sources in a syntopical read. It's at these later two levels of reading where doing zettelkasten work is much more profitable, particularly for discerning differences, creating new insights, and expanding knowledge.

If you want to think of it this way, what would a kindergartner's zettelkasten contain? a high school senior? a Ph.D. researcher? 30 year seasoned academic researcher? Are the levels of knowledge all the same? Is the kindergartner material really useful to the high school senior? Probably not at all, it's very basic. As a result, putting in hundreds of atomic notes as you're scaffolding your early learning can be counter-productive. Read some things, highlight them, annotate them. You'll have lots of fleeting notes, but most of them will seem stupidly basic after a month or two. What you really want as main notes are the truly interesting advanced stuff. When you're entering a new area, certainly index ideas, but don't stress about capturing absolutely everything until you have a better understanding of what's going on. Then bring your zettelkasten in to leverage yourself up to the next level.

• Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/
• Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

reply to u/jack_hanson_c at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g9dv9b/is_scoping_the_subject_a_counterzettelkasten/

From the linked article

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it— which comes to the same thing— is by writing in it.

Really love that quote - the idea of [[marginalia]] is to write in the margins, take notes as you read - to ask questions and answer them, and context around the highlights.

In turn, [[make the book your own]]

[[analytical reading]] is one of the [[four levels of reading]] - the goal is to get to know a particular text very well.

sub-type of [[inspectional reading]] - reading the table of contents, skimming pages, looking for the hooks - how does this relate to [[proximity principle]] and [[scanning patterns]] - but getting a sense enough to know "is this book worth adding to the collection" for deeper reading

I think this is where I've been able to use #ADHD to it's advantages at times is with [[inspectional reading]] - being able to skim a large amount of content and get a sense of what I want to dig into later on or not.