My FULL Obsidian Zettelkasten Workflow in 10 minutes

if you want to make notes that last a lifetime notes to help you think and even create content then this video is for you because most people just take notes they passively copy or highlight whatever they find interesting and call it a day but when you make smart notes you're creating something it's no longer someone else's thoughts it's your own and as you make more and more smart notes your system becomes exponentially more useful to the point that it becomes an idea generation machine this is what makes Smart notes smart and I'm going to go

over my entire workflow which is based on this little casting system but the methodology behind zettel castan which was created in 1950s is a bit old-fashioned after all it's not like people back then had access to the same tools that we have today so while the ID is the same the execution has been shaped by the capabilities of modern tools one of such tools is Obsidian which I've been using for nearly three years but if you use something else that's fine as long as you can link to different notes also bear in mind that this

is just the way I do it it's not the only way and it might not even be the best way because the best way is whatever works for you and lastly I'm going to mention a lot of fancy terminology that may sound intimidating at first but once you understand it you'll see that it's actually very simple alright so first up we have fleeting notes these are notes to quickly capture what's on your mind and they're meant to be deleted I'm not going to spend any time on this as I don't use proper fleeting notes I

think of them more as to do's and I've made a separate video on how I capture my ideas and thoughts which you can find right here in this video I'm Only focusing on reference literature and permanent notes and each of them has its own individual chapter and let's start with reference notes these are meant to capture someone else's thoughts so if you read a book an academic paper an article whatever it may be and you highlight stuff those highlights are your reference notes these notes should only have direct quotes of someone else's work and not

your own the whole point of having reference notes is to help us in writing literature notes which we'll get to in the next chapter there's a lot of different ways to get reference notes into obsidian I personally use read wise so in my Vault there's a readwise folder which contains all of of my reference notes from all this stuff I've captured read wise is great but it isn't free and if you want double the free trial to see if you really use it you can use my link in the description and if you want a

free alternative I recommend looking into zotero or you can always do it yourself and most people stop here they don't go any further they see stuff they like they capture it in their app of choice and that's it they see this next step as a waste of time but really the true waste of time is stopping here because you've consumed a bunch of stuff and you're not doing anything with it you're just archiving it and before you know it you'll have hundreds of highlights that you'll never see again if you want to actually build knowledge

and stuff that lasts we need to continue to The Next Step which are literature notes a literature note is a note you make in your own words about a reference note it's your own interpretation of the author's thoughts it's what you personally got out of it there's no right or wrong way to write these as long as it's in your own words let's take this book here as an example I read it on my Kindle I took my highlights and through read wise those highlights were exported to obsidian and I can find it here in

My Vault Under the device folder that's my reference note I then created a new note which is this one right here where I summarized the book and I wrote down what I got out of it that's the literature note over here on the top you can see I have a literature tag and I also have a medium here because I also take literature notes on academic papers articles and so on now you might be thinking why not just keep one note as opposed to keeping a reference and a literature note and sure you can do

that but I prefer to keep two different files because while all the highlights I take make it to obsidian I try to put only the most relevant ones in the literature note the fact that I keep two different files gives me permission to not be so selective with what to highlight it lets me read more freely and really focus on the text itself instead of spending time thinking like should this really be highlighted or maybe I should have highlighted that end up sitting makes it really easy to Simply link the exact location of a highlight

so in here you see that I'm linking to not only this note but this exact highlight so if I go on it it's going to take me right there and when I'm writing the little future note I normally open up the reference note on one side and the original note I want to write on the other the simple Act of summarizing a book and writing down what you got out of it may seem pointless and even a waste of time but in my opinion not doing it is what is a true waste of time taking

notes highlighting Etc takes no thinking at all it's the act of summarizing and writing what you got out of it that really makes you think about what you read and Simply Having the predefined headers of summary and my takeaways forces me to think because I can't just leave them empty and then down here I have a list of all the chapters in the book and as you can see the majority were left empty but that doesn't mean that they were a waste of time or that I got nothing out of it in fact I even

took highlights on those chapters but I'm extremely selective on what goes in the literature notes this goes back to what I said earlier about the benefits of separating a reference and a literature note and in the case of this book these were my thoughts on what I thought truly mattered and if I want to look at what the author said I can just click on any of these references and it's going to take me to the author's exact quote and if I want to re-read that exact part of the book I can just see what

chapter it was and reread just that chapter so depending on the medium this will either be chapters Pages or even timestamps I don't like to impose strict rules on myself but I do try to keep the literature note as short as possible because that's what's hard it's the same thought process as when I plan out my YouTube videos doing a 30 minute video is easy what's hard is turning that 30 minute video into 10 or 15 minutes without losing anything of value and the same applies here I want to say the most that I can

in the least amount of words and more often than not as I make my literature notes on a book it usually leads me to think of one or more ideas and I don't have to act on them right away I can just link them that's all it takes in fact I often don't act on an idea until I find that I have multiple notes pointing to it which means that I'm almost never starting from scratch and this usually marks the starting point for a permanent note which we'll get to in the next chapter and even

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interpretation of someone else's thoughts permanent notes are Concepts and ideas independent of their original context let's take a look at an example and go back back to the literature note for this book right here if I scroll down here there was a part where the author talked about the multitasking myth which basically says that multitasking doesn't work and when we think we're multitasking we're actually switching between two tasks really quickly and every time we switch there's a switch cost and this is something I agree with and I have my own thoughts about it so it

prompted me to make a permanent note on it at the time I created the link but I didn't write the permanent notes I just linked it as I read it could soon more content I made literature notes on Atomic Habits by James clear and Flow by mihali those three literature notes both ended up linking to multitasking so later once I saw that there were multiple links to that empty note I started writing it and I already had so much to write about because I had already thought and written about it before this is why it's

commonly said that in the goods at all casting system you never start from scratch as your Vault grows you'll see clusters forming in your graph View and some of these clusters will likely be around notes you haven't even written yet but when you have multiple notes all point pointing to one single link it becomes virtually impossible to not take action and write a permanent note about it because half of it is already written for you you just need to put the pieces together alright so how do you write a permanent note and again there's no

right or wrong way to do it but I do follow some guidelines the first is that they should be Atomic which means one note one idea secondly there should be a short and concise as possible I make it so I don't have to scroll down to see the full note because generally speaking if I need to scroll to see the full note I mean it not being clear enough or I'm covering more than one idea and lastly it should be easy to understand by anyone even if it pulls information from two or three different literature

nodes someone with just basic knowledge of the topic at hand should be able to understand it as sunk has said in the book permanent notes are directed towards an audience ignorant of the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context only equipped with the general knowledge of the field lastly I do my best to have at least one Link in each permanent note this of course isn't possible when you're just starting but it's something to keep in mind as your Vault grows because that's what adds real value to our system it's what turns

it into a Content creation machine all right so is there more to this is this the end goal and for me at this point in time yeah it ends here but for a lot of people it doesn't because there's one final step in the process and that is to write published work that's when you take the content from multiple permanent notes to write published work whether that's an academic paper a book Etc the same permanent note can and likely will help in creating several different published pieces but for now my journey ends here so the

last question that is probably on your mind right now is why bother with any of this if you don't want to have published work and there's so many benefits to doing this your notes and thoughts will compound over time giving you insights and connections you wouldn't find otherwise you'll become a better thinker which turns you into a better speaker because you're able to better articulate your thoughts and no matter what you do or plan to do being a good writer will probably help it the one thing I thought in this video was how I capture

my ideas and thoughts so that I can later process them in obsidian and you can find that in this video right here so I'll see you there