Transcription
Welcome back to my channel. My name is Morgan, and on this channel, I talk about reading, writing, knowledge management, and productivity more generally.
I've told you a bit about my philosophy of note-taking and knowledge management. I've shown you how to use the tools that I use in knowledge management. I've even ruminated on the joy of the note-taking process on this channel. But I haven't actually shown you, like, what I do in a note-taking session. How, on, like, a day-to-day basis, am I making notes, building connections, and forming ideas within my knowledge management system?
If you clicked on this video, maybe you already know that I use the Zettelkasten technique of knowledge management. And that Zettelkasten is a very broad methodology that could be enacted in a variety of ways, probably a different way depending on the different person that is using it. So, in this video, I'm actually going to show you how I use the Zettelkasten. I've recorded a 30-minute note-taking session in my life. It's literally just a note-taking session that I did not for demonstration, just for myself. So, I'm really going to bring you into my use of the Zettelkasten, specifically in the software Obsidian, today.
I would love to hear whether this kind of video is useful to you. So let me know in the comments if you like this sort of thing and how I could do it differently next time so that it provides more value to you. Because I know you're not going to necessarily be interested in what I'm taking notes about, and I want to make sure how I'm taking notes is as accessible as possible to you. So let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts or ideas or questions or comments or whatever you want to say to me. Or maybe you don't care about this sort of thing at all, and then please feel free to just comment that and let me know so that I know for next time. I won't do it again.
A couple things you should know before I dive right into the note-taking session. First of all, I have sped up the session quite a bit because a lot of my note-taking is just staring at the screen or staring at a text on my desk, and I know you don't want to just see me do that. And then I also want to give you some context for what I am taking notes about. Because how you use the Zettelkasten technique is going to depend on what you're taking notes about. So, I am a PhD candidate in theater and performance studies. And largely, what I am note-taking about these days is research for my PhD. I'm writing my PhD on the relationships between the human and the non-human in the act of juggling. And then I hope to extrapolate what is happening in juggling to the larger relationships between humanity and non-humanity. And obviously, how I take notes is going to be very different than someone who's doing, say, a PhD in biology, or a fiction writer, or a grandmaster in chess. Regardless, I hope my workflow for my PhD note-taking might help you develop your note-taking process for whatever you happen to do. Even if it's just to say, "Well, I'm not doing that."
If you don't have time for the whole video, you can just skip to the end of the video. I've included timestamps below where I summarize basically what I typically do in a note-taking session. That said, I have commentated my own note-taking session. So if you want every little insight and every little thought that goes through my head while I'm taking notes, then you might want to watch the full thing.
So here it is. My Obsidian vault. Here we are in my Obsidian vault, and we're specifically in a note called "Cool and Frost 2010 New Materialisms." And that is my source note for this book, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics" by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. It's edited by, at least, it's an anthology of different texts within the new materialist ideology. And this is just one of the types of places that I might start out when I start a note-taking session is within the source note for a specific text. And when I start from that place, I will start by just copy and pasting out the notes and the quotes that I have taken while reading a text. In this case, it's a physical book, and so I literally would have the book open in front of me and be writing out the quotes that seemed relevant to me or interesting to me. But in other cases, I might have been highlighting things on Zotero, and I'll literally just copy and paste all of the Zotero stuff into my Obsidian. And that, of course, makes things a bit easier. But regardless, this is one place where I start when I start taking notes within the source note for a book, copying out quotes until I see something that really piques my interest. And then I might actually move to a new note and create an idea. And that's what I'm about to do in this video.
Here, what I'm doing here is just seeing if I already have a note about this concept of materiality that I just took a note about. Oftentimes, I will make a note about an individual word or concept so that I can be backlinking to that concept so that I can get a nice little local graph view about that concept when I need some note about the idea of materiality. But I don't necessarily know exactly which note or which idea around materiality I'm looking for. And that way, I can get inspired. In this case, it looks like I have not made a note about materiality yet. And so I'm actually going to go create that now. And I'm copy and pasting that text into this note because it seems directly relevant. I'm linking back to the Coole and Frost text. And then I'm sort of like wrapping it in my own words. And I did have something about anti-materiality, which is this note here. "Materialist consumption is anti-materiality." Inside this note is literally just a quote. Sometimes I will just toss a quote into a note without actually expanding on it or turning it into my own words or my own ideas, which I know I told you not to do previously in a video. But in some cases, I just, I want to get the ideas out. I want to section off the notes. The idea, like, is the note title. And then I just toss a quote in there so that I can reference it later. I can flesh it out later. But at least I have the idea in there to expand upon.
In this case, I actually am going to expand upon this note. So I'm glad that it was there and that this Jane Bennett quote was inside of it. Because now this idea from Coole and Frost's book is actually super relevant. And the idea that I put in the main materiality note, the quote that I pulled from Coole and Frost, is actually a more specific idea around materiality. It's not like necessarily the definition of materiality itself. And so I wanted to make a specific note for that idea, which is directly linked to Bennett's idea about materialism being anti-materiality. So I invented that note inside of that note that was already existing from a long time ago from Bennett's book. And now I'm creating that note: "Materiality is not simply the property of being material." So that's kind of the idea that is extending from this quote from Coole and Frost. And I actually sort of like alter that quote to say that Coole and Frost used these specific adjectives to define materiality, which is: it's an excess, force, vitality, relationality, difference that renders matter active, etc. So that's kind of like the, I, one of the ideas within this note. It's more than just being material. It's also all of these adjectives that they describe. And then I'm going to write in my own words to express what this means to me or how I'm understanding this idea. I'm linking to "New Materialism" because that is the field within which this idea is coming from. So I want to make sure I'm linking to the note that encapsulates everything to do with the field of new materialism. And I'm writing: "New materialism scholars might consider all material to have materiality, but they're not equivalent." If I'm holding something, so I'm like relating it directly to my own experience. And then I'm, you know, writing what I think or what I would experience around this concept.
And now I've gone all the way back to the original source note. So after I go on this little tangent of making notes, I always come back to, like, my landing page because I've got this book in front of me and I'm taking notes about it. So even though what I'm doing is like writing quotes into this one big source text, oftentimes I'm going on tangents, I'm realizing things, and I need to make those notes immediately before they leave my head. So I'll go on this little trail. I'll start from the word materiality, and then I'll realize that actually there's an idea around materiality. And then I'll realize I already have a note that is an idea kind of around materiality. So I want to link that. And that's the point where, like, you're making a new note, and then you want to make sure that that note has thick connections leading to and from it to make sure that you can find it again. So every time I put a quote in, I might get an idea, and then I have to write that idea down. But if I'm writing that idea down, I need to make sure that it's heavily linked to other ideas within the text and other ideas I'm having because I made that note.
So the note that I just took reminded me a lot of something I had read in Robin Wall Kimmerer's book "Braiding Sweetgrass," which I also have right here. Voila. So I was just seeking through to see what notes I had already taken from this text. And I have to do a lot more note-taking and connecting for this text, I know. But, um, it was enough for me to start interconnecting the ideas about new materialism to Robin Wall Kimmerer's text. And also another note that comes from Jane Bennett's text, "Vibrant Matter." So this is something that I will also do. Is when I have a quote, maybe I don't have a new idea that comes along with that quote. But maybe this quote is actually directly relevant to a previous idea, as it is in this case. This note, "Imagining matter is dead desensitizes us to how consumption destroys the Earth," was kind of like exactly what they were saying in Coole and Frost's text. So I wanted to pull that quote and put it into this existing note. And that's like really helpful. I, I can start to actually see how scholarship interconnects and how these scholars are responding to each other and to the ideas that are emerging.
In this case, I actually now I'm taking that quote out of this text, out of this note, because it has a more specific idea that is directly relevant to Bennett's idea. So I've got now the link in Bennett to where I'm putting Coole and Frost's idea, which is like slightly different. And I'm actually linking between both of them. So I've linked to the note based on the Bennett quote, and within the Bennett note, I'm linking to the Coole and Frost-inspired note. And this one is getting heavily linked up. So this is a brand new note: "Imagining non-humans as more lively reduces abuse against them," which is kind of the opposite of the previous note that I was just taking. And I'm linking to other ideas as well about performativity, which I had just taken notes on, like, a couple days prior to this note-taking session. And so it was fresh in my mind. And that's also why it's great to be consistently taking notes because you are going to, like, have ideas more fresh in your mind so that you can better and deeper interconnect between them.
And now we've got the Coole and Frost quote itself. And then I'm writing "in other words," and the other words are going to be my words. Um, I'm writing how I'm understanding this quote. I'm linking to the ideas of materiality because obviously we're still thinking within that world in new materialism because again, this book is about new materialism. All of these ideas are relevant to that field. So I want to make sure they are connected. And now here's where Kimmerer is coming in. So you remember I went on that little rabbit hole finding some Robin Wall Kimmerer concepts. Now I'm actually linking to those concepts within that note because they were relevant. I just needed to find what that note was called. So I was able to link it. And that, that happens a lot where I know that I have a note about this, and I don't know what the note is called or what the exact idea is, I can't remember. But I do remember the book that the idea was in. So I can go to the source note for that book, look at the backlinks, and see all of the notes where I've referenced that book, and then I can, you know, just find the correct note from a list.
Here's another thing that I will often do in my note-taking sessions, which is create an alias for an existing note. So rather than creating a note called "Mastery of the Modern Human," I wanted to say the words "Mastery of the Modern Human," but I already had a note about that idea. The phrasing of the note title didn't really match the sentence I was writing. So I actually just went into the note, created an alias that was the correct phrasing that I needed to use in this sentence. And now I'm able to link to that note within the flow of my sentence.
And now we're back inside of my main note to take some more quotes down. Always coming back to the original source note for the text I'm working with. Sometimes within the source note itself, I will also wrap the quotes within my own words if it makes the quote make more sense to how I'm understanding it. And sometimes that will also create links within that text because I know that eventually all of these ideas are going to be pulled out and created into their own notes. So if I can help future Morgan by already putting them a bit in my own words, by already linking to some notes I know will be relevant, then, you know, why not?
And finally, sometimes some of the quotes that I'm putting into this source note, I need to add a bit extra information to help me remember what I was thinking. Or maybe I had an idea about it, but I don't have the idea fleshed out enough to actually create a new note. So underneath the quote, I'll just put a bullet point and then write my own words and my own ideas about that quote so that later, a future Morgan can go create a new note about those ideas when she has synthesized them a bit better and understands what she's thinking a bit better, or maybe has some more quotes from the book that are going to help her understand that idea she had a bit better.
And that was about half an hour's worth of work in my Obsidian developing my Zettelkasten. Before I finish, though, I want to sort of summarize for you exactly what I do when I am taking notes. So in this case, I was going in with the specific goal of making notes on a text. And when I do that, I start within a source note. And I name the source note after the author's last name, the year it was published, and the title of the text. And then I just start copying out all of the quotes that I found and the notes that I had while reading the text. Either I'll copy and paste that from something like Zotero, or I will literally type it in because it's a physical text that I'm reading. And then when something piques my interest from these, either after I've copy-pasted all of my quotes in, or as I am typing them out, I will actually link within that source note to a new idea that I'm having. And so right inside of this source text, this source note, I will write out the idea as the title of a new note. And then I will hop into that new idea note, and I will put in the quote that I had the idea based on. I'll include my notes and develop the idea in my own words. And then I will always link back to the source so I know where to find this idea in the future. I will also start connecting to other ideas that are within my Zettelkasten.
Alternatively, sometimes a quote I'm putting into my system already relates to an idea that is existing already in my Zettelkasten. And so I'll hop into this existing ideas note. I've got my writing already in there. I just need to add in the new quote and the new notes. And then, of course, link back to the source and link to anything else that is already existing that I haven't already linked to within this note. And that's the basic process: putting in the ideas from the text, and then as I get new ideas or as I synthesize this information, creating new notes that are ideas I've had while reading this text. And ideally, at the end of the day, I'll have a source note that has no actual writing in it. It's just links to notes where the writing is. So if I have a thorough note or note about an idea from the text, I'll just erase the writing I had done in the source text because I don't need that cluttering up the area. I've got it all in separate little notes, little atomic notes of single ideas.
So, copy out the quotes and notes. Turn those quotes and notes into smaller ideas that are their own notes. Link to those within the source note. And link to the source note within the new notes, as well as any existing content that is already in my Zettelkasten that I can link to within that idea. And that's basically what I do if I'm starting from a text like a book or an essay or thing within my Zettelkasten.
Let me know in the comments below if this was helpful to you and if you have any notes on how I could do it differently in the future to give you the most value. For what I'm doing, it's very easy for me to just record a note-taking session and then tell you what I'm doing because it's what I'm doing every day. So if it's useful, let me know. Let me know how to do it better, differently, whatever you need, and I'll give it a go. So nice to see you guys, and I'll see you in another video soon.