How To Template Zettelkasten In Obsidian 📝 Practical Note-Taking

in today's video I'm going to go in depth on templating the zedcast and system that I've modified for code capture organized distill and Express in a way that it's much more practical for the digital ecosystem hello my name is Callum also known as Wonder loots and welcome to today's tutorial on templating zetel Casten walking through my molecular zetel Casten system in obsidian in today's information overload age it's incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information we consume each day I use obsidian to help deal with information overload leveraging personal Knowledge Management Theory

and my second brain to filter information in my creation and knowledge work obsidian allows me to both offload information into my second brain my digital mind and make connections between that information to form knowledge that boosts the value of my creativity and my knowledge work I refined my note ticking system over the last two years modifying zedcast and as I wrote over 50 articles over 15 50,000 words or approximately three books worth this is the best way that I have ever found to structure information in a way that I can actually use the notes that

I'm taking effectively what I'm doing here is I'm converting Atomic note taking into molecular note taking here's today's outline an overview of templating notes in my molecular zetoc Casten system capturing important information and ideas with fleeting notes organizing my system with topics tags and folders distilling the core value with atoms and molecules also known as as permanent notes and expressing new ideas in original work with allies formed as note sequences my system is inspired by one of the most prolific notet takers and writers of all time Nicholas Lumen who created the zedel Casten system he

used this system to publish more than 70 books in 400 articles approximately two books a year I modified his system to be a lot more practical for the Modern Age the digital world using tools like obsidian that can help augment the connections we're making inside of our digital minds or our second brains my not taking system is a hybrid between zetel Casten and the code method from building a second brain by TGO Forte capture organized distill Express I found that by modifying the physical system of the zle castom with the modern note ticking system of

code I had the best of both worlds with a hybrid system that allowed me to truly augment my personal Knowledge Management and has helped me to publish so many articles and make hundreds of YouTube videos I think that this system will work for any Creator any knowledge worker anyone who's looking to work with information to reduce information overload and increase the value of the knowledge and creativity that they're generating the goal of this system is to shift away from just taking notes for the sake of taking notes just copying and instead take smart notes that

are designed for purpose to connect with our existing knowledge base so that we can generate more value in the long run where we actually Forge knowledge and build on it so it compounds over time generating emergent patterns in our thinking my system is also inspired by Robert Martin at reasonabl deviations docomo cular note ticking system I modified that along with zle Casten to create a hybrid system that works best for me if you're interested in learning more about what settle Casten is and the goals of personal Knowledge Management I recommend checking out part one of

this video after you've walked through the template system so you have a better idea and more context on how it all fits together this system can be kind of confusing and feel very abstract so I hope that by going through the theory after you've seen the Practical component you'll have a better idea on how you can actually use this system in real life this system took me hundreds of hours to build refine and recalibrate over time if you would like a copy of these templates along with the obsidian canvas workflow I'm making this template system

available as a downloadable folder to members of my tier one on my YouTube membership if you're interested in joining this and want to support me for all the work that I put into building out this system I'd really appreciate if you would consider joining my membership okay I've talked enough about the theory and how Z has and works it's time to get into the actual practice of using this molecular note ticking system in a way that I found to be the most valuable and I hope you do too let's dive in I think that templates

are the most useful when we keep them in mind of code we have different note types that are for each step of code we have some notes that are for capturing some notes that are for organizing some notes that are for distilling and some notes for expressing okay so let's start with the fleeting notes because this is the first step as part of capture so I'm going to start with the source note because that's my generic note for any information that I'm taking in and I've actually created a source template already in my obsidian for

beginners video so I'm just going to use that one for now okay let's take a look at this note so my source template has a few key elements has a summary section a key takeaway section and a notes section then at the top under the front matter or the yaml I have a tag section and a reference link section so this reference link I can use to create for example a link to a book like how to take smart notes so this creates already the citation the bibliographic element inside of my reference manager which if

you recall is part of the reference manager slip box you want to have a bibliographic note so what's nice about obsidian is that we can just use the reference link to add a bibliographic element to it because now if I click on how to take smart notes I can go and I can find this specific information so I would have to add here reference link and I could include a link to my reference manager something like Soo which would have a citation key so I can go back and find it or I could link to

a website like Amazon or my own website where I have this book so the reference link is a key element of a source note and you can see here that I also have a tag for hashtag Source what this does is if I click on Source it'll pull up all of the list of sources that I have on the side here so tags provide some structure they provide a really easy way for me to effectively create a file system for any type of of tag so you can think of tags as an alternative to folders

that you can also use folders too I have a whole video where I go into the distinction between tags and topics so I recommend checking out that video if you want to learn more but on that note we should also add a topic section because this is where you can start to get into what's called semantics semantic is the study of linguistic meaning it examines what meaning is and how words get their meaning the reason that I say topics provide a semantic element is because if you use topic notes you can then provide something like

for example Psych ology as a a topic or or second brains as a topic or personal Knowledge Management Systems as a topic and I can use these semantics these words to help introduce an organization system for example if I go click into the topic of personal Knowledge Management I can go and I can find all of the notes that are linked to that particular concept so this allows me to use topics to begin producing an emergent structure in my system topic notes are notes that help organize with emergence and contain hash topic so I'll use

a tag to indicate which are topics so that if I wanted to I could go through and click on the topic tag and find a list of all of my topics again I could also have a folder system for this which I'll show you in a moment so now I'm just going to delete this because this is my template note and what makes this a template note is that this is sitting inside my template folder and I can apply this template to any note so any time I come across a book a video a podcast

a conversation and I'm generating information I'm drawing that information I'm internalizing it I create a source for it by using the source template and then I create a reference link to where I got the information from for my citation purposes and I tag it with specific topics that will help me organize the structure of related Concepts in this system because I read so many books I also like to have a book Source template and with my book Source template I like to add chapter specific notes so that I can have a bit more structure on

where I got the information I'll include specific ele ments on the chapters that I'm reading so that as I go through I can copy down the quotes and then add my own notes and it this just helps me distinguish as a form of fleeing note where I'm capturing the quotes and capturing the ideas and the essence but also capturing my own ideas along the way in a way that is really easy for me to keep separate with this I could also add the tag hash book and then when I apply this book Source template it

will have both tags in it and then I can easily find all of the notes that have specific books related to them and as one other quick note what I find really helpful is when I'm reading something like a book or watching a YouTube video I have three tiers for how I take my notes the first tier is the main level and this is the current concept of discussion you can think of this like a a heading or a title then I have the specific quote plus the page number or timestamp that I got the

information from and then in my bottom level I have my ideas thoughts and insights so what's really nice about using this system for myself is that when I go back and read my notes I always know whether I got the information from someone else if it's in these first two tiers or if it's one of my own ideas then at the bottom I also include a separate section that specifically notes and this would be including only my own ideas again the goal here is to be able to keep track of what is coming from an

external Source like these first two levels and what's coming from an internal source which is myself this is just a good way to track your own originality and I find that very valuable okay and then we also have as a fleeting note the daily note and I also have a daily note template that I created inside of my tutorial video on obsidian for beginners so if you're interested in learning more about daily notes I recommend checking out that video so this is my daily note template again you can see it's got the daily note tag

so that's just an easy way for me to see all the notes that have been created that are daily notes I have a section for tasks ideas favorite moments a journal you can put whatever you want inside this template here for myself my main fleeting note section is under the ideas section and that's where I'll go through and I'll write down hash idea and if I have an idea then I know that I can always click on this and go back and find all of the notes that contain the hashtag idea so that this could

be a jumping off point for me to begin creating a molecule or a permanent note in my system I'll take these ideas and then I'll find specific atoms that relate to that idea and combine them together to produce molecules this is a basic version of The Daily note mine is actually a little more complicated but I'll get into that in another video and then as another component of a fleeting note we could just have a new blank note this is where you go and you just have a new idea and perhaps you don't have time

to drop it into your daily note and it's not coming from a particular Source or it's hard to identify where the source is you just quickly want to jot something down so you don't forget it then you can just create a new note and go back to it later so if you wanted you could add for example hash fleeting note and then you'd be able to find all the notes that you would like to sort through later as part of your fleeting note inbox I'll explain inboxes after we go through the rest of the templates

in some situations project notes could also be fleeting notes where you've gone through and you have new ideas for something like a new article a new YouTube video something for work that you've solved a problem and you want to quickly jot down your ideas and it's all under a specific project name then project notes can become a fleeting note as well again the goal here is not to have something that's completely set in stone based on how I'm describing it but to generate something that works best for you so I hope that some combination of

these fleeting notes you find helpful the next part of code is organization which is save for Action ability and I've already gone through this quite a bit with topic notes and with tags and I explain a lot more in my topics versus tags video really what we're dealing with for organization is how this whole system flows together so we're kind of dealing with that throughout this entire video but as a main form of organization if you don't want to use tags we can introduce folders on the side here where I can use a community plugin

called the auton note mover plugin to automatically move notes to a specific folder based on the rules that I've set so for example I have my sources folder and I can add the tag hashtag source and it will automatically move any file that has hashtag Source into the sources folder so effectively what you can do is you can automatically generate an inbox for every source and you can do the same thing for fleeting nodes for atoms for molecules and that's what I'll do quickly at the end but if you want to see more about the

auton not mover I have a YouTube video that goes into depth on automatic inboxes and indexes using the auton note mover plugin templator and data view so I recommend watching that video as a lot of people have found it really helpful okay so I just quickly went through here and created a new folder for each of my different note Primitives so what that means is as part of the organization component if I have a different hashtag for each of my different not types and I use the auto note mover plugin I can automatically send each

new note that I create using the source template or the daily note template or the fleeting note template and it'll automatically get organized into its appropriate location now some people just prefer to use tags rather than folders but I like being able to click into my molecule folder and then specifically explore all of my permanent notes that's one of the benefits of using a zetting system is that you're able to reduce information by reviewing knowledge and Distilling your own work already I wanted to briefly touch on the distill component of code of capture organized distill

Express this is typically the point in the zc casting system where people tend to get the most confused and it's understandable because it's also the hardest thing to explain it's one of those things that you can only really understand by doing it and in a sense the distillation part is known as the gener generation effect when we translate information from others into our own words we understand and remember the information better this is the true beginning of knowledge which is the result of making connections between pieces of information these connections are far more valuable if

the connections that you're making between the different notes are notes that you've already put into your own words distillation is the most important part of the zle Casten system because this is where we actually build the building blocks of the notes that we're going to be using in note sequences to create original works I'll touch more on Note sequences later but the key here is that we're standardizing something that will help us augment our personal Knowledge Management as we practically use this system by definition the generation effect is something that you must do yourself you

have to take the concept and translate it into your own words it's something that you can only really gain knowledge and wisdom if you do it yourself you learn by doing my suggestion is after you read a book after you watch a movie or listen to a podcast and you have insights that you're jotting down as part of your fleeting notes take time to go through those notes and distill the parts that resonated into your own words into your permanent notes so that you can go back later and take all of the building blocks that

you've created and build whatever it is you're interested in writing about by distilling the value into your own words you can create a block that future U can use and future U will thank you for the work that you put in now while it's fresh in your mind okay let's take a deeper look at the distillation process in ular thatle cast now let's get into the distillation this is where you can see here that it says find the essence and that's really what we're trying to do with all of this is we're trying to distill

we're trying to reduce complexity and improve Insight improve action ability let's create the atom template I quickly added some more properties into the metadata here the first thing we want to do is create an atom tag and I've also included a page number that goes along with this reference link so I can reference a specific source and then I can include the specific page number that the quote or information was found on so the types of nodes that go in here would be quotes Concepts key takeaways and one of the main elements here is that

we want to convert the quotes into our own words so what we can do is if there's a quote inside of a source we can extract an atom from that source to create a single concept this is where we truly start to get into Atomic node taking where we want to have each atom be its own singular idea or con concept so this is also referred to as the generation effect where if we take time to distill and translate a quote into our own words we remember it a lot better and just as another quote

to throw in here if you want to learn something you write it down if you want to really understand something you have to translate it into your own words so this comes from the book how to take smart notes in my source note on how to take smart notes I had this quote in there so if I wanted to extract this into an atom I could translate this into my own Atomic note where learning comes from under understanding and understanding is derived from translating Concepts into your own words now what I would do is I

would go back and create a reference link to how to take smart notes and write down the page that I got this from which I have to look up but let's just say it was page 90 then I could include a topic which could be writing or it could be personal Knowledge Management System and then I would just leave it at that I would remove all of this additional context and I could if I wanted to include the quote below for the original quote but again the goal here is that by using the generation effect

I can put something into my own words so that this becomes more applicable to me in the future so you can put whatever you want in here in terms of how you would like to remind yourself of what the point of this is but my Atomic literature node template basically looks like this where I don't have any more information it's the most basic form of notes but key elements that I would put in here would be definitions Concepts principles mental models historical facts really anything that could be distilled down to a singular thing so you

can really think of atom as a core of the idea or concept plus the citation of where it came from and then let's just move that into the template folder okay now the second part of the distillation element is the molecule so let's convert that to a file and this is very similar to the atom so I'm going to just insert the atom template and then change this tag to hashtag molecule and we can remove page number can remove reference link and we can keep topics so molecules are also quite simple and the reason for

this is because we want to identif Iden ify insights ideas or connections between atoms I've just included some notes here so that it's help more helpful for you you can kind of see what the makeup is what the anatomy of a molecule is and I just want to remind you that we want to write as if for someone else we want to write for print and the reason for this is that each of these molecules can be combined in different ways like the Lego block analogy I gave before so if we're writing as if it's

for someone else which could be for future us for future me and we want to write it as if it's for print or for publication then when we go back and we start combining those Lego blocks we have to do far less editing because we can just connect things rather than having to try to reframe or paraphrase or convert the previous ideas into a publication form effectively by doing the distillation by connecting the atomic nodes the atom nodes with the molecules and framing it as if we were writing it for publication we can save our

future selves a ton of time and we can start working on many different Publications at the same time as we just piece together the different ideas the different insights and just as a quick quote to help elaborate on this concept here's a quote from Nicholas Lumen who was the creator of the zle Casten system and he said I always have a slip of paper at hand in which I note down the ideas of certain pages on the back I write the bibliographic details so this is the literature note section after finishing the book I go

through my notes and think how these notes might be relevant for already written notes in the slip box it means that I always read with an eye of possible M Connections in the slip box what this means is that as you go through your atoms as you go through and you distill your fleeting notes into literature notes you can then read through those literature notes with an eye for your problems and your ideas and your Concepts the things that you're working on like your project notes or your papers or your YouTube videos whatever it is

you want to create whatever is at the top of your Bloom's taxonomy which is this pyramid here Whatever Gets you to that create phase that's the idea that you want to keep in mind that's what you want to read with an eye of possible Connections in your slip box you can really think of your molecule your permanent notes in the zalasin form as the idea generator or external mind or your thinking box whatever the phrasing is for you it doesn't matter it's something that resonates with you something where you know that you can just go

and you can click on your molecule folder that contains all of these permanent notes and you can read through only those permanent notes with an eye of making more connections between them over time you'll really start to generate a huge amount of connections between all of your notes in a way that you'll reach a critical mass of ideas that you'll really start to have one idea come after another this is what makes this system so emergent where patterns begin to emerge over time as another example that's related to this I'll create a new note called

notes as ideas and I'll insert template of atom and this is a quote from how to take smart notes on permanent notes again the reference link would be how to take smart notes the page number you can see here is 43 and the concept is second brain personal Knowledge Management System and the quote is that permanent notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas but contain the actual thought or idea in written form so I might call this concept permanent notes equals ideas and the idea here is that I'm not just writing down notes

that I've captured as a fleeting note to remind me of something I've thought of in the past but to actually crystalize that information into a single note so that I can go back to it in the future and it's like I'm walking through my thoughts I'm flipping through the pages of my own second brain it's the true core of the idea then I can take the core of that idea and connect this concept to other Concepts throughout my slip box through my permanent note box my molecule box and generate new ideas or insights and get

that emergent critical mass going and in this case here the title is actually sufficient I think to summarize this particular quote so I would just leave this as it is and then if I were to use this inside of my molecule I would just reference it permanent notes equals ideas and if I wanted to I could create an alias for this note and I could maybe call it permanent notes are crystallized thought that way I'm able to keep the context of that particular Atomic note the idea that permanent notes equals ideas but I can frame

it in a way that's more applicable for this particular molecule and one of the most important part of permanent notes is making those connections so again we don't want to have any orphin notes what we want to do is we want to make connections between molecules and the more connections we have the more exponential our thinking box can become if you were to try and gauge note taking productivity the best way to do this would be to measure the number of permanent notes that you create the number of crystallized insights that you generate based on

your fleeting notes and ideas related to your projects the whole goal of this entire system is try to make as many high quality permanent nodes as possible as many highquality Lego bricks as possible the way I think of it is like that scene in Oppenheimer where they're trying to measure the amount of plutonium they need in order to create a critical mass for the atomic bomb and he has a jar that he adds marbles to over time you can kind of think of that like your thinking box your idea generator once that jar gets full

of highquality molecules eventually you'll hit a critical mass where you'll spend so much time making new connections between new things that you'll never run out of things to write about for the rest of your life and that's where we get into the final stage of the code method as it applies to my molecular zle Casten the Alloys or publishable notes the template for Alloys or a publishable note is going to vary depending on its output use case this could be for social media newsletter YouTube emails articles blogs the list is literally endless here the point

is that as you go through and take your fleeting notes based on the source information and distill it into atoms the literature notes on the key Concepts you're learning about the atomic notes and you make Con connections between those atomic notes and your own ideas based on your projects to produce molecules you want to take those molecules and base on the project ideas that you have use them to publish new and original thinking so as an example of an alloy I'll show you my newsletter template so this is my recalibrating newsletter template which I like

to think of as an alloy because my newsletters can be somewhat long sometimes they're a thousand to 4,000 words effectively what I've done is I go through and I read a whole bunch of sources like books art articles I watch YouTube videos and I distill all of my thoughts into atoms of the specific Concepts then I take my own ideas and insights that I derive from multiple atoms in my own projects and I start to link together the molecules and come up with a list of ideas that I would like to talk about and then

I take that list of ideas and I put it into this template for my newsletter so for example I might go through and come up with a list of three different problems that I've got from literature three atoms related to something to do with artificial intelligence or intellectual property or something to do with photography and I'll come up with three different problems that are related to atoms that I've derived and molecules that I have used to solve those problems so then I'll put it together in a story format that I can then share with people

as a newsletter or add to my digital Garden as part of my cultivating segment of my newsletter so the goal here is that whatever your project is whatever your desired form of expression something that you can share your work with other people that's where you're trying to create a sequence of notes that are within your permanent notes so for example you may take five or six molecules and thread them together into a note sequence and that's how you can publish it you might not even have to change anything about the molecule itself because you've already

written the molecule in a format that it's able to be expressed and what you might do is you might take three or four molecules and then put them in order in a way that makes sense for how you would like to express it as your newsletter and then you realize that there's a gap there's something missing between the molecules well that you can just fill in as part of the alloy to make it in a publishable format related to that let's create another example of an atom from how to take smart notes so I can

go and create a new note insert template of adom Copy in the quote which again is from how to take smart notes write down the page number link to the source the quote here is there's no need to start from scratch keep doing what you would do anyway read think write just take smart notes along the way so maybe my Atomic note here is smart notes enable me to do what I'm already doing so now if I wanted to take this Atomic note and Link it to a concept that I had already thought of earlier

which was the analogy for a Lego brick I could make a new note and apply the molecule template so I can take this concept this singular quote from this atom I can reframe it to Smart notes are like Lego bricks they enable me to create a system of interoperable blocks that can be sequenced together in an indefinite number of combinations by taking smart notes I can do what I'm already doing read think right so this was taking my my analogy and applying it to the concept that I extracted from the book how to take smart

notes on page 146 so I can always go back and find the direct train of thought that led me to that idea so now that I have that molecule I can move the file to the molecule folder I can search for all of my existing molecules and I could go take a look at the molecule folder and I would be able to go work through all of my existing thoughts and ideas that I've already connected and try to make more connections between them so if I look at it in the graph view I could filter

specific specifically by hasht molecule and obviously I only have a couple notes with that tag at the moment but I'd be able to quickly see any particular patterns in My Graph here by going through and identifying how the different notes relate to one another I can start to identify clusters of knowledge based on the questions that I've been asking that are the most important to me to help explain that concept let's take a look at my current brain so this is my main obsidian fault that has a ton of notes in it so if I

wanted to I could limit by molecule and I could find all of the specific notes in here so you can start to see oh here's a particular cluster here's a cluster here's a cluster all of these notes have different relationships to one another and the more connections I pull them together the more you can begin to start to see how the different notes relate to one another patterns begin to emerge over time and if I wanted to rather than going to the internet to look for more information I could just come into this system and

look at my existing information which is going to be a lot more sustainable for me to deal with now that I've gone through and templated this entire system of molecular that'll C I thought that it might be helpful for me to go through a few more examples of creating atoms using those atoms to create molecules and then using those molecules to quickly outline an alloy like a newsletter or an article I'm just quickly going to create a couple more atoms using some of my favorite principles that I've learned in the past and then I'll apply

those in a way that demonstrates how molecular zcas can be so effective for reusing Concepts in new ways the first concept I want to talk about is called the PTO principle which is uh singular concept so I'm going to insert the atom template my favorite use of this principle comes from the book The one thing which I have listed in my recommended reading on my website the one thing is effectively trying to help people with decision fatigue and overthinking which are two of my biggest blocks that I find myself having when creating new works and

working with knowledge or creativity generally so I found the one thing very helpful and one of the key takeaways is the one thing is that you can keep applying the Proto principle to reduce the complexity of the problem that you're dealing with the prto principle is effectively that 80% of outputs come from 20% of inputs it's the theory of unequal distribution this quote came from chapter 4 and the topic relates to productivity and I would also say to something called a power law so I could give this an alias because this principle is often known

as the 8020 Rule and that would be it for the atom this is just a quick explanation of a singular concept that reminds me of what this principle is all about so let's create a new note and I'll add the PTO principle as the beginning of an alloy but the key here that's not listed in the principle itself is that in order for there to be 80% of outputs there needs to be some kind of input so in order for me to apply the Proto principle there needs to be some kind of data and this

brings in another one of my favorite Concepts the concept of 1% better every day this concept comes from the book Atomic Habits by James clear and he refers to this as continuous Improvement and the concept is that if you operate in a way that you can get 1% better every day at something that compounds over time it's the power of tiny gains so that you would be 38 times better at whatever that thing is than you would be if you had done nothing or in contrast if you got 1% worse every day you'd be at

effectively 3% of what you were at when you started let's add this principle in but I could do too is instead of just including the reference link to the book Atomic habits I could also include the URL of James clear's website which I could add as its own separate note if I wanted to but because this is just a specific reference I'll just add it in as a reference link and then let's give it the top IC of productivity and also power laws so you can see why these two concepts the parto principle and 1%

better every day are both related and I can already start to see this has to do with a compounding effect so now to tie this into what we've been talking about already let's add a note for the generation effect so the generation effect relates to the topic of note taking and I would say to a second brain and also productivity the generation effect is translating Concepts into my own words improves understanding and knowledge retention effectively generating Knowledge from information at it is translated in a way that makes the most sense to me my favorite source

of this concept comes from Nest Labs by Ann lur lump this is where I first learned of the generation effect she has a nice graphic here where you can see that going back and forth between studying and creating you improve the retrieval of information when it's needed over time and she also includes the original research paper that she learned about it the Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior from 1978 where information is better remembered if it is actively created from one's own mind rather than simply read in a passive way since this is my

favorite source for this information I will copy that and add it as a reference link and this is where I could for example introduce a new source called nest laabs because Nest laabs has more than one specific reference and I'll also include the link here but I'll open up nest laabs and I'll turn this into a source template and add the main website and I'm not going to add more for the moment but at least I now have a source that I can go back to and add more information if I need to okay so

you might be wondering how do these Concepts all tie together well effectively what I've done so far is I've created singular Atomic concepts for a few different effects and now it's time to start converting these into molecules so let's create a new note the thought that I have here for the molecule is that ZL Casten compounds over time so if we take a look you can delete this if you want to so the thought here that the idea that came to mind is that the more permanent nodes I create the greater likelihood there is for

emergence some unpredictable property by writing every day taking time to distill information translating it into my own words with the generation effect I can get 1% better every day at using using SLE Casten at generating knowledge within my second brain so this applies to the topic of not taking second brain and personal Knowledge Management System but how does the PTO principle fit into this well if we take a look now at the graph view you see that our graph is getting a little bit bigger and I color code the difference between the atom and the

molecules I can start to see which notes form which part of my second brain which fall under atoms and which fall under molecules but as you can imagine this starts to get much more complicated over time so what would be useful would be to have a way to process this information and identify the notes that have become the most important to me because for example if I wrote one note a day for the next 365 days to get 1% better every day and 38 times better than last year that's going to give me 365 notes

which is a lot of notes to filter through so this is where I could have another molecule idea I'll just delete this for simplification and the thought here is that AI augments data sets and reduces decision fatigue if I go through and create notes every day using the generation effect to generate emergence to compound it with the 1% better everyday principle and then I use AI to apply the PTO principle to the notes to identify which notes have the most impact I can now begin to augment my existing data set or my knowledge base using

artificial intelligence and my understanding of the pareda principle so this is where we now start to get into the alloy creation and I am able to start threading these Concepts together so if you remember I like to start off my Alloys with some kind of problem so so effectively what I'm doing here if I combine artificial intelligence with my personal Knowledge Management System to augment it to augment my second brain I can use it to identify the knowledge that has the greatest impact on me or in other words apply the PTO principle to identify what

20% of notes leads to 80% of results after I've been using the generation effect to get 1% better every day at building my system so effectively I am threading two different molecules together zle cast in compounds over time and AI augments data sets and reduces decision fatigue if I wanted I can embed these notes directly so I can go and just add an exclamation mark in front of the note and that automatically pulls the notes in and I can do the same thing with the atomic Notes too I'll rename this to AI augmented personal Knowledge

Management to overcome overthinking so effectively what I did I identified three concepts from various books and articles that I've read that have personally helped me to understand my own knowledge and how I can solve problems and make decisions better while proving my own understanding of the decisions that I'm making as I'm building out the knowledge and I can use those Concepts along with the zcas and system which I've been working on here to combine that with artificial intelligence to help reduce decision fatigue and overthinking so now all I really have to do is I could

go and fill in the gaps between these different concepts and explain it a little bit more in depth and I've effectively created a newsletter on some of my favorite Concepts that lead to something that helps me with my own mental health over time as a practical example of me actually implementing this idea that I had this article that I put together this alloy or publish note something that would end up going in my newsletter or perhaps be turned into a YouTube video I've been using Google's notebook LM to help me create these Concepts and work

with a large amount of information and help reduce my decision fatigue so I've been actually using notebook LM to apply the prto principle to help me make connections between my existing notes that I've published for example you can see on the side here that I've uploaded sources all of these numbered sources are my newsletters that I've published over the last year and a bit so what I could do for example is I could prompt notebook LM and ask it to identify themes using the PTO principle to see which Concepts seem to have had the largest

impact on me over the last year so let's quickly try that apply the PTO principle to my numbered sources which are my newsletters to identify 20% of the topics that have led to the largest amount of impactful writing summarize these Concepts in the form of atoms so this already knows what atoms are because I've been having conversations and saving notes explaining my molecular zcast system so notebook LM did a prettyy good job summarizing the key atems with Noe taking systems personal Knowledge Management digital Gardens and content creation I would say that these are the main

Concepts through my newsletters and this is what you've been seeing in my YouTube videos because I use the newsletters to create a knowledge base that I've been drawing on to make these YouTube videos so I would say that this checks out quite well with applying the prto principle using notebook LM to my existing notes this is a really easy way to augment my personal knowledge management system using artificial intelligence without giving my information and data away for training if you're interested in learning how notebook LM works with obsidian because you can add sources that include

markdown files which obsidian runs on I have another video that goes in depth on how you can use notebook LM to augment your personal Knowledge Management System and hopefully help you with overthinking and decision fatigue so I hope that this gives you a good idea on how you can have a workflow that goes from Concepts that would start originally as a fleeting note some Epiphany that I may have had tied together with Concepts that learned from books or reading articles or watching YouTube videos like the PTO principle or the generation effect and how I can

take those Concepts and those insights and thread them into molecules make connections between the atoms and then take those atoms and those molecules and literally just Nest them in a new note by using the embed function in obsidian and then I can go through and fill in the gaps to create a published work I could then go publish this into my digital Garden which I have at w. XYZ you can see here I have Alloys atams and molecules digital Garden authors I have my Vault sorted in a way that allows me to publish directly to

my digital garden and here's another example of original thinking which I talked about in the last YouTube video on the theory of knowledge where I walked through Bloom's taxonomy and a couple other Knowledge Management theories so this is another example of an alloy that started with an atom of the concept of Bloom's taxonomy and then I applied my own understanding and knowledge from being an intellectual property lawyer and a patent agent and understanding what it means to generate original value in an intellect ual property standpoint and then use that to express as an alloy to

my digital Garden you've been able to see how I've converted the zetel Casten system into my molecular note system in a way that takes advantage of the digital ecosystem rather than the physical one of zedcast but maintains the same benefits of the zel Caston system again it's really hard to put into words how valuable this system can become over time it's something that you can only really learn by doing but if we go back to the data Insight wisdom graph you can see that wisdom really is action the only way that you're going to start

to see this value is by making these connections yourself in a way that's intuitive to you I hope that this overview has shown you the value in using connected Thinking by leveling up Atomic notes through molecular notes combined with zetel Casten and the code method to really boost your personal Knowledge Management System and reduce information overload in your life zetel Casten was an incredibly confusing system for me at first but once I modified it into the molecular zle Casten system and templated it in obsidian I've have a much better grasp on how I can actually

practically use this in my life I use my molecular zcast and system in obsidian every day every time I consume information and I find that there's something that resonates with me I jot it down as a fleeting note then I go back and I convert the fleeting notes into Atomic notes linking them to the original source and then go through and tie those atomic notes to my own ideas to form molecules it's really the best way that I've ever found to reduce the information overload in a practical way so that I can leverage my knowledge

to create new things rather than talking more about zle Casten here I made a separate video that goes in depth on how it works and how it aligns with Knowledge Management Theory I recommend checking out that video for more context and deeper commentary on the value of using a note-taking system like molecular zedal Casten if you're interested in learning more about obsidian digital Gardens and personal Knowledge Management and how it can be augmented with artificial intelligence I also have a playlist here that goes through all of these Topics in much more depth I recommend checking

it out if you're looking to expand your system in a very practical and easy to understand way a reminder that if you're interested in the templates that I built and the structure in obsidian along with the canvas workflow I'm making the system available for my paid subscribers as part of my YouTube membership it's currently $2.99 a month Canadian which is roughly $2 us so if you found these videos helpful I would really appreciate if you would consider supporting me if you have any questions about how this system works or how it relates to the rest

of the personal Knowledge Management and AI systems that I've been describing please feel free to leave a comment below and I'll go through and answer questions to help everyone understand how this system can benefit their lives if you found this video helpful or valuable I would love if you would please consider subscribing I'm trying to make YouTube my full-time career so any support you can give is very much appreciated similarly if you found this valuable and would like to share it with a friend word of mouth is by far the best way to help me

grow on YouTube so I appreciate any way that you could share this thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video