Zettelkasten Smart Notes: Step by Step with Obsidian

welcome back to another video in this video i'm going to be showing how to apply the zettelkaster method in obsidian in my previous video i covered an overview of the different components of the zettelkassen where you've got the fleeting notes the literature notes the permanent notes how you link those together so that you can use it to create new ideas new thoughts new connections and ask questions against your slip box in this video i'm going to show how to assemble that using obsidian so here i have a brand new obsidian vault and if you're not

familiar with obsidian it's basically a markdown editor that allows you to connect notes together in what we call linked thoughts and it's a file system based application where your notes are stored in markdown and you can organize them in a structure and use tags and links and embed notes in others so let's get started the approach we're going to take is to create folders for the different types of notes so for example we have fleeting notes we have literature notes and we have permanent notes so in the fleeting notes we're going to store our ideas

capture things that we've seen on the web that are of interest and generally record quick ideas about things in our literature notes these will be our thoughts out of stuff we've read consumed such as videos where we're thinking more creatively about what it means to us and getting a bit more deep thinking and then our permanent notes is where we store those permanently in our slip box and link everything together and it's our permanent notes that we will ask questions against so that we can gain better understanding whether that's if we're creating a blog post

and we want to pose a new insight or a new question will we use our permanent notes as a source of information for that so before we get started we're going to go into the settings and enable the templates core plugin so this plugin here allows us to create a template of which we're going to nominate a folder for our templates now i don't have a folder created here i'm just going to create that quickly we'll call this templates and in the settings i will select templates as my folder what this allows us to do

is to set up a quick way of creating a fleeting note eligino to a permanent note in our templates folder we will store a template that we're going to use as the basis for all our note types so we'll create the first note as a note template i'll call it that and we're going to create a title using the hash for the markdown title and we're going to use the template notation called title we'll just put some metadata to say when we created it and we'll add a section called references and start a bullet point

list which we can then fill out and we'll put some space where our note details will go so with that saved it's now called note template when we create a new note we can use that template to insert that and it will fill out the title the date and the time based on the file name of the note that we've just created i'm just going to create one second template called map of content or moc for short i'm going to give it a title and i'm going to start a numbered list and this i will

use to outline various topics for a given theme into my notes so let's say i want to create a new fleeting note an example would be i'm reading an article i love this article my product is my garden where it talks about how creating a product doesn't need to be a huge endeavor it doesn't need to be a massive investment you don't need to raise money for it but actually sometimes it's good to have a project or product that is almost like gardening where you just want to pot it around in the garden and work

on it over time as something that kind of fulfills yourself as a bootstrapped founder so we're going to use this as an example of where we're going to create our fleeting notes so the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to copy the url for this and we'll create a fleeting note in here called my product is my garden and i'm going to insert the template called note template now we've filled in the details that we created here and i'm going to create a reference here just put the link in so i know where

it came from and this is where i would now read the article and just create very quick kind of snippets out of it i would highlight things and we'll do that very quickly and then we'll take that through into literature notes okay what i've done here is i've just captured some highlights from this article and i've put them into this fleeting note so now i don't need to reference the original article in its entirety i can just look at this note and get a summary of the bits that were relevant to myself so next we

want to create the literature note that goes with this and i'm going to call it my product as my garden again i'm going to insert the template note template and i'm going to split my view vertically so that i can have my original version here and i can now put my individual thinking around these points that i've highlighted so i'm going to do that now and then we'll take that through two permanent notes okay i've finished creating my literature notes based on this it encompasses things like you know entrepreneurs are faced with the challenge of

building a business that is fast growing and hiring lots of people or bootstrapping and going at a more slower pace things like there's a pressure to do things fast and to break things but it is that uh but is that always the right approach so it's posing a question now about challenging the status quo taking the my product is my garden approach it actually gives you permission to think more slowly about the creation of your startup we cover things like doing it in small parts over time and enjoying the process we also cover things like

doing the research exploring practicing mastering the smaller details needed to move the project forward with our literature note complete i'm now going to create a collection of permanent notes that will embody the knowledge that we've gained from this and we'll start linking these together now you won't always be starting from an empty collection of permanent notes you will normally build on this over time and add things insert things update things as you go to start with i'm going to create a map of content just to outline the areas of the content based on what we've

just learned that i want to include if i already had a map of content of a subject i would probably add items to that so i know where i'm adding information or i'm updating information so within my permanent notes let's create a map of content and i'm going to call this bootstrapping a startup so this now is an entry point to the topics around bootstrapping a startup i'm going to use the new template called map of content and i'm going to start outlining the areas that i want to encapsulate now in my permanent notes the

first one i'm going to do is what is bootstrapping one thing i want to do next is to be able to just create these notes directly by either control or command clicking but before i do that because this is a new vault in obsidian i need to go to the settings i need to go to files and links and i want to change the default location for new notes at the moment is the vault folder but i want to do the same folder as the current file so that means if i'm creating links whether i'm

in my literature notes my fleeting notes my permanent notes i'll be creating sibling links in the same folder so with this now selected i can command or control click and create that note so i've got what is bootstrapping i can then go insert template note template and now i've got this one ready to fill out on the left hand side here i'm just going to switch to my literature note so that i know what i'm referencing and now i'm going to use my literature note as a reference and start completing information about the various things

in my permanent notes here i will have something like what is bootstrapping and then i'll create another note what are the benefits of bootstrapping and i'm going to use something in my article here to add to what i would have as a collection of benefits because i'm going to be using it as a source i'm going to add it as my references so i'm going to use the double brackets and i'm going to use my product is my garden literature note so now i've got traceability of where this idea came from back to my original

note here and in fact i'm also going to add a reference here to the fleeting note my product is my garden so i've now got full traceability of where those ideas came from okay so now i have this note here and i've got to this note by linking from my what is bootstrapping and the benefits so i'm going to click the backlinks and this brings up the backlinks folder here and now i can see how i got to here so i'm going to go back to what is bootstrapping where i've got this and i'm going

to go back up to bootstrapping a startup in my map of content here i'm going to add number two and i go benefits benefits of bootstrapping i'm going to add some other things now from this article that allows me to build up my map of content around bootstrapping a startup okay i'm just going to add two more notes into my collection here so the first one is skills required to bootstrap a startup and again using my literature note i'm going to fill out the information that i've gained from here into my permanent note so i've

encapsulated a few points here around bootstrapping and the skills required and i'm going to create a reference to this literature note so that i've got full traceability back to where the ideas originated now that i've completed this note i can go through and complete the final one which i've got goals for bootstrapping and startup and my final thoughts here are just two points the goals are to become profitable so you can support the business full-time and to deliver incremental value so that you gain new users so the point of a bootstrapping business is that you

are growing slowly but consistently so here we have completed a map of content around bootstrapping a startup we have a fleeting note where we took extracts from an article it may be quotes from a youtube video it may be highlights from a book the fleeting notes can come from any source then we take those into literature notes where we start thinking more holistically about those highlights that information so that we can add our insight into it in a very quick way then we take those literature notes and we bring them into permanent notes where we

start layering them into the relevant places within our slip box so that we can then start linking them together within obsidian we can now see an open graph view of what we've created this is a great way for us to see how different topics relate to other topics and whether we may have gaps or we may have too many links coming from a particular area that sort of dilutes the ability to get meaning out of those links so the final part of this video is now thinking about what you can do with this knowledge now

that you've got it so let's create a new folder and we'll call this projects within the projects we may want to create a blog post that we want to publish or it could be the script for a youtube video and we want to use our permanent notes as a source of inspiration so that when we start writing we're not doing it completely from scratch so in this case i might want to create a new blog post and i'm going to call this bootstrapping a startup and here i would start outlining the various parts of the

blog post that i want so thinking about this i would say what does it mean to bootstrap who can bootstrap a startup the benefits the drawbacks any tips and a conclusion this would be a rough outline of how we want to structure things and with the zettelkasten slip box you can now start decorating what you want to talk about in here so for example what does it mean to bootstrap so i've got an article called what is bootstrapping so i'm just going to link this in here i haven't really covered much on who can bootstrap

maybe that's an area that i can add into my permanent notes to look at the types of people who do bootstrapping the types of people who go for venture capital funding uh and types of people who probably wouldn't create a a business in this way we also have an article about the benefits so we can link that in i haven't really covered the drawbacks of this so that's another area where i probably want to spend a bit more time in my research we've got some tips that we can cover with the skills required and then

the conclusion we would summarize this article in a conclusion once we've pretty much written the main body of content now one thing that you can do with obsidian is that you can add an exclamation mark in front of your links so when you're in a preview mode you get to see exactly what you've pulled in there so this is a good way to reference your notes so that as you start building out your your main article you get an idea and again what i can do here is i can split my view so i have

my preview so i can re view those inline and then over on the left side i can edit this so an example of this would be where i now start writing a first draft about bootstrapping in the way that i'm talking to an audience member for my blog so here's an example of where i may introduce the topic of bootstrapping as a start startup where you create a business that is fully self-funded often founders will do this in their spare time while they're working for another company now we won't go into too much detail about

the copywriting of writing an article in here but as you can see you can create your drafts here and when you want to clean it up you can just remove the exclamation marks and now you you can see the individual sections of what you are writing so in conclusion i hope this has been a great overview of how you can take the zettelkaster method where you can take fleeting notes literature notes link them together with permanent notes and then create projects from them where you get to ask questions about your slip box about an insight

that you have and then you can use it to create blog posts youtube videos and various other kind of creative outputs where writing is predominantly the main output of what you do one of the main benefits of this is that you get to really test your understanding by writing it allows you to see the links and the gaps in your understanding and essentially find the places where you need to create more insight more understanding bringing more articles and research and books into your fleeting notes and literature notes and start building up your permanent notes over

time now as i finish up this video i would just like to share with you what i'm working on it's my own note-taking app called flowtelic and the idea here is that it helps you study learn think write and publish with maximum efficiency and consistency so as i explore this whole zettlecaster method and note taking in general there's a lot of ideas that i've got around the workflow that i want to improve on most notably around doing things consistently and building up your slip box over time so this is the app where i would create

study notes ideas i can organize those into what we call the archive create projects and track other things like books that i'm reading and people the idea here is that the workflow is going to be completely configurable but the most important thing that i'm very excited with this product is the focus mode where you get to do small amounts every day and compound it over time so the knowledge that you put into your slip box the books that you read the articles you read they're only as useful as how consistent you are at doing it

and this is where i want flotellic to really shine where daily you create study sessions organize your ideas and notes and work on your projects and you'll be doing different things at different times so projects you work on in one day maybe from notes that you've created two or three or four weeks ago and then the idea is that you get to create work outfit you get to blog from it and you get to publish that work and that's a really great way to build your own audience around the topics that you love find your

tribe and really improve your note-taking and your understanding so if this is of interest to you uh please go to join.flowtelect.com where you can join the waitlist and you get to try out the app immediately while it's in sort of an open beta and the idea here is that it's a bootstrap business much like the topic we've covered in this video and that over time it's just going to get better and better so thank you very much and see you in the next one