hey welcome to tools on Tech so in this video I want to talk about different types of notes and what I mean with that is that in my day-to-day workflow I found out that there's different types of notes I take throughout the day and they each need their own workflow some of those are more efficient by not doing too much work up front others are more efficient because I do the work up front because I know I won't have the time when I get to that later now this video will show it in L seek
but I think it's tool agnostic and for completeness sake I will also be looking at the loek DB to show you how I expect to use these same workflows in the future as I'm migrating towards that system now the first type of not taking I want to talk about is really really simple and that is journaled note taking and what do I mean with Journal not taking because you have the journal this is a place where you Chuck some notes but when I think of Journal note taking I'm not thinking about things that I have
plans for not things that I'm going to need in the future the goal is either I need to to write something down because I want to get it out of my head but I don't expect to be using it or it's stuff that I want to write down because I want to be able to scroll back in time which is I think one of the features of the journal I want to see what was I doing last week Tuesday and not everything has to be related to a project or a to-do or a task sometimes
writing stuff down and deliberately not linking it free you up you know you're not going to be using this long term this is just you rambling on to a future self that looks like what happened on this date how was I feeling for example another example that I have for that one is that I had a query that looks back like I was doing this last year and those small tidbits those journal entries that I make that I don't care about are exactly the kind of things that I like to see there because they tell
me something about how I was feeling a year ago or two years ago what mood was I in and because I'm not trying to figure out like oh how am I going to use this in the future it allows me to focus on just free flowing what's in my mind what's my emotional state so journal entries are pretty simple and they'll work exactly the same no matter which version of Loi you use because it's just an outliner and just a journal page that is the core and Brad and butter of Loi at least to me
unless you disable the journaling which I don't know why you would do but you know to each their own then we get to collections now with collections I mean anything where I'm using like the same hashtag to collect a certain subset of small information uh usually ideas or faults that I had or things that I've collected that I want to group together two of my most frequently used there ones are # idea which is for any video ideas I have and I have for example hashtag quote for when I have like a quote from a
specific person that I want to collect in my database of quotes now those two things have one difference and that is that for the hashtag idea for example I very often add like a to-do marker and the reason why I added to-do is not because it's something that I need need to get done but I want a simple way to Mark hey I've already used this idea in a video so I no longer want it to show up in my overview both inherit work very well in the database version as well except for idea instead
of me like manually adding the task I can now say that the hashtag idea has too or task I believe as a parent and when it has it as a parent it inherits all the elements of a task that meaning that I get like the whole status thing and I can say like okay this is backlog stuff this is stuff that I want to use and send like through the same Loops without having to think about it now it's important to see that collections aren't tasks or groupings of tasks it's not something that you have
to finish it's something that you want to use either as inspiration or as a quick reference where you want to be able to filter the data and they also really come to their own once you start adding properties so for example when I have a quote I have a source property with it and there I can link to whoever s said quote meaning that if I do a query and I turn it into a table I see that element I use this for research for example when I'm by chance today I was researching for a
desk chair and there I immediately made like a small collection with hashtag desk chair added certain properties in it like price and which brand it was and then that allowed me to quickly generate like a small table where I can see it with an image and then think about it in the future like okay which Choice am I going to make this all works perfectly well in the database version except there you have much more control and it's much easier to fill in the same properties because you no longer have to memorize which property belongs
where it will autofill itself and you will be able to click quick drop downs or you'll be able to limit Pages just making the same workflow that I already had much easier to use so right after collections comes research and research is like a collection but instead of linking it towards a specific tag I link it towards a specific topic SL page and there's usually more details in it more Su Lings in it URLs videos blog posts I found anything that's related to that topic that I want to use and then I don't do anything
with it and the reason why I don't do anything with it is I usually have more information coming my way than I have time to clean up and process and I call this just in time note taking because I collect the notes I put them somewhere in my journal I spent little time as possible not sometimes I don't even watch the video or read the blog post maybe like 10 seconds and they like okay this this valid but by collecting those I have them lying around once I actually want to use them so when I
want to dive into a topic when I want to make a video about it when I write an article about it when I want need to make a document for work about it I can go to that page spend half a day reading all the posts going to all the videos taking all the notes and collecting those into something which is coherent and easy to find and research for me and I usually put like a mark saying like I did this work at set date so that I know that all the things that are below
that date are done I've processed those and anything that comes after that date is new information that I'll probably need to process at a future date when I need it again but this saves me a lot of time because I don't want to spend the time to make everything pristine I only want to make things pree that are going to add value to me so that means that they're producing something either a video in my case but it can also be like a document at work and of course this doesn't always apply but that's the
next note type that I want to talk about okay now we get to something that was a big mistake on my end and that was reference stuff now reference feels like research because you make notes and you link them towards a topic well that sounds like research right but it's not the same because one of the mistakes that I made is that in a business setting when it's something that actually is reference like something that I need to look up very often and not something that I have as a topic and I'll process it later
when I get to it having all those uncollected unsorted notes means that it becomes a pointless exercise that you'll never get to because it's work prime example for me is for example I have a database page at work and that one has like frequently used queries in it important tables information that need to know pipelines that are running this is all reference material now initially when I was making notes I would just Chuck them in my journal link them to the database and thought like awesome done right like Loy is so speedy and fast and
then I kept forgetting about those notes and I was wondering what's happening there and what I found out and this is important because it's somewhere in that long list of reference stuff you don't know where to find it you can't quickly skim it and that defeats the purpose it's like when you get one of those 16 email threets mailed to you and uh you get asked to respond quickly you have to read those 60 Ms you don't got time for that you don't want to spend time on that so with reference stuff pages that I
consider reference instead of me making a note and just linking towards that page I spent that 20 seconds extra to go to that page and immediately put the notes somewhere where it belongs the difference between reference and research is reference is stuff that you know you'll be checking which you'll be looking into anything where you have like okay I need to check that once in a while to make sure that things are matching take those extra 20 seconds take the extra five minutes because that will pay back because if you summarize it you're helping your
future self research is different because you know that your future self won't suddenly need this there will be a planned time for needing it meaning that you'll be able to sit down you need to be able to process it and then make it into something that is equal to reference reference is stuff that you have to do now immediately all the time and that for me was like a key difference in making my notes more useful so take the time figure out which ones of your notes are research notes and which ones are reference refence
note and reference notes deserve a little bit more time because you need to be able to find stuff back so those were my four different types of notes Journal notes where I don't care at all about them my collection notes which are small tidbits that I collect for inspiration and that's something where I usually build a query that I can quickly skim through them then I have my research notes where I collect them but I don't process immediately unless I actually need them so there I know that there's going to be a future time when
I'm going to need them and then I'll sit down and process those and my reference notes which are very similar but those I process immediately as I'm making them and very often when I'm working on set thing I'll just have the Page open and I don't even put it on the journal like I shown in the example I just immediately Chuck them where they need to be because I know that future me will be happy about those those were like the four key elements that I saw when I'm making notes like where do I put
them and as you can see not much changes when I'm moving that towards the database version is not going to be drastically different mostly collections is affected and only for the better so do you have any type of different types of notes something that's out of this scope that that to you feels like that deserves its own workflow then let me know in the comments because I love reading about those nitty-gritty and things that maybe I've missed or I don't need on a daily workflow but you do remember you're awesome keep it up and see
you in the next one