Questions over Assumptions | Note-Taking like a PhD student

so most of us take notes while studying learning something new or reading books however it is extremely hard to retain the knowledge that we've not it down over the years and it's even harder to create something new based on those notes during our school years we are kind of forced to write down everything we learn but does this system actually help create something new as adults do we just learn assumptions and forget how to ask questions the question then becomes not just how do we take the notes but where do we find the notes that

we've taken during my PhD I had to learn learn retain and combine information from many resources to write coherent papers in the field and during this process I've learned or created this system that really works well for me and in this video I want to give you an in-depth look at how I take notes create a system to find those notes and handle the information overload in the modern Information Age I've divided this video into six parts why not taking matters the zast an inspired framework tools and systems creating notes and organizing and using notes

for creation feel free to jump around in the sections that interest you and hopefully this video will give you some more information about not taking and upgrade your not taking system so let's get straight into it so first of all why not taking matters at least for me and that is really because as a PhD I had the underlying assumption or the underlying notion that during the four years I was taking my PhD that I had to retain all of the information I learned and knowing myself I knew that that would be an impossible task

without a good notetaking system so there were really some things that I wanted from my notetaking system and that was retrieve the information when I needed to use the information to generate new insights or new ideas and help me learn and master new Concepts as quickly and fast as possible so these were really the three main key principles I wanted my not taking system and what I noticed at the end once I created this not taking system is that it really helped me to process information and make new connections very fast and essentially it allowed

me to create almost like a library of my own knowledge so I really still to this day have this almost 4year library of all the knowledge that I have and I do have to be very honest I think in the first two years of my PhD I wasn't so good at taking down notes and even now I sometimes forget to take down notes so this is also still a learning process for me but I definitely think that the framework that I've learned over the years Works quite well so let's get into that so the Z

of cast an inspired not framework and I call it inspired because I don't follow the stoc Casten system to a te but setto Casten is the German word for box of notes and it is a method for organizing ideas by linking individual notes to create a Web of Knowledge and the original zetan system was entirely analog so you would create these notes on cards but nowadays A lot of people do it digitally and me personally I also prefer to do it digitally and there are definitely some pros and cons to doing doing it over your

computer versus doing it analog and I think you can decide for yourself which one you prefer but let's just get into the system a little bit so in general the idea is that you would take down notes or small notes on everything you learned so for example imagine that you're reading a neuroscience book you come across the concept of neuroplasticity and you really like the way they explain it so the thing you would do is you would create an index and an index can kind of be whatever you want and then you would write down

the content of what you've just learned and quite often it is good to write it down in your own words but I also usually include a note or a citation so for example the content would then be neuroplasticity is how the brain forms new Connections in response to learning experience or injury and then you can link it to other notes that you have so maybe for example you have another note on long-term potentiation ltp another Neuroscience concept and you think that these two are actually really connected so you would then at the bottom write down

the index of that other note so in general then each note connects through links kind of forming this web of ideas and over time the system really helps you to see the relationships between different topics and retrieve insights for different topics and I think it works really well over a longer period of time so if you only have five notes and only two of them are connected of course this system isn't so valuable but if you work like this for a really long period of time so four years or even a lifetime you kind of

have this really interesting web of how you you as an individual see the connections between the different ideas that you have so the most important actually is the linking of the different concepts that you have created so in short a zast and transforms no taking into a dynamic interconnecting thinking tool and I definitely don't use the zle Casten system as it was originally created because I think in the modern day and age for example the concept of creating these very strict indexes and then following this indexes to a t just didn't really work for me

so well so how I do it personally is through notion which is this not taking app and I will talk a little bit about the tools a little bit later I think as you are creating your own system and writing down notes for yourself over years you will kind of see what works for you and I will also link down below a book on the setas system if you're interested to learn more about that but in general the key three principles that I really like about the Casten system is that it allows you to make

connections between related nodes to build a network of Concepts and ideas and another thing that I really like is this idea of mindful consumption so you write down notes on everything you consume to engage more deeply and that really shows you how much you're consuming so if you don't write down a note on something it means that you're not really mindfully consuming it and that is to say that if you're watching a TV show and you don't want to write down a note on that that's of course perfectly fine but it does make clear which

parts of your life are actually mindful fully consuming something and which parts are just you entertaining yourself and then lastly I really find the concept of reflection and summarizing really useful so the idea that you have to write it in your own words and really reflect on what you've just learned and I think that allows you to really deeply engage with the material that you've just learned or taking a note upon and I think that is definitely quite different from how we learn or at least how I learned in school so in school I definitely

learned more it's important to almost directly word for word memorize certain things and this zast and system is instead of memorizing it's actually engaging with the content that you learn and writing it down in your own words so after that there's the tools and systems and I don't want to go too much into tools and systems because I definitely think people can hyper optimize for this and to be honest like an analog tool where you just have little note cards works perfectly fine for a lot of people but just to give you a little insight

into how I do it so in general I usually use notion for organizing the notes I've written about or talked about it in this video here as well where I talk about notion as a second brain and I kind of learned how to use notion effectively through skillshare so skillshare was also kindly enough to sponsor this video and it offers these Great Courses on notion and the setle Casten system so the first course I personally took on notion and on skillshare was this notion Master Class to maximize your productivity and organization and I definitely have

to say it was really beneficial for me because I find notion intuitive personally but it is quite um big a leap to learn everything that is possible in notion so over the past few months to learn these skills my go-to research has been skillshare so a big thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video so with skillshare's created learning poths and thousands of classes taught by industry professionals I found it incredibly convenient to immerse myself into topics that I personally really care about so you've probably all heard about skillshare already but they are in general

one of the largest online learning communities for creatives making it easier than ever to unlock your creative potential so skillshare has this wide variety of classes in illustration design animation productivity and notion of course which I talked about the first editing class I've actually ever took was on skillshare and that was Ali abd's course on Final Cup Pro and it's actually really good so if you are thinking about creating videos like this one I would definitely recommend just to take that course cuz that can basically give you all the information about how I edited my

videos for the last 3 years so many of my notion skills has also been honed through skillshare and I'm currently also exploring their learning Parts including one focused on Creative productivity a theme that will feature in my next video hopefully so as we approach the end of the year December is also a natural time for just looking back on everything that has happened and for reflection and definitely for me 2024 was really this creative year and for 2025 I kind of want to learn a lot more so personally I've compiled this massive list of classes

I want to tackle over the winter break and I love to hear from you what is something that you would like to learn in 2025 if you're ready to take the next step the first 500 people who click the link in the description will receive a one month free trial from skillshare so don't wait to start your journey toward mastering something new today so let's move on to the next part creating notes and the most important thing for creating notes is that you actually create them as often and as frequently as possible so for example

if you're a student in class or lectures the way I did it is to write down questions mostly and not really full sentences I think through questions you kind of trained is listening instead of yeah just writing down exactly what the professor is saying but it definitely also matters your uh familiarity with the content also messy notes are fine during lectures I would also type them out for clarity instead of just writing them out because that wasn't fast enough and I usually did it in notion in daily lives I would also collect ideas from books

podcast and feeding thoughts of course books I usually read currently through Kindle it's not that I like Kindle or Amazon so much but I really like the feature that you can highlight and have all your notes in one framework and then I can expert those notes and put it in notion if I want and also I like that sometimes I just keep certain books there or notes that I I've taken without exporting them but sometimes I remember that I've read a book and it's really nice when I want to create these kind of videos that

I can then just look up that information fleeing FS I actually do it by WhatsApp messaging myself so quite often as I'm riding the bike in an LS I have these thoughts about what I want to do or what I want to create and I usually just type them to myself really fast so I think that's a great method as well and of course I always carry around a couple of notebooks for brainstorming or if I have certain new Concepts I want to explore so these kind of tiny bucket notebooks I have a few of

them and also carry these ginormous notebooks but they're not super handy actually and then lastly I want to talk a little bit about organizing your notes and using them for Learning and creation so organizing notes I think I'm personally a very unorganized person so I really had to find a system that worked for me to organize my notes as effectively as possible I think in general you don't have to worry about organizing notes immediately I know some friends of mine like C oriz them index them perfectly etc etc but I actually feel that this is

in some sense a form of procrastination because quite often as you are working with information the way you want to categorize that information will change so for example I was writing this paper and this was a review paper and originally I had about three or four categories that I thought the knowledge in this theme had to be organized into but as I was working with the knowledge I realized that the original classifications that I made didn't really make sense and I kind of halfway through had to change the entire way I organized this review and

I think something is very similar with the way we organize notes something that makes sense now will not make sense in 5 years and your system needs to be flexible enough that you can kind of upgrade it easily then the second thing I do for organizing notes is I just have everything in one tool so I personally use notion I know some of you have said obsidian is better and I definitely believe you I do think obsidian is probably better but I'm kind of so integrated in notion right now that I find it hard to

change but if you have quick tips on how to change I would love to hear them so put them down below but just having one system or one app that you put everything into makes everything so much easier later in your journey so I'm really glad that I started with notion four years ago and I'm still using notion right now for everything I'm learning and then the last thing in organizing your notes is the thing that you need to reflect regularly so I think one thing is the collecting of notes and the organizing is just

an entire task on itself but I think if you just go through your notes about once a month I would say or once every 6 months even and just reorganize them at that time and try to find new connections between the notes at that time that's actually fine enough you don't need to do it every day at the end of the day unless you have the time of course but it is important to reflect regularly and not just leave your notes dormant as they are so then lastly using your notes for Learning and creation I

think this is the most important part but I I left it at the end of the video and I think outside of being a student I think in life it's just the nicest thing if we can create something new I've talked about this already in a few previous videos but I think as I become now a post and afterwards maybe continue my academic journey I think what I've noticed is that the ability to create something new from the ideas that you've noted down and from all the information you've noted down it's actually the most important

step and the way to do it is quite difficult but if you have a good not taking system it can definitely Aid you so try to turn all the notes that you've taken into something new that you've created and that can be an essay a blog post a research idea a paper or perhaps a YouTube video as this one cuz this one was also based on just a bunch of notes that I've taken about note taking so just try to create something of your own and I really hope that you will because I think that's

my most important message and if you want to take it one step further not only create something of your own but also want to teach it I think it's also really good to combine it with the fainman technique so that's kind of my last message to you try to create something of your own and I'm also really curious if you have some other methods or techniques that you really like I love to hear about analog Zeta meod methods I just find it really interesting also I'm currently creating a community space for sharing and learning so

I would actually also love if you're interested to let me know down below I'll share this little Google form that I've created about the general concept I have in mind to kind of create a community for people that are interested in neuroscience and continuous learning so I would love for you to sign up and otherwise see you next week bye