Getting Started with Zettelkasten

1. Getting Started with Zettelkasten Introduction: Welcome to this course on getting started with dental cast him. My name is Curtis. I'm an avid reader. You can see a small portion of like My next to read books over my shoulder. I'm researcher in general. I took counseling degree and I really loved research on everything from like technical topics for coding to sport watches because, you know, a runner as well. And that's what I do. I I researched and I produced videos on a lot of the research that I come up with. And so today I'm going to walk you through head of minds that'll cast in system where I think a good settle cast in is so that you can walk out with a system that works for you. Now the reason that we're gonna go with the system is because as the book How to take smart notes says, a meaningful and well-defined set of systems task is going to beat your willpower every time because without a system, you're just going to defaults to willpower. James clear of it says it's an atomic habits that we rise to the level of our habits. We don't. Then we fall to the level of our systems is really the thing. We fall to the level of our systems, not rise to the level of our habits. And that's the goal here. Throughout this video series, we're going to look at what is that'll cast him when talked about what makes a good settled casting note. And specifically some of the connections they're going to talk about the different software you can use and how to choose a good is that'll cast and tool for you. I'm going to show you craft maybe a little bit of obsidian and some Devin think as my tools when talking about why I use mainly debit think and then craft, but you don't have to use them. And in fact, if you are on Windows or if you are not on Mac OS and iPad OS than Kraft is not an option for you, but obsidian is a great one if you're on Windows, if you're on Linux, if you're on lots of other platforms. Rome research is another good one that's a multi-platform web interface. Are also going to talk about the basic exedra cast an organization. How did your links, how do you do your tags and how do you just generally organize it so that you can't have a system where you can find stuff. Then we're gonna do three videos on kinda taking notes and adding years that'll cast. I'm gonna talk to you about online articles. I'm going to talk about how we deal with videos and what do I do when I want to keep a video for long-term reference for myself. And then I'm also gonna talk about getting books into your settle casting system. How do you get go from literature notes and we'll talk about that later into durable notes. And what's the process I use that I found really helpful in doing that. And one of the final videos is going to be connecting our ideas because it's really easy to fall into the trap of collecting, becoming a collector where we just throw a bunch of notes into a system and we don't really do anything with it. And we view this collection of notes as knowledge progress when really it's the connection of notes, it's your own ideas. That is knowledge, progress. And then we'll finish. By the end of this video series. You should know what a good that'll casting is. You should have some ideas about what you need to look at for your software. You should have an idea about how to take good notes and then how to connect good notes. Come join me. 2. What is Zettelkasten: Let's talk about was L Cassin really is, as popularized are really used heavily by Nicholas lumen who published 70 books and over 400 scientific articles that bear his name. Now, I'm not a scientific researcher and you aren't either, but that's certainly does not mean that we shouldn't discount the methods he used to work because they're excellent. Like me, you probably deal with people all the time. You deal with ideas all the time. And without a good system to keep those ideas and to link them together, you're going to totally forget that's something you looked at last March relates to something you look at today because you just want to have a system to link them together. You won't have a practice to link these ideas, to really interrogate your ideas as they go in to your knowledge management system. Now what does this that'll cast him. It's really just a spot to store your ideas and that's important, your ideas. So that you have a system to store them, to find them, to retrieve them, and to link them together with other ideas. That's it. It's, that's all it is, is a note taking system place to store your ideas. Ultimately, there's really only three things you need in a good settle casting system. First, need inbox. This is where you put all your initial ideas, where you put your literature notes for parsing later. Second is your deep long-term durable note system. Years that'll cast on what is really the core of yours that'll cast him. Where all your notes go, all your thoughts golden, they link to each other. And third, is a reference database, a place where you can go back to primary sources and really figure out where these sources you have found, where they link together. Well, like what do they go back to? What book did you read that page? Did you read that on? What web article did you collect to find this information? That's it. An inbox, a place for your durable notes, and a spot to hold your long term research database for all your primary sources. Now in my system I have Devon thing as my inbox and it really doubles in many ways as my primary source reference material because I can go back to any of the web articles I have there. And then I have craft as my settle cast and main database and that I'll reference books in my literature notes that I've read. So it's also in some ways doubles as my source material reference repository for books at least. And as the spot that I put my long-term durable notes that really linked together. In the next video, we're going to cover what makes a good settle casts and note. 3. What Makes a Good Zettelkasten Note: In this video, we're going to talk about what makes a good settle Casta. Nope. Because for years I took notes on books that when I look back at them now, I really feel like they're wasted effort because they weren't good notes. And this metal casting system really helped me get to that point where I looked at all my old notes and said they're not as worthwhile as the notes I'm taking and they're so far behind where the notes I'm taking now that I view most of them as wasted in many ways. One of the big reasons those old notes just don't feel useful is that in many ways I lied on my memory to magically just bring things back to the surface. And while I have a decent memory, It's just not good enough to actually do that. The truth is, any of the knowledge that you gain, the application of that knowledge is the biggest thing that gets you moving forward. Just having the knowledge doesn't really do anything. That's when you use the knowledge, when you use it in your work, when you use it on your blog, in your video. That's when the knowledge actually mean something for you. There are two main things that make a good note. And first is that the note should be in your own words. Yeah, quotes do have a place and a goods that'll cast and system when you can really reference what someone actually said. But by putting quotes in your own words, by putting ideas in your own words, you protect yourself against what's called the mere exposure effect. The mere exposure effect is mostly when you see something lots, you get used to it and you trust it more. It doesn't actually matter if it is true. There's actually an interesting study where they put real words and nonsense words on a park bench in a college campus. And then they surveyed the people of a couple of months later. And the nonsense words were like, oh yeah, that's totally a word just because people had seen it on a park bench. And we easily fall into that with our own ideas. If we don't really work hard to make sure that we've written them down in her own words, right? Reading a quote multiple times will just help you trust it more, whether or not it's actually true. The second big thing that a note has, a good note is that it connects to your other webs of knowledge. It connects to your other knowledge that you've already gathered, the other books you've already read, the other articles you've already read. A reasonable rule of thumb to get started is that if you have a couple 100 notes and you have very little connection between those notes, you're not doing the work it takes to build connections. I have around 1000 notes, and when I locate a one-off, it usually means that I'm heading down a new research avenue or it's just a note I totally missed in some ways, but more often it's a new research avenue. As I've been researching more about community structure, city structure, what makes a livable city, what makes a walkable city, and what really connects neighbors. When I first started that, that was like a note off on its own, linked out to a whole bunch of books that I wanted to read. It really was just a node that had no connection into the rest of my system. Now that I've kinda headed down there a little bit and have watched more videos on it and sort of looking and learning about walkable cities. Livable cities have a lot more connections into the rest of my network than I did before. In our next video, we're going to look at the types of notes that you may have in his that'll cast and system. 4. Types of Zettelkasten Notes: In this video, we're going to cover the types of notes that you may have news that'll cast and system. And ultimately there are about four main types of notes. First, you're gonna have fleeting notes. These are your ideas just as you come across things in life. As you're walking down through the grocery store and you think, oh, you know, this idea comes up and you want to relate it to something else. That's actually how this course started. I said, Oh, I should do a course about dental cast. And as I was walking through the grocery store, I just I should do that. And I opened up my phone and took a fleeting Note that kind of started this whole process. The second type of note is a literature note. These are nodes you take, not just in books, but in any source. You're looking at a video or a blog post or a book, notes that you take about what the book is saying, what that resource is saying. Sometimes that node itself will connect to other ideas. Sometimes it'll just be on its own. It will actually end up in your inbox and you won't do much with it. But as you consume any type of media, you need to be taking some literature notes so that later on you can connect them into other things. Remember, don't let yourself fall into collectors fallacy where you simply collect a bunch of notes without connection, that it's never the goal of this system. Third, we have our durable notes or a permanent notes depending on what you want to call them. I like durable. These are the notes that come out of your literature, notes, out of your fleeting notes and really begin to be yours that'll cast and system. The other two nodes are kinda holding spots and then as you connect them, as you expand on them, right? So in a book, you may say this book says a, B, and C. And then when you go back through the book and I'm going to show you this in a future video. You'll look at the ideas and say, okay, well if a, B, and C is true, then I think, and you would actually break out your own thought, maybe even with a reference into its separate note and you'd reference back to the original. And say if a, B, and C is true, that must mean these other things. Or it also connects to these other ideas here that reinforce it or contradict it. That's an important thing to look at as well. And those become your durable notes, your long-term notes. Now the final note type is a little bit more about organization. It's called your project notes. It's where you may say, I'm gonna do is that'll cast of course, this is where mine started. They said, I want to do is that'll cast. Of course, I had no idea what the title is. I just put settle casting course and then I started collecting different links that had already found and kinda logged them all into the one page. Then as I move further forward down this I actually in craft broke them down with different video sections and then I continued to progress down that path until I had a good kind of overall note, overall map of the content that I wanted to have and broke it down into the scripts that turned into this course. In our next video, we're going to talk about some questions need to ask yourself. As you take your literature nodes, as you take your fleeting notes and turn them into durable notes so you can make sure that they are good notes. 5. QUICK Notes: Really anything get in your inbox. Your inbox should have lots of inputs with strong filters about what gets past your inbox into the rest of your system, into your durable notes. Actually, I really like Matt rag lends quick acronym here where he looks at what did his inbox and the first thing he asks is, Is this equality note, is this something that really deserves moving from your literature notes, from your fleeting notes into your settle Cassin system, into durable nodes. Because there's lots of stuff that won't. You'll just take it off and say, nope, that was not an idea that I wanted to pursue. The second is, is this unique note? Does this actually contain your own thoughts on the subject? Or is this just a rehashing of someone else's thoughts? And if it doesn't contain your own thoughts, need to be really hard. Maybe you don't understand this topic. Maybe you need to re-read the notes so it is your own thoughts so that you can't really expand your understanding of it. Third, is this an individual note? Is it atomic and self-contained? Does this note stand on its own? If I pulled it out and say, oh, yes, this note stands here, and this is a complete idea in one shot. It may relate to other things and that's fine. But is this a complete note, stand alone on its own forth. How did this note fit in the context of the other notes you've taken? We'll get more in a later video into how to connect notes. But you need to be thinking right away, how is this gonna connect to the other ideas that I have? And I have a whole set of questions I will go through with you to ask yourself when you're trying to connect notes to help you find those connections. Now finally matter the likes the knowledge-based thing here as his final question, is this a knowledge base note, I actually think that's pushing to get his quick acronym really well. But ultimately, you're looking at your notes to build your web of knowledge, build your knowledge base over the long term. In our next video, we're gonna start looking through some of the things you need to think about as you pick the tools you need for your settle cast and system. Whether you go with the original three by five card, which is a really good size to limit what you write. So you don't just write on and on and on down to something like Rome research or craft that kind of has whatever you want in it. 6. Choosing Your Zettelkasten Tools: In how to take smart notes by Sancho Ahrens, he says that a good tool should not increase the complexity of the system. That should make your job easier, not make it harder. As we choose the tool, we need to be very careful about which we choose at the beginning. Because the burden to change tools is so high, you probably don't realize how high it is. First off, you already know the tool you're using. And so changing lighter means you have to relearn a new tool that's a large burden. And secondly, you've got a lot of data to convert to a new system. I was originally on obsidian and just plain old markdown files. And I liked Kraft because I do a lot of work on my iPad. And craft has an iPad app. Where is obsidian doesn't. And when I first looked at moving over to craft, they only imported notes and 200 note bunches and kept the notes links between those two hundreds and a bunch. But it did not keep notes across batches. So I would have lost many, many links. Now, recently craft allowed you to import up to 2 thousand Markdown notes, and that meant that they could keep all my links. So one of my big burdens and learning the tool was gone because they didn't have to go back through a whole bunch of content and a remake Link's for my system. Now, that's still didn't mean that there was no cost. I still have to learn a new tool. But since I do so much of my research and my writing and all by planning on my iPad, the cost was worthwhile because I spent more time on my iPad by far than I spend using my Mac. Now let's go through some of the questions you need to ask yourself as you choose a tool. One of the first real questions is, who owns your data? While currently with craft? I technically owned my data. In fact, it's my data because it's in my craft database, but I do not practically own my data. I cannot look at the files on my hard drive. I cannot choose my sync service. I have to use their service. So while I theoretically on them, I do not practically own them. A tool like obsidian, you practically and theoretically on the files because you bring your own sink along. A second big question is, how do you get your data out of the system? Because at some point almost every tool will go away and you won't be able to do anything with it because it just won't be developed anymore. Your operating system will upgrade, your tools will change, and you cannot stick with that same old tool you use. You need to look at the data export options. So a tool like Devin thing, which I used for my primary resources is really good because it's literally saved a file on your computer and you can say revealed the file to Me and see the file in a folder. Something like obsidian, which is really good because I could literally see the markdown files on my computer and do whatever I wanted with them. Third, you need to look at the tools, the operating systems, the devices you use most to do your work. So when I started this, there wasn't really a great iPad option at all in my mind. But obsidian was a really nice Mac OS option and it's Linux and Windows. So I really liked that. And I liked that it was markdown files to new long-term. If a better tool came along, I could probably write a script because I do programming to port my data over if I wanted to. As craft came out as craft enhanced features, I looked at most of my reading, most of my research has done with my iPad and Obsidian really didn't have a good solution for that. Yes, you could use one writer. Yes. I could use some other solutions and it would sort of work. But it just wasn't where I wanted it to be for my iPad, it was kind of a hack to make it work for you as well. If you're on Windows, craft is not a solution for you because it doesn't exist here on Linux, it doesn't exist. Obsidian exists across all those platforms. Rome also exist across all those platforms. There are lots of good options. They're for you no matter what system you are and you just need to look at where you mostly do your work, what your plans are long-term, and what that data portability out of your software of choice, his. Now, ultimately, I'm going to encourage you to choose two pieces of software. And that's in part to avoid collectors fallacy, that you can just collect more content and think that you're increasing your knowledge. So this is why when I start off with a web resource or a video that I want to really go to later. It starts off in Devin think as a link to Devin think or as a web archive and Devin think. And then only once I've sorted that data out of Devin thing when I read the article, then it actually moves into craft or my notes on it. Move into craft. A link to the web Bureau with a link to the Devin thing ID. And I'll actually show you this later. And I'll provide the shortcut for those of you that are on iPad. But if you're not, you'll actually see the format that I used, that you can use as well. Now as far as your inbox goes, say I use Devin think, and this is the spot where you put all of your initial ideas. You're fleeting notes where he put your literature notes as well. Where you can put in other people's thoughts in there so that you can process them. A really good role for inboxes is that you need to have as few as possible while still having functionality. I kind of end up with two actually. My first is Devin think holds all the primary web sources, the primary video sources. And the second for just a random idea is the actual in Box folder in craft where I can just start a new idea, write it down, and then later on I can come back and sort that into something later into a durable note, into a project note into something else like and dig into it later. Now there are really few requirements for your second thing, for your durable notes archive. It needs to create backlinks so that you can link two notes together. It needs to set text or any other type of file as you like. I like to be able to draw graphs sometimes in craft, that's just something that I can do there. But if you're going to draw like a handwritten graph to kind of move data over out of a book, then you may not need that feature. And that's really it. It needs to accept text and any other bits of data that you want. Now there's a few good options out there. For your notes, there's really good options like Rome research, there's obsidian, there's the archive of crafts, tidally Roman standard notes. I've actually even seen some people that do a really good Devin things that'll cast in setup for primary sources I like Devin think and keep it which are both Mac OS only. But Evernote and one node are also really good options for storing primary sources. So that later on you can sort them into your own settle casted nodes. And the next video we're gonna go over and actually start looking at my craft setup and looking at how I do tags, how i do links, so that you can see some basic organization for your own system. 7. Basic Zettelkasten Organization: In this video, we're going to actually jump into my craft setup. So you can see how I do organization, why a tag things the way I do, just so that you can do something similar. Now the first thing we're in here is my inbox. So something I have, which will be a project note is office speakers. I actually want to have some office speakers for my desk. I'm not loving just the Mac mini speakers. So I started a project note right here for that. I took in a podcast and they talk about office speaker, so I can go back to that at a later point. What I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna put that into what I guess Project note or a research dashboard is what I would call them. So another thing I have here is moon lander links. These are interesting links for the moon lander keyboard. And what I'm actually going to do in here is I want to tag this as moon lander. So in craft, you use at, and I say moon lander. And I can already see that I have a moon lander note in there. And other systems you would use double square brackets. You saw 12 and it turns into an at symbol. And then you would actually link it out to your note. And what that lets me do is, I can now go back in here. I can now click on this. It'll take me to the main moon lander note. And so I can say like and also you can go in here and say lander links. And so now this is linked together so that I know if I come in here, if I wanna find anything about the moon lander, which is the keyboard, you Here I come into this one research note and I have my moon letter. I can say what a key caps do I need. Here's the different profiles that work for my keyboard. Maybe another 30 other uniform styles, but I'm not actually sure about that. And I've linked out to a Guide to key caps here because they're just different profiles if you didn't know that. Now another thing to do, let's just jump straight into a note here I have probably into a book to read actually is probably better. So look at the working life. So what you see in here is I actually have to read this was an old tag. Now, kraft doesn't currently support tags, although you wouldn't see them in obsidian still. But I wouldn't actually use them outside of maybe for status. So in obsidian, I can say that this is a book to read. And I could also say this is a book to read about working or employment or overwork. Instead here, because I've actually used the at link notation to create links. So that means if I went into the employment note, you can see I've got that there. I can actually say this employment note links to reset, which is a book I've read, squeezed working life and slack economics. So I can see the other books that already link to this later. So what we may find later is that this actually becomes a research dashboard or a project note if I want to take more unemployment. And that's what the tags using the notation or the double brackets, depending on the system you use. That's why I think this is a better way to tag your notes. Now if you notice, I have in here, I have all my tags go into a tag folder just as a way of organization, right? I can look at hormone therapy or attitude drugs. I can look at Authors. This is an author here. Julie Holland, right? She did the one book. Would you bitches. And I kind of go back through all of these things, right? If you say Harry runs, This is a watch review, chorus, capex running, watch review. And then I can go back through here and see what else have I read or what else have I looked at on this specific tag, right. Decision fatigue still only has one. It's a fairly new tag to somebody older ones, maybe I have some more chase the summit. Still one. Women, probably more on women, three links. So this is why we can't sleep. She's still there. And Moody bitches. So these are three books that I know. And if I expand, it actually shows me what this is or where I can find this and I can even go straight to it by clicking that or see a preview of it and say this is a book. And I could even go in here and I could say, why this book doesn't link, because it links to itself. And go into this one. She's still there and I can say what links to this? This is why we can't sleep. And I can go straight to that link. And I could say at the bottom, I know that these are, we're all those links are coming from two books. There's a books that were cited in the book, why we can't sleep. Women's new mid-life crisis, which is the book I'm currently reading. Now they said dealing with projects is a little different. So sports watch, let's look at this one because I have a whole bunch in here already. So I have some basic questions that I want to answer. Doesn't do structured workouts. That means does it kick my watch actually tell me, hey, run faster for this distance and here's the pace you should set. Support multi sport. I run, I cycle, I ski, I do a bit of mountaineering, although that's usually running, scrambling and plus or Bluetooth, low energy, that's the way it connects with other sensors. Does it do sleep metrics or recovery metrics? And I've listed some of the watches that I think are in here that r could be good for me, right? So looking at the Aerospace too, I started looking at that because it's a good price. But as I did more reviews and you see actually went through a bunch of reviews here. I realized that it doesn't cover skiing. And more importantly, if I'm looking at for my wife, doesn't cover skating. She's a figure skater, a coach, and she tracks on her work that's there. So it doesn't deal with that at all. And then I have the chorus apex, which is one of their nicer watches and seeing it does support skiing, I know that. And so I started to go through somebody videos here and just taking notes on the Mao's ego, right? Chorus, apex GPS watch after 1500 miles. I literally watched the video. I took some notes as I went and I will walk you through that process in a later video. So the whole goal of this at the end is to say, this watch is clearly the winner for my wife. This watch is clear to that winner for me because they may be different. I do a lot more cycling that she does. So there might be a Garmin watch and probably not either of these. In fact, one of their garment Phoenix watches probably might be for me because then I would also work really well with the byte computer and combine into a good ecosystem for me that my wife just doesn't need because she doesn't really cycle as much as I do. One of the most important things your notes is to really look in and see where things work together, where they connect and where they don't connect. So this is a note or a video that I read from, not just bikes, it's YouTube channel. And so looking at why people don't bike in winter. And I know that this relates to cycling, to infrastructure at car culture. And I actually know this relates to community. Exist already have this is the starting as a project note community with a book referenced and some other things as well. So I know that this will relate to community. So later on, I will actually come back to this and look at winter cycling and the relation to how you build a strong community because those do relate. As a quick overview for you. Basically, the less walkability there isn't a city, the more we worry about our children because there's no adults around, just kind of seeing what children are doing. And then we actually start clamping down on the freedom that children have. And we don't see our neighbors as much as a real short. Look at it. I have some more books and you can see over my shoulder, strong towns is back there and bowling alone as part of this big white one. So those will all relate together eventually. But again, finding these connections, seeing what else is in car culture and making sure that you continue to make these connections. And we'll have a whole video just on making connections in your system. And overall that's it. You can see I've got some folders on the side. I collect all the books to read on their own folder. I put my course notes in its own folder. I have my ideas. These are just new video ideas coming up, new writing ideas coming up, right? Electric cars aren't. The solution is one because electric car is still a car. And I just take a little bit unknown illness and I start putting in different research, right already, reviewed this article or looked at it, the afterlife of electric vehicles and how their batteries maintain long-term. And also have outdoor just kinda general housing for any of my outdoor fitness stuff. These are all the tags. These are for apps that I'm looking at. General notes, any notes on code uses my book lists. So I actually keep books in order from the Bookman. Books on parenting books, on writing books on race, books on transgender stuff, and books on universal income as a demo one just I use for demo purposes for videos. Here's all my literature notes, all the books that I actually have, including my reading dashboard. And this is just the books that I have read this year so far with the date I finished them so that I can keep track of it and then link back to all the different notes that I took on those clients, any client nodes I have to use craft. This one just comes with it. And the final one is just the imported notes that I imported at the first time. And that's really an overview. I think that when you are looking at how to work with your notes, I think that tagging with craft the app notation or in other systems with the double square bracket makes it easier to build your long-term database because you'll be pulling those notes and graduate and up to project note that some point as you find more links between your different notes. And the next video, we are going to look at what it's like to take online notes with. Here's a stochastic system. 8. Taking Notes for an Online Article: In this video, I'm going to walk you through how I use Kraft and shortcuts and Devin think to take notes on online resources. So to get started, let's find a good article in Devin think Yes, I'm gonna do this live. So far, done this one. Here. I'm just gonna move it off. And they've already done it. Move. And it's gonna go just into blanket research because you'll see that I can actually pull it back out of Devin thing really easily later. So let's do this one instead. This is accept recycling lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles. And you're going to read through the abstract and see if it's worth going into later. But the first thing I'm gonna do is actually get a boat for shortcuts. And I'm gonna go down to my craft, acetyl casts and shortcut. And I'm going to clean it up slightly because it just pulls all the links that are there, which I don't quite want. And then I'm gonna have to go in here and I'm gonna pull up Devin think, and just with my finger, pull it off to the side. So now I've got them open side-by-side. Now I already know this is tagged as electric vehicles. And I also need to say that this is electric vehicles because it's gonna go something into this article as well. And then I'm going to take some notes on it as I read. So right now in the article talks here about the recycling process and reuse. So I'm actually going to tag this as recycling so that later on, I can say find all the articles they have about recycling in any fashion. Again, we're talking about waste management. I just want to tag that, which is why I use the notation in craps. Later on I'll have a waste management tag. Alright, so now I've gone through this and got it what I want out of it. So I'll just move Devin thing off to the side. And the next step in my process is to go through interest rate. Kind of summarize the notes here, so I don't have to read through all my notes to really get back into the article. So I'm gonna say first, the sales of electric vehicles are lots. And actually that means we have lots of batteries. Right next up, recycling and reuse can do some of the burden, but it's not great and reuse is actually preferable. And then I'm gonna say robotic assembly as part of the last point I want to keep on this. Okay, so now I've got my summary here and I know that I want to take this later on in my electric vehicles one, so I'll look at electric cars aren't solution. And I'm just gonna put a, another point in here, and I'm gonna link it back to your recycling lithium ion batteries. And done that. And now I have to deal with the notes, the tags I got generated out of here. So on Mac or on an iPad, I can just two finger swipe. Then I can select all of these. These are all tags. I'm actually going to move them and drop them into my tags and go back to my inbox. And this is one of my articles, so I'm gonna put that into my notes because this is a notes on my long-term idea and then my electric or my guess ideas is where my electric cars aren't the solution. This is an idea that probably will actually become a project note, a deep breath, get into it. But for now it's just an idea. As I find more resources that linked to it, I will continue to add them in here. And that's really all I do. Any new resource that I find on the web goes first into Devin think. And then from there I go through and I sort it and I can actually go back into Devin things. I've done this one now and I'll move it off to research. And now that one is there. And if I go back into craft, you can actually see I'm done here, but actually click on the X Devon thing, thing and it will open up the exact article endeavor for me so I can find my original source later on if I want to. Now you can do this. You don't need craft, you don't need to even think to make this work. You can do this in obsidian, you can do this in her own research. All you really need is at the top, the name of the article. You need the URL to the original source. If there is a link to the actual file on your computer, on your device, then you can use that. That's my Devin think link or an x callback URL, which is really the MAC and iPad thing. And then the tags, right? My tags link off to electric vehicles. And then again, electric cars aren't the solution. And then I took my notes and I created a summary of them in my own words. And that's kinda the important part for this whole article, is this right here. Electric vehicle sales, my summary is the important part. So when I come back to this article, I can look at that specifically and say, am I going to use any points out of this? If I am that I may actually go back to the original source and just reference them to make sure that they're in the next video. We're gonna go over how I get videos into my settled cast and setup. 9. Getting Videos into Your Zettelkasten: In this video, I'm gonna go over how I take YouTube videos and turn them into notes. And y keeps on them long-term and why I don't keep other ones. To start with. We're looking at this video called How writing online may be a millionaire by Ali Abd-al. And so what I would do first, I'm gonna assume, although I haven't watched the video yet, so I don't know this, but this video I want to keep long-term. And so I'm going to open up Downey with a link in Firefox here. And it will automatically download the video for me. And I'm actually minimized it. And see it's downloading right here for me, it's already downloaded and processed and everything. So if you're not on Mac OS because it is a MacOS thing which I get through set up. Then you could use a tool called YouTube DL, which is command line. That's a tool that I'm familiar with. There are other options out there, although they all look slightly shady to me. So YouTube VL that you could use in your command line in your terminal to download videos from YouTube and just do whatever you want with them. And it's a very powerful tool. I used to use it as well. But Downy is just kind of easier to use as a graphical interface. So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a new note in craft. I would actually normally do this on my iPad instead of on my Mac, but I want to show you Downey. So I'm going to title it. It's going to be writing air. Now I'm gonna do my, He's that'll cast them prefix. It is the fifth. So its fifth of February, it's 2021 and it is 929, so nine to nine. And do that mainly because if I have another article or video in the future that has the same title, I now have differentiated between the two. The author is Ali Abd-al. Until I can track who it goes with. The link is right here. Bags i'll do after summering all that. And then I'm gonna say Notes as well. So now I have the basic format that I'm going to use. And what I really only need to do now is to watch the video and take notes as I go. Completely changed my life and how we can do the same for you and friends. Welcome back to the channel if you knew him on. And Apollyon is also based in Cambridge and run funny is good by making lumps, putting myself out there and started my personal blog. So since basically my first year of university is 16, so basically 5-years ago, I've just come from this book, show you what I also can fail. And this book single-handedly changed my life. And it's actually the book that I most gifted out of any other book I've ever read. I keep multiple copies of this book in the house because often if I'm talking to people and to come over and they asked me for advice about anything at all. It's always around on like, oh, I'm skeptical myself out there. I just give them this book. It's really show is really three. I'm going to pause an excited checked right here to see if I had show your work and I don't. So I'm actually going to come in here and make a tag for that. I'm going to say at that, show your work and I'm gonna give it a time code again. So it is the fifth write 050 to 2021 and its 09, 33. So I'll come back and deal with that after. But I just wanted to know that this book has been mentioned by him in the video. So that later on when I look at this book or again, I could find, say, all the different times it's been mentioned throughout the resources I've consumed. So you can see I tag something here again with the at symbol because the curse of knowledge is likely going to be something that I will refer to a few other times. And that way this may turn in to a project note eventually. So I wanted to make sure I tag that here because he talked about it. Don't even put the time code here at about 453, just so that I know that that's about where he talked about it. And that's probably a little earlier than that actually. So we'll call it for 14 or 15 seconds before that, because I may want to refer to this later and then I can find it in this video really easily. So that's the video so far where he's at. And I'm just going to close this because I don't really need it right now. And I want to make that a little bigger. And then open it in a new window because gonna do some organization now. So how writing online has made me a millionaire. So this is about open it up in to Windows. Doesn't let me do that actually. So it does let me do that on my iPad, which is nora normally. So he has talked about what tags I already have. You can see I have some here and I'll show you those when we get down lower in the notes as well. But he talked about writing self-promotion. He talked about I think those are the main things. So I'll summarize it now. So you might say that he started in talking about how his starting his blog basically gave them confidence to eventually start a YouTube channel which changed his fight antigenic trajectory. So not to deal with the other things. So I actually want to come in here and I need to create a new folder if they don't have this right now. So I'll call it to summarize. This is just a status folder for stuff that I need to summarize. I want to summarize the butterfly effect. I want to summarize idea I've learned to teach. I want to summarize serendipity vehicle and want to summarize the curse of knowledge. Once I've done that, those would all go into tags later. This is a book. So I actually want to come in and go to this and look up Amazon. Show your work, which I want to find by Austin crayon. And so I'll put the link in here. Or is hostile. Cleon's tags are creativity, self-promotion, generosity, and pulling that out of some of these here. Sharing, that's actually interesting. So this is how you get, because you get in your notes, I look at sharing, actually want to tag it as sharing. But this book likely relates to sharing as the point. So first I'm gonna create sharing. And I'm, I'm going to create a new title just because I saw that and I'll put a bullet point in here. Sharing is the point. So when I come to the sharing of the point note later or when it come to show your work, I'll already have this idea kind of queued up in my mind later to look at. So show your work was in there. And you know, he also talked about serendipity via fills Erin. And he talked about somebody who had talked about it. Serendipity vehicle. Let's see what I find. So on serendipity vehicles which had actually already moved off, there's a podcast here. So let's look that up. Serendipity vehicle and research. Just a link there so they have it for later, and that's the name of the person that he referenced as well. So again, when I come back to summarize this later, when we come back to look at it, I already have researched pulled into it. And yeah, you can see that process happening. So show your work, is now going to go into a books to read this again, just status. Sharing will be a tag. There's nothing to sharing is going to be tag. Generosity is going to be a tag. Austin Cleon as a tag. Self-promotion is also a tag. And now that's really it. I've got all my notes on it that I think I want to take its close this. So I took notes, I did my summary. You can see here in multiple spots I tag like the curse of knowledge, I tagged the spotlight effect, I tag serendipity vehicle. And you also saw me add some research to it. Learn to teach is another idea where you learn something, you do it yourself and then you teach it. And teaching it really simplifies the information because you have to have clarity on your thoughts. The Butterfly Effect is something that I want to summarize later. So it's in that status folder of to summarize, which had to create because I had been doing that with a tag before in obsidian and now kraft doesn't support tags that way, so I have to create a folder for it and how to actually go back through some of my notes to find those other things. And so I'm done this article on YouTube. This was a good one. So I will actually also open up Devin thing. And I will find iCloud Drive inbox and then I have how writing online and made me a millionaire and like and drop it in here. And now I can actually go in and copy my item link. I'll come back over here. Now my link, there's my Devin think link as well. Now though is officially done and I can move it all off into into my notes. And that's how I deal with online videos from downloading them to archiving them for later and also put this away into research. So that I just have all these things for later. In the next video, I'm gonna walk you through again craft and some of my literature notes and how I walked through some of that process to take notes and to connect them to other things. 10. Getting Books Into Your Zettelkasten: So what we have here is a book that I've almost finished, but not quite finished. It's called Why We can't sleep Women's new mid-life crisis. And once I'm done the book and I'll do part of it now I would actually go through and read kind of each note and start looking for other things that relate to it. And so I already know because I didn't take a look that this is one of the notes that I want. So I would come in here and I would create new content and actually want to give it a title. So I don't love that title. When I would actually put in the title again here. So it's called Why We can't sleep. The notes, page 54, but I'll again I'll put it in again because I'd rather just haven't doubled. And now my cup with a good title for it. So the good title should be. And then I'm gonna also give it my time code, 500 to 2021. And the time is currently ten o'clock, so 1000 00. Now, I know there's a few things that relate to this. So this is related to related to some of those. I'll documents business as a proxy for productivity. So let's look at that. Busy DNS as a proxy for productivity. So you open the node over here, plug-in just taking a note about why I think this relates. Because again, from this other book over here from deep work, right? And I can even actually link that because a link wasn't made originally. Backspace and go deep work because I know what's in there. This is page 64. So now I've actually linked this back to my, my second reading of Deep Work notes, and this might have been my first reading. So knowing that we proxy busy-ness for productivity. So in why we can't sleep, it says that it should be playing havoc career, raise a family without becoming a serial killer. Let women are told they could have it all. So they should have it all and then they feel they must have at all. And this also relates into gaze a business as a proxy for productivity. So in Newport's book, he talked about it being we show we're busy and that if we're just busy, if we're running around and answering emails, we must be doing a good job because we don't have any clear markers of what's happening. So I just wonder if these two ideas meshed together in any way. And then I want to tag it as well. So I'll give it some tags here. So this goes to overwork. It goes to productivity. It goes to a woman. Phi goes to feminism as well because feminism really helped raise what women are able to do feminism career. So, and then another one we saw actually just that I brought that up when I searched career. So it will go overwork. Meaningful careers, Trump overwork. So let's look that up again. Ok, meaningful careers. So in barking up the wrong tree, they say that in general, working too much is bad for you, but when your career has meaning it's good. So if you're looking for that second mountains again, another book that's linked off two hours a day. You put it into words, your strength less stress and worry, and anger and pain report. So now, when you're not sure that you have a meaning though, right? Then it is overwork. And just taking some more notes for this whole thing, I would actually go back through all of it and say, what, like, how does this relate into my other notes? Where, what can I do with it and how do I relate this and connect us to other things? In our next video, we're going to cover some of the other ways that I've used to connect ideas. Some of the questions I ask myself when I once, maybe twice a week, go through the ideas that I come up with recently that I've seen recently that I've read consumed process may inboxes and really start to dig in to how do I connect these things? How do I make them into my web of knowledge? 11. The Practice of Connecting Ideas: In this video, we're going to cover some of the questions I ask myself when I'm trying to connect new notes, new ideas into the rest of my system. Because like I've said numerous times already, the most important part of your entire Zell Kastner workflow is connecting notes into your other ideas, into your previous reading, into everything else so that you create a big web of knowledge. One of the first questions I ask is how does the idea fit into what I already know? You saw this when I did some of my note-taking demo's already my literature notes when I really started searching like here's a keyword for this one sentence and does this keyword at any other notes that relate to it? Are there any other ideas that relate here? And then I put a bullet point and explain why I think these notes relate. The second question is, can this idea be explained by something else? So maybe I think I have an explanation already, but is there some other explanation that I might not see that maybe contradicts it, that maybe will change idea, flip it on its head. And what would that be? How would I even find that out? That's a good question. If you don't know, you'd say, Well, maybe and you might guess a little bit and take a note on why it might be wrong or why you might need to change your idea here. Another one is how can this idea help explain anything else that's already in my system and you saw me do that when I related a few notes together again, specifically in my literature notes for why we can't sleep. You saw me connect two or three notes together and continue to build that network. So that later on when I start to interrogate my system, when I start, maybe you're looking at say, midlife crisis, something like that. I come into three or four notes and, or four or five notes and start creating a project note that helps connect all of these things together. Maybe one of the biggest questions is what other ideas contradict this one? So if I say, if I like the idea, if I say no. And even we did some of that in the literature knows where it said. We looked at the one that said, meaningful work is good. And it helps, helps you work through overwork of your work is meaningful. But it also said in why we can't sleep that like you're just overworked. You're trying to have everything because you could possibly have everything. So you must, must have everything. And so just those ideas are in a bit of tension together. Because while you can say it's meaningful to have kids, it's just also so much work. It's tiring, it's picking up socks. It's tell why why you would licking the posts. That's when my daughter did yesterday, looked all the fence posts. Why you're looking the posts, why you licking the water off the ground in the parking lot. And that in the midst of that, you think as meaningful as, you know, parenting can be, as raising kids can be. It's just a grind every day. So seeing those two ideas intersect. And again, even going with my example, if my child licking posts just today, just interrogating those two together and saying like, do they really go against each other or do they not? I even found this when I looked at the dip and range recently on my youtube channel where I said, these two books, I started these two books do not line up. One is telling you to do different things and when I started pushing them together and kind of writing out interrogating idea and I did a video on this, then I really figured out that they're not probably talking about something different. What they're talking about is ranges. And in the different basic was as you get good and then you lose your, you're not making your four momentum. You're still working hard, but you're not making a lot of progress, then it goes up and range. It's probably in that middle bit when you're getting your diverse experiences. And then you're building on them and suddenly you get that career you didn't really know at the end of the day. Another good question is, why am I attracted to this idea? Does this idea fall into what's called confirmation bias? Doesn't confirm other ideas that I have. Am I attracted to it because it confirms these ideas? If that's the only reason why am I making note of this? Because it's very easy to fall into confirmation bias to continue to find resources that we believe that we want to keep following because it says we're right. And that is probably the weakest thing you can do as you build your that'll cast and system is just focus on those without really interrogating them. Again, with some of the other questions we've already said, Would this idea differ or would this outcome defer my thoughts differ if I came from a different race background, social class, gender, how would this idea relate or look to people from these other areas? And you may not know. You literally may have no idea to start, which is, okay. I'm clearly a white guy. And there's a lot of stuff that I just do not understand because I'm a white guy, right? I don't worry about walking down the street like my wife does. But then reading and visible Women helped give me some perspective to look at what women would deal with in the design of transit systems, in how we light our cities in a bunch of other things that make it less safe for them. And in part because, in part in mostly because men design it and they do not do perspective-taking very well. And that'll actually if I just do a bad job. But I didn't have these ideas ready at hand until I had read some other books and realized that I didn't have a good idea of what First Nations people of color, what women had to deal with because it's not my experience, but by reading and then looking at some of these ideas as I've come back to them later with new knowledge, I look at it and say, well, that might not be true or it's not true in the circumstances for these people, for this gender, for this social class because of this other learning I've done. And finally, a good one is, are there any moral applications for this idea? How is this going to change what I'm gonna do today? How will I apply it today to make my life better? Now there's probably one really big final step in how you really use yours that'll cast and system and it is sharing. You must share your system. You must share some of the ideas in there and it doesn't have to be online, doesn't have to be in videos or in blogs or anything like that. But you need to share it somehow. You need to talk with your friends or no, I talk to my friends about transit in city design regularly even though I don't write a lot about it. But I think about it as a mostly cyclist, as a one car family. I told my children know that round in a trailer regularly. So I think about trends that I think about the spacing of the Baldrige that stopped vehicles from coming into bike lanes, but also prevent a trailer from getting out very easily without having to cross into the road, right? I think about this and I message the city sometimes is they take a photo look, the trailer doesn't fit. You're forcing me to go into traffic and RCTs actually very good. They've, you know, oh, we had moved it over three inches and today that that's perfect. Now there's plenty of space for this, but sharing these ideas, continuing to interrogate them, writing about them for yourself, better for other people, doing video work, stuff like that on YouTube can really help you build these ideas. In our last video, we're just going to kind of do a quick recap of everything that's going on. You can head off and builders that'll custom system. 12. Course Summary: Welcome to the final video in the getInt starting with settle cast and course. So over the course of this course, we've covered what does this that'll cast and just tried to explain what it was for you. What makes a good note? Remember the things that make a good note are that it's in your own words and that you're connecting to other things. That's the real core of this, that you connect to other stuff. And it's your own words, not just the regurgitated thoughts about the people. We talked about choosing your tools. Make sure that the tool you choose has good data portability and that there is a system for you to practically own the data where you can actually see the files. Make sure it's on the platforms that you use. Mostly, like I've said a few times, I'm on Mac and iPad, so I use Craft, It's great system for that. If you're not though, then obsidian is great. Rom research is a great tool as well. And then we talked to a basic settle casts, an organization I've showed you in. You actually saw it when I did my literature notes. Why I use tags with a double square bracket in many systems or the notation and craft and how I can use that later on to build a big project note for really summarizing the data and turning it into something that I would share with other people. Then we walk through the three different ways that I just get notes into my settle cast and system. And in many ways they're the same. They're very similar. But watch getting you to actually see what I do and see the process by which I go, we'll help you just build your system well, and again, you don't have to use all of my system, use the parts of my system that worked for you and skip the parts that don't work for you. And finally, I walked you through some of the ways that you can interrogate your ideas, ask yourself questions to really make good connections between your shadow casting and then share it. And that's the final thing that I want to emphasize again just before we go, that sharing your ideas is one of the most important things so that you can continue to learn from them, that you can really have to interrogate your own thoughts and make sure that you understand them. And you're not just regurgitating someone else's ideas because it's very easy to do that. And by sharing your force to really dig into your own understandings that you can teach it to someone else. Thanks very much for doing the course. You can find me online at Curtis Mikael dot ca. You can find me on YouTube at Curtis Mikhail. And I'd love to have you join. More of my videos are sign up for my email list at Curtis Mikhail dot ca, slash subscribe.