👑️ My 2021 Comprehensive Obsidian Zettelkasten Workflow 👑️ [Copious Timestamps] 🏷️

welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and today is the long long awaited debut of my updated comprehensive obsidian and zettlecostin workflow that's probably the most popular video on my channel for my 2020 version and a lot of things have changed since then and between each of these videos or even every individual video i'm constantly updating changing and improving my workflow so what i did back then is a far cry from what i'm doing right now so it's been really necessary to have a new updated video on all of my system what is in this system and what goes on this isn't going to cover all of the granular details simply because i don't want to make this run on for days so it's going to be a long video it's going to be a lot of time stamps and you'll probably see the chapter markers in the video but it's finally here i finally got it started i came over and you know finally got over my executive dysfunction and i'm finally making some progress on this so hopefully you enjoy this video because it took me like eight months to finally get up to working on it thanks adhd so hopefully you'll enjoy this video stay [Music] tuned all right so end to end what does my system look like from how i process inputs to how i manage tasks how do i keep up with all the things that are going on all the notes that are in various stages of processing what applications do i use how do i use them how do they all tie in together and how do i leverage each of their benefits and minimize you know their shortcomings to maximize how productive and how useful what i'm doing is all of that is going to be covered in this video all the things and all the applications that i use in my workflow how i use them to a varying level of uh detail but we're going to cover all of this today and we're going to start off with some very important points like what is a pkm and productivity system the best ways to support the channel are if you're going to do an ongoing basis github sponsors because they take no fees followed by patreon if you're going to do like a one-time thing buy me a coffee paypal are just fine and if you just want to support me without any money involved the best thing you can do is like comment subscribe share the video and that's it keep in mind that even though i've made this video it's finally up here you're finally seeing it that even as early as the day after this video is posted i will probably be changing something this entire system and even your system should be fluid you should not focus on the newest shiniest tool or use every single add-on plug-in extension that exists you need to focus on what will actually help you get the job done produce value move you closer to your goal not just what is popular what is everyone else using what's the latest shiny thing no focus on the results your goal what actually moves you forward and what actually helps you get work done these are topics of focus that i need to pay attention to because i have to deal with adhd and trying to do things even things i want to do so i need to focus on what actually helps me get things done and not just what is interesting and shiny because that is how i will just spin in circles and not actually achieve anything meaningful or productive in my time so keep those in mind as we work through this video is that any of these things can change at any point in time and they're probably not gonna be putting out another one of these videos for a very long time because look how long it took me to do this one so with that let's get started all right breaking down the system what is a pkm system pkm personal knowledge management now a lot of what i'm going to say is a lot of the things that are very popular going around in this space right now or are just my personal opinions and i'm going to share my screen and just basically show you the script for this video because honestly trying to film this normally is already becoming too much of a hassle for how my brain works and it's just easier for me to follow this outline and it's even easier if i don't have the context switch between clips to show you and talk and whatever so you know you're gonna get a little bit of the behind the scenes look because i honestly just don't have the energy the mental will power or the ability to just do this like an ordinary youtuber so here's my screen now on the right hand side is my question what is the pkm system on the left is actually the script for this video with collapse stuff but what is a pkm system a lot of i spent a lot of time thinking about this what actually goes into a personal knowledge management system and the first thing you need to identify is what is your end goal what is the product or the desired state that you want by doing this otherwise why would you do this just for fun maybe but then fun is the end product the goal so you need to know what you actually are trying to get out of this so that you have a direction or a goal post to identify and walk towards and what goes into that is like do you want a formal document like a thesis or a paper do you want creative output like writing or dnd world building fiction writing video scripts uh ways of organizing your content do you just want a tool for thought so studying and thinking and using srs space repetition software tools to help you remember and learn information or do you just want to get more value out of your note escape just typical rote memorization passive learning of just listening to lecturers or reading notes or reading textbooks and not actually getting any value any meat out of it do you want to just get rid of useless forgotten notes and actually have things that you can return to over time that you can curate and create to be very valuable quote-unquote evergreen notes lots of buzzwords in this space these days and you just want to escape the typical trope of i'm in class and i'm just writing down exactly what said verbatim transcription that's not helpful for learning and honestly you could just use a tape recorder so what is your desired end goal what do you want to get out of this system now once we've identified our goal we need to be able to capture ideas and items that float through our heads as they come because items like or like ideas like emotions are just visitors they are transient they pass through and if you want to make sure you can grab them you need to have the ability to quickly grab them put them in a trusted location and return to them when you have the time the context switch that you're in that zone to do it and just the ability to think and process something that might require a level of depth of thought that you don't have in the present moment that's definitely something that i need a lot of so quick capture capture your notes capture through your daily notes capture through task management software what are the ways that we can quickly efficiently capture ideas thoughts notes and just maybe even writing prompts for yourself like thinking about i'm driving and oh what about why do we have wheels how did the wheel form what was the thought process behind inventing the wheel what was the first wheel just the information about that researching that might actually spur on additional thoughts completely out of the blue that are completely unrelated to wheels but something sparked your interest and you wanted to capture that and not lose that train of thought we need to have a quick capture system to capture all these ideas and this is also tying in with gtd the get things done productivity method where you quick capture your tasks in a trusted location refer back to it process organize and execute on those tasks a lot of these types of systems productivity personal knowledge management knowledge organization all of these things tie in with each other so their benefits and their drawbacks can either synergistically improve each other or shore up the weaknesses of each other a lot of these types of methods and tools are all over this all over the process all over the system and all over the place that you can use what works best wherever you might want to apply it for your workflow but also where it might actually cover the deficit of some other tool that you're using so pay close attention to what you need out of these applications how they work how they work for you what you want to use them for and how you might be able to use them better i switched the screen sides because i figure i can never remember to actually increase the font size for the mobile viewers so here we go and is on the side where my face is not next thing status tracking all right we have our goal we have a way to quickly grab things and process them later in a trusted location that we can always refer back to so we take up no cognitive load no mental space it's always known to be in that drop point so we can have all that now once we begin to process things how do we actually track the status i just captured this it's brand new it's in the quote-unquote inbox or have i done some work on this have i gathered some preliminary ideas have i made a few basic bi-directional links and connections between this and other ideas that i want to flesh out or have i spent some time fleshing this out and just really hasn't found a solid home in my system yet all of these different stages of processing are stages of tracking this piece of knowledge this information through your system and wherever it goes ultimately however you treat your system whether it be atomic notes evergreen notes a pure zettle costing system however you want to structure this and organize it is really up to you up to your unique desired goal output process workflow how you think and do things but there's going to be a status component to things there always is so how are you going to track status how are you going to deal with it so because you don't want to lose things in the shuffle because if we're capturing everything all our notes thousands of notes in the single location using some of these tools methods and approaches like zettlecostin a top level freeform pool of notes connected through links not folders then you're gonna have to have a way of tracking when things are done done or when they need to be looked at for their first go-around another very important facet after tracking the status of items is search how do you find what you're looking for when all you have is a faint idea of something because again another point of these systems is to have all of your information and knowledge in a single place but we're not using folders it's a free form pile of information so how do you find what you want to find in that mess because it's a mess if it's not in folders right wrong there are several methods of looking through sifting filtering and finding what you're looking for in your system and because everything we're doing in markdown and in obsidian is based on basically plain text using plain text it makes it incredibly easy to find what you're looking for through standard tools that have been around for decades that are used by programmers people who work with computers and are not always quite so intimidating we have textual searches and there are several things in here that i think i don't know i'm not going to claim that i popularized them in some of this space but i like to say that a lot of it caught on a lot more when i started bringing some light and attention to it but simple things like a special symbol taxonomy taxonomy being just a method of classification and assignment of classifications two items in a collection basically if all of my book notes begin with a special symbol then that is a piece of my taxonomy i have a breakdown of this symbol is equal to that that one to this that one to this and that way i can easily categorize and organize things this special symbol taxonomy is a homegrown organization system that doesn't really play nice on windows but when you add a special symbol or character to the beginning of a note it will help with search later on and we're going to go through all of this late in in live examples later on too but special symbol taxonomy is something that i like to use and it's not as robust as several other options that are out there such as the library of congress classification system or something that i've gotten from my friend bree watson is a very much more robust method of granular classification when you really need to capture a world of knowledge such as all writings by female norwegian authors in the 1860s on the subject of cats like there is a classification system that can be that granular and detailed it's just overkill for me for what i'm doing this special taxonomy symbol system and what i use it for works beautifully for me and others i think have also found success with it so that is one method using regular expressions regular expressions are basically pattern matching looking for every instance of a singular word that is followed by another word or one maybe you want to find all notes that actually have a real email address in them or find all telephone numbers that match one of three different telephone number patterns all of those types of pattern matching searches are possible through regular expressions regular expressions are incredibly powerful methods of searching through text which is why they are incredibly useful and prevalent on command line systems that deal with text such as bash on linux or mac and are a very valuable tool in your tool chain so do check those out also we just have plain searches in obsidian there's a bunch of boolean logic where the path can be in this folder where the title of the note starts with this or add a regular expression in there but basically saying it has to meet this this and this criteria or all of these criterias and any way of structuring those searches through a little bit more of an english type of question answering is native to obsidian but there's a lot of other types of applications and tools that utilize that but just plain searches with boolean logic boolean being true or false it meets the condition or it doesn't and then also relevant dates in the title i use daily notes with an iso 8601 date iso 8601 is a date standard that says year month day and is separated by dashes and i do that specifically for everything because that will always correctly chronologically sort your files it'll sort them by year then by month then by day a lot of people like to say that well that doesn't sort to the most you know what you're actually working on top of mind or what most recently edited or whatever there's been a lot of different excuses and different ways about talking about this but honestly i will always prefer iso 8601 and i've done this for years because i can easily just change the filter or sort or whatever on any file anything looks at files to sort by title and now everything from the present day is at the top of my list or the very bottom and i'm looking at the oldest thing i will always use that and i use this in my titles of my notes especially with my special symbol taxonomy it can say you know a curly brace for a book and then the date iso 8601 of when i processed that book that means in my file system my book notes are also chronologically sorted because it's first the symbol that groups them together in the search pane but then also the dates in the titles after the symbol is the next piece of sorting so it sorts by symbol then by date then by title alphabetically i'm not reading tons of books per day so it's not really an issue of concern but this plays in later with some of my searches and my queries and how structure a timeline of how i how and what i process because of how these things work with these dates a date is a very important piece of metadata to add to your notes and your system because it drastically aids in search through a temporal component playing off a little bit more on some of these other ideas we also have association traversal association traversal is and probably the most value-added part of this type this application obsidian or these tools that actually use bi-directional wiki links an association traversal is as simple as a soft link like a tag which says regardless of context anything tagged with this tag is now in your results pane i want to search for this tag here's everything that's been tagged with that whereas hard links are actually more poignant they're actually more important and more robust of a link because you're saying directly i don't want this to just be okay everything tagged with this tag no i want to say this note and only the notes that are directly referenced by it so that way you're only looking at the things that you personally directly chose to link to your per your current note that is a hard link something intentional something direct whereas a soft link is like an umbrella a hard link is like a pointer finger saying that one and then lastly we have filters so let's just say you don't have a hard link but you only have soft links get through your tags and you want to add filters where tag equals this and this and this so it has to have all three of these tags or has these two tags and has an outgoing link to this particular note let's say i'm looking for is a specific note on adhd so i know it's connected to my adhd mock so i can say with an outgoing link to adhd but it has these two tags and it has to have all three of those criteria and and and to match to give me my note result back that is the idea of a filter or a saved search in obsidian that you can capture everything you want about a particular topic idea or whatever your filter is save it put it into your starred searches and now you have a filter to start off with your association traversal you have a particular subset of notes you want to flesh out more you want to quickly search for them find them and then deal more with that particular subset of knowledge in your knowledge base save it as a filter and now you can traverse all of those notes associations and build more next we have the simple topic of what type of structure do you want in your personal knowledge management system maybe your approach and what you're doing or how your brain works how you think about things and organize does still call for folders instead of the freeform network graph map of content type of approach well here's what we need to think about is your structure more rigid or less rigid if it's very rigid you want to have folders you want to categorize organize and folder and sort and filter and file things away that is a rigid organization system and from more rigid to less rigid of a system we have several different options here and these are some things that i found and some things that i've liked used and used myself johnny decimal very very useful and interesting system it uses a minimum and a maximum i use the maximum of like two folder levels of depth so you're not dealing with seven levels of nested folders everything needs to be organized in a particular way but with a level of depth that doesn't lose any of your information again the caveat to folders are there's going to be times and issues where you need to ask yourself the question this note belongs in two places do i make a copy and put it into both folders do i create a brand new folder or do i just pick one of those folders and put it in there that is always my biggest connection with folders is that i might have something that needs to be put into two places at once and i don't know what to do with it what if it belongs in more than two places i need to be able to flex flexibly put it into every separate area of context that it belongs without having to make copies bloating up my notes and my system and i just needed an easier way to manage this without having to think about where does this get filed where does it go i don't want to have to think about that and with adhd ida can't handle that extra level of processing and cognitive load of just thinking where do i file this throw it onto the pile have a flexible system to categorize tag organize and network graph relationships around it so that i don't have to deal with a rigid classification taxonomy and filing system for my notes i can just toss it on the pile with its metadata as it is and easily come back to it with status tracking search for it with textual searches and regular expressions or as we're gonna get through in this video there are several approaches but that doesn't mean that you need to just throw out every single approach you have in anything that you do with folders it simply means that there are some better applications of folders where they might be more applicable and others where there might not be maybe you need a dedicated folder system for organizing your research papers in something like zotero maybe maybe not we'll get into that but i really like johnnydecimal i still need to import my personal system over but my work machine for at work and i use johnnydecimal it's a really great system for keeping everything organized in minimal folders and in the end you can always just do a quick bar uh search like in windows you can just hit the window key and start typing and you might find the name of your file or you can set up a bunch of like script stuff like i have in powershell to traverse your johnnydecimal folder network but in any case johnnydecimal is a pretty rigid system with great rules to keep you in line and organized without lots of bloated folders and nested folders less rigid is just a freeform folder system where basically you decide whatever you want to do with your folders and you go nuts you do whatever you want to do there's no rules it's the wild wild west this is where i was before and i don't like living there i like johnnydecimal for when i need that rigidity of a system but i prefer freeform and maps of content when it comes to you know dealing with this type of idea connection and just freeform knowledge now this doesn't get into my technical notes which i actually have in logs sec and i might touch on that later too but this is purely zettlecost in my ideas things i think about and literature notes from reading and writing and watching videos listening to podcasts etc after these rigid ideas we have these more free form ideas maps of content and just pure free form maps of content are when you have a simple and i've heard it referred to as a higher order note instead of just saying these are all of my notes on adhd it would be here is a note called adhd and on that note is a link to some of the most uh prominent and well connected notes on adhd i don't need to connect every single note to my adhd mock map of content mock i don't need to connect every single note to that because then it just gets to be link below on my graph what i need is jumping off points i want to look at a particular topic so on my index my home note my single point of entry into my system here's all the major topics and areas that you cover talk about write about care about here's adhd oh let's go there okay we're on adhd now what do i want to see do i just want to see a sea of links and get lost in that no i want to look at that and say okay you're on the topic of adhd now it's a prominent topic you care a lot about there's a lot of information you have on it here are the major concepts of adhd and the notes about those concepts linked into this mock oh i want to look at that concept and then maybe that is the level where everything related to that concept connects here but as your system grows and evolves maybe you need a little bit more of a tendril growing system where it branches out kind of like a binary tree you know these tendrils split split split and they continue to fork and branch out as your ideas grow so not every note needs to be connected to every other note or not every note needs to be connected to your index or your mock for that topic and lastly freeform is really just again wild wild west but on the polar end of the of the spectrum there's no mocks there's no folders it's just a literal pile and all you do is just search or maybe use tags or textual searches regular expressions filters whatever but if you don't use mocks or connections and it's just free form it can work but ice personally would see a lot of growing pains in the future when you're trying to continue to grow this system and it gets harder and harder to find things without a little bit of organization and you need to have that organization or that approach that can also scale with you and that's the whole point of a lot of my systems and setups is that i want something that is simple enough but not too simple but they can continue to grow and expand as my system and my note volume does i don't want to have to do a lot of major refactoring and changing over time i simply want to have enough to help me cut through the noise get to what i care about but as i continue to grow and evolve and add to this system it will flexibly grow and evolve with me with minimal change and overhead next we have temporal components i've already talked a little bit about the metadata and association not association traversal but textual searches with dates and titles and things but the temporal components are something like on this day on my daily note i have a link to all of the inputs that i processed on this day i listened to these two podcasts watched these three videos and started these notes from those inputs having that temporal component of your constant timeline through your daily notes or basically just a journal even or you just write about what you're actually learning about i actually use mine as a personal journal but it doubles as this so you can actually have this temporal component of your daily notes to add timelines through your links so on this day i've i processed this input but it's connected to that daily note because that's the day that i processed it and maybe that might help you jump between okay well i was reading this book and oh i processed this book on that day let's go to that day oh also on that day i processed this podcast you know actually that actually has a note that i can connect to this book and that and that books note oh something is simple you know simple example but that type of association and random random traversal through these associations and links through these temporal components can come in handy it also shows progression through material so let's just say you broke up your book a very massive volume into set like 10 sections and over the course of a few months and on certain daily notes you tag when you completed one of those volumes well that through the you know links on these actual sub pages or even just a main page when you continually add notes to it will show you through daily notes a timeline of how you process this or each of those sections of that book could be its own note with its own temporal component in the title of when you finish that section and now you have that to add to your timeline again just showing through progression through material and kind of like a log of your journey to knowledge it's also a very low way to begin working in the system a low friction way of beginning to work because like rome research or log sec when it just drops you into these daily notes you're just in the daily note what do i write i don't know write whatever today i read this book then you go onto that page it's the same same approach obsidian just has a little bit of a few other paradigms that make it not quite as rigid as those other outliner applications you don't have to start only with daily notes but it is a great way to actually break into this system with maybe a couple writing prompts and begin from there and like i said great entry point into this type of system so now that we've identified goals ways of searching filtering associating and traversing our content our notes when you start thinking about what are the types of inputs and things that i'm going to be putting into this system i'm going to be reading writing watching listening and learning from different sources how do i capture that information in a useful poignant and actually processed way i don't want to just be a transcriber and write down whatever the professor says i need to actually be thinking about what was the main point of that lecture what did that make me think about how do i take that lecture and put that into a specific type of note this is when we think of types of inputs and the tools to work with them we need the ability to discover to acquire to store these inputs processing them marking them up archiving them after we're finished with them and using them for reference later all of these different types of uses of these inputs should have you know you should have an idea or an approach for what you want to do with each of them like for instance if i'm going to do a research paper discovery you got connected papers citation gecko research rabbit acquisition you have you know open papers you can just download or if you are of the type who believes that research could should be completely open there's resources like scihub or libgen z if you want to store them you can put them into zotero or you could put them into a cloud hosting service to process and markup you could put them in through the uh pdf reader highlights which is my preferred one on mac so you can put that through there and mark it up there or when zotero finishes their shiny new beta you can use their homegrown pdf editor and markup system with highlights there's some good work going on there archival just tag it with something in zotero to make sure that you know you've processed it if you're even going to archive or reference if it's in zotero and it's a research paper you got you got your bibliography entries but if you want to reference that in notes then you could simply reference uh your paper as a note and all the details and notes on that paper in obsidian well the paper actually lives in zotero but inside of obsidian you actually have all of your notes for the paper and anything connected to it is referencing that paper and maybe you might even give the note for that paper an alias which is the site key for that paper it could be let's just say brian jenks brian 2021 would be the site key for this video you cite this video then you could easily just have a note for it with a very long verbose title you know the date component special symbol but the alias for the note is simply that site key jenks brian 2021 and now you can easily reference that paper video note input idea whatever in any other note by using the typical citation key you might use in other tools editors or applications these are the types of thoughts you should be having about what you're putting into this system so once we got our notes in here maybe we need some help actually thinking about what about this what do i need to say about this how do i flesh it out what do i connect it to and this is where something called thought facilitators or maybe it's just me calling it this but this is where these might come in and i only only have one right now because i honestly just don't have a lot of trouble with this at the moment but i made a video about abc lists about just listing out a to z all the letters and simply saying when you think of this note what are some words that come to mind put them on that abc list if you're thinking ah this note apple the word apple comes to mind put it next to the a and just continue with that build out your abc list and think about what notes might connect to some of those words and try to build those associations for where you might actually connect and settle this note in to your web network or your evergreen notes once we've created these notes we've done some of these thought facilitating activities and exercises to really flesh out these notes the content within them connected them to where they should be living they are evergreen how do we continue to curate this large knowledge base you have thousands and thousands of notes how do you begin to even think about curating this large system well libraries have been doing large data set curation for millennia because they have so much knowledge to manage they have robust systems in place but what do we have for these little tiny personal knowledge bases maybe the library's classification system is just way too much overhead for what you're actually trying to do well for curation here's some thoughts and ideas picking a topic and following it and following its rhizome and when i say rhizome i mean like the root system of a plant and i have a note that's actually referenced here where the benefit of an add-a-law analog zettle-costan card system you know the actual traditional zettle cost on index cards the benefit of it is being laid out on a desk it's flat it's all laid out it's spread it's top level everything's at the same level you can organize and move these cards put them next to each other in stacks or however you want to organize them to think about how you're going to connect those thoughts together and the benefit of this analog system is that it's all there it's all present it's all top of mind top level well that's where i really like this sliding panes plug-in in obsidian and basically we all used to call it andy mode from andy matushak whose website has this for his notes and it's a really great way of laying everything out flat digitally while still having the benefits of a digital system which really is just way powerful search tagging and yeah quick capture and just search it's just amazing with what we can do with digital tools we also have for curation following its rhizome yes just following whatever is connected to this note to just you know walk your system just walk randomly see where you go fix things up as you walk along it's kind of like walking a forest trail and oh there's a giant log here in the way let me just kick that over the edge there and now the trail is clear it's kind of like curating like that you're just taking a walk through your system clean things up as you walk along and as you see them you know if you see a job that needs doing it's yours we also have random local graph traversal much the same instead of you know systematically following a rhizome basically every note connected to this topic you know here's my adhd mock i'm going to go through every single subject area then after each of those subject areas i'm going to go through every single note connected to that and just follow the entire domain of information and curate that way we have local graph traversal i'm only going to look at things that are connected directly to this graph or i'm just going to walk this graph go jump there oh what's connected to that one jump there jump jump jump jump and find your way to somewhere random and just curate as you go along there's also and one of my favorite approaches is there are several folders in my obsidian vault that i don't want to have brought up in a random search like i don't care about curating my daily notes because those aren't meant to be curated they're just my journal my snapshot so i ignore several different folders i ignore several different other things and basically i say i only want to see the things i want to curate and i have that as a saved search in obsidian when i click that search it only shows results that i actually would care to curate then using the smart random or open random note from search uh whatever the obsidian plugin is for this it opens up random notes from your search results so using those two pieces of um functionality in tandem i then only open up random notes from a search of notes that i actually care to open and curate and that is my personal and preferred method of curation is i just randomly hop through things or if i just happen to be on something i'll fix it or tune it up there's also uh the ability to set intervals to review things using the review plugin let's just say you use the review plugin and you want to make sure i want to review this in two months to see what i think about it in that time you can use the review plug-in and now two months from now on your daily notice it'll have a link to this current note you want to review and say oh hey you know two months ago you said you wanted to look at this here's a link go look at it and that's a great way of following up on some of these things too in a more structured manner where you say i really want to make sure i look at this in a month or two and you can do that review plugin with natural language processing dates nlp dates i think are the other two uh plugins you might need to do that type of functionality great approach as well but now we basically walk through the actual work and structure and architecture of this type of information system we've got goals we've got approaches we've got tools we've got notes they're connected they're curated and we're good to go what comes after this well now that you have the actual meat and potatoes it functions it actually produces it has you know it actually is meeting your goals moving you forward it serves its purpose now we can get a little bit more into like you know the fun things such as aesthetics first and foremost the tool should work it should be doing work it should produce work it should also inspire work and not just mire you in endless configuration this is why you need to avoid just falling into the trap of testing out every single shiny new tool it's always ask your question of okay this does this cool new feature but have i really been missing this feature or would adding this new level of complexity to what i'm doing really also increase the value more so than the detriment of all this added complexity and overhead if the answer is no then don't use it there's i there are over 220 obsidian plugins as of right now and i might at most have 30 installed and of those i probably on a daily basis actively use probably less than half of them if not even less than that and most of them are just for like changing how some things look that's about it you don't want to over complicate your system because then you're just going to get mired in oh i need to make this work with this and this plug-in and i need to have this work this way and i want to use that tool and is it helping you get things done is it actually helping you produce work is it moving you closer to your goal or is it just a bunch of shiny tools don't get lost in just using the shiny toys do things that actually help you achieve your goals now once you have some work getting done maybe something will actually be fun interesting useful and you want to actually implement it because you think it would be fun or you want to try it out totally okay but don't get lost in those configurations a tool should be nice to use and and inviting so like ultimately you don't want to be using something ugly that is just like uh well here we go i got to use this thing again even though this is this is what i use but it doesn't look that great i you want it to look nice enough that you want to use it like you want to use your tools personally though something like notion uh looks a little too shiny for me like it's too nice looking i get too lost in configuration there's too much nice pretty stuff going on sometimes just raw plain text albeit with some colors some highlighting some special stuff added in this is enough for me that is both nice and pleasant but not overly distracting like something like notion would be for me and also you can make it your own by customizing your css theme if you have experience with css and if you don't it's honestly not that difficult just do some google searching and you'll figure out some basic css in no time honestly i don't do web development and i only know a little bit of css but i just know enough to really you know ask the right questions on google or to tweak what i have and that's why i have my personal theme here that i give away in my newsletter if you're interested in signing up for my newsletter where i talk about stuff like this or just what's going on with me and what i'm looking at or doing these days you can sign up to that in the description below but yeah your program should be inviting and you should want to use it but that shouldn't be the top priority and after aesthetics maybe your system's been working for a while you've got a great workflow it's going it's going it's going life is good but maybe there are some boring parts maybe there's some things you just don't want to have to do manually over and over again this is where automation comes in handy now what can be automated and what should and should not be automated these are the important questions you also need to ask yourself there are some things that probably could be automated better but should they really and i can't really give a specific example because there's not really too much automation of what i do in my system but maybe there might be something that you set up or maybe there's something you might want to do like let's say you have a dashboard built through mermaid the mermaid charts in obsidian that you write with a script and you put into your computer running on cron like there's these types of things that you can do and i've actually done some of these things but is that something that really is necessary or do you need to do that do you need to have that automated that way or can you just use a plugin like obsidian tracker and have a chart that's automatically built for you based on some quick searches these are the questions you need to ask what is going on in this tool chain what needs to be automated what shouldn't be automated how should it be automated how can i reduce dependencies potential issues problems how can i make this robust and flexible of a system these are all the questions you need to ask yourself and don't get lost and think you need to do all of this before you even begin no think mvp minimum viable product you need to just begin start taking notes get something started get some traction and then iterate over time constantly add a little bit more a little bit more robustness a little bit more of a guided approach and build it over time you don't need to be like me and stress out and think you need to do it all before you really start to begin no you can start off with a measured approach and slowly iterate over time kind of like the agile software method just iterate over time but get the minimum viable product out there so you can just get started get your notes in the system and on the same level of aesthetics and automation something also a little bit extra that might be useful to you but not critical would be something like a smart lens which would be a way of looking into your vault to gather insights or useful information like using mac smart folders or basically what notes have i edited today and you could honestly just do that with a data view query a dataview plugin search query but i've also noticed some issues where if you do large bulk assignment and replacements or modify lots of files with command line utilities like said then it kind of resets a lot of the modified time metadata on your files so it kind of doesn't play nice with data view so something like a mac smart folder might be really useful and i could do that and say hey show me a smart folder here's mine today's work and it shows me all of the notes that i've edited in my obsidian vault and here we go today last seven days previous 30 april etc and these are a great way of getting an insight into what you've done in your vault today bam but you also have some other options you have network graphs with filters so you have your obsidian graph this large network graph that you want to look at so let's open up a um a new node over here and wants to say graph so we can open up our graph view and here we go we have our large graph this is a very useful tool for having a smart lens view into your system but it's too busy how do i find what i care about that's when you add some some filtered searches and sorts and whatever so let's just say i want to look for um only my new seedling notes there we go and it'll filter and it'll show me all these little seedlings and everything they're connected to this tag these other notes other tags uncreated things so here we go this is this this whole system and i can remove some of this noise here i don't want orphans or attachments and i want tags and i can see some of these seedling notes and what they're attached to and right there network graph views with a filter is a smart lens into your work but also just higher order filtering by doing something like mocks so let's just say i want to look for a tag and this is going to be my mock tag which is a map so this will only show me my mocks and it will show me only the mocks connected to each other it shows me some other stuff that's unconnected here or does the notes don't exist yet but this little network here shows me a web of mocks connected together this is kind of like a meta view of my knowledge base because it's only showing me the major topic areas and how those topic areas connect to each other it's kind of like an overlay of the giant pool but these are also members of that giant pool and this is another great way of getting a more intelligent view into your system just by you know the existing functionality no extra tools no code needed just right here through some basic organization tags assemble taxonomy and however you want to structure and organize your work and knowledge so we've gone through all of that and all of that was basically saying what is a pkm system personal knowledge management what is a pkm system that's like my idea about this whole space that i talk about on youtube that there are several other people in this whole space that is my idea of what a pkm system is and what it comprises several aspects of it not so much the like the esoteric woo-woo theory of knowledge curation but like the actual practical approach using technology what are some of the critical things as a human that i need to do i need to make sure i can not have to hold this all in my head i want to have it go to a trusted place i want to have it organized in several ways to make it easy to search sort filter and find what i'm looking for i want to make sure i know the status of things so i know what needs to be processed what has been processed i want to have an easy way of curating the system it's so large so just random jumping through and finding things and random interests and tangent follow the pathway and fix as i go along is really the best way that i'm gonna have to curate this system so setting up all these tools approaches and things to facilitate these patterns of work and philosophy on this system is what i'm focused on i care less about why do we take notes why do we connect things together the why is easy you have your own personal reasons why do i want to do this personally i like it i find it fun i want to connect my ideas i need things out of my head because i can't hold anything up here with adhd but also i want to have something where i can say oh i had that idea i remember that here's the link to my note about it and you can traverse that to all the other links and all the other thoughts in my head in my public brain but also it has helped me as an active practice and space repetition do things like somebody starts telling me you know there is that concept that humans can only be friends with you know a small number of people and you know i forget what the number is and i'm like that's dunbar's number it's about 150 people only 150 people you can have close intimate relationships with and that's called dunbar's number how do i remember that because i have a note about it and that is why i have a system that's my y and it could be different for you you could have a several different y's but the whole why do we do this theoretical approach to this is not what i'm concerned about i'm concerned with helping people and just honestly nerding out about okay we have the why how where do i begin how do i begin and what do i do i'm concerned more with those things than the why because the why you have your why otherwise you wouldn't be watching this video you wouldn't be here and you wouldn't be searching on youtube for resources on obsidian if you didn't care about why so here we are and that is what i think about the pkm system so with all of that context and background established let's go through my system and what i have set up that ticks all those boxes and talks about all of those talking points all right kicking off what are my goals for zettle coston and this whole system i wanted creative output i used it for youtube scripts medium article generation these two have kind of been falling away from just because i don't really seem to get a lot of productive work done on this inside of my zettle costume as much so who knows if i'll get more value out of this but these were two of the original creative outputs one day i might be able to and have the ability to write a research paper so all the research papers and research i've done so far i want to have something to start with in that process so that's another one of my creative outlet type goals but i also wanted an external framework for thought because i have to deal with adhd there's a lot of issues with not really long-term memory but just memory get remembering to think of my ideas also those quick capture quick capture is a essential part of my workflow for me because i have thoughts that are obviously transient thoughts like everybody else but i can't hold anything like that in memory very easily and that's why like if i have to remember something or i remember three things and i have to walk across my house to go write them down because i'm not gonna forget them if i don't write them down the entire time just to not forget them from me walking from one end of my house to the other i have to literally like chant them over and over again you know buy milk brush your teeth fold the laundry buy milk brush your teeth fold the laundry whole time until i walk over there pen paper in hand and write it down or something so having an external framework for thought to do quick capture grab those ideas that just float through my head hey voice assistant in five minutes remind me of prompt and that helps me quickly add you know those little ideas to something that i can come back to later a trusted source a trusted location inbox thing to grab those ideas notes and thoughts and flesh them out and actually keep them because your brain is meant to have ideas not to hold on to them another reference i believe from gtd but i needed that to have more to keep more of my ideas to actually flesh them out connect them to each other and feel like i have something growing like my knowledge is growing because i can't hold all that stuff in my head that's why you know leverage software in these tools because now i have this tool to collect capture and connect all of my ideas and my information and thoughts together and it forms a robust knowledgeable framework and tool for thought that is also a companion that i can refer back to as needed for anything that i need because it's all there and it's basically just an externalization of my ideas thoughts knowledge memory and ideas and it's beautiful and that is my one of my main purposes for having it another one is i have a lot of notes on statistics so i've actually separated out my as you can see the next bullet uh my technical content the log second i'll get into that next but statistics i have notes on statistics so i can say oh yes this is how you calculate the standard deviation and this is what a two a two-tailed t-test is and where i might do that in this and it's that's not an idea that's just actual like technical you know factual information why would you put that in here i would use that so that way whenever i'm taking notes on research papers and i can see their methods that they went through and whatever statistical tests they ran whatever sample size they had the standard distributor standard deviation the distribution i can look at their results in those papers tag the statistical methods used that way i can quickly jump back and forth between knowledge and notes and ideas about the paper but also the actual factual content actual factual content of their paper and who knows maybe you might actually catch something like oh wait that's not valid because of xyz reason but you can actually tag your statistical notes and actually figure out why but also because let's say they're using an advanced statistical concept that advanced concept links to all of its component parts that are you know easier and more minut and granular components of statistics like i don't need to know this whole big formula when i just oh yeah the standard distribu standard deviation on a normal distribution you grab the mean and the median and you do this calculation and i can have four notes to like the distribution the standard deviation mean and median and all those notes explain to me in detail what those things are to then build up my conceptual understanding and this abstraction in my head of okay those four pieces form this big concept and that's what i'm caring about so then i can take that big concept applied to the paper and it helps you build this idea and understanding of what you're reading but in the frame of statistics and formal research so that's why i actually have my statistics notes in my zettocauston and why they're likely going to stay there i have migrated a lot not all yet still working on it of my technical notes to logsec because it is now my dev vlog and i did this because i wanted that mutual exclusivity of systems i did not want my technical notes mixing with my zettacosta notes because my technical notes are literally just here are some really useful snippets of python code as it relates to the pandas library like that has nothing to do with my zettle costing anymore or anything that i'm doing in this system so i wanted to be mutually exclusive and because logsec is working on this like web app type of interface it works with github it can be private it deals with markdown it's basically the same thing but it is that rigid outliner but with a lot of extra roam research functionality i made a great video on it recently about how i'm using it and i'm not really like going overboard with setting up a comprehensive really robust complex workflow it's really just this is what works for me there's a couple little things in here that makes it you know quality of life is really great but i mostly just use it as like a giant to-do system of you know technical uh content to research and to review flesh out my my technical notes for myself and kind of just keep a devlog of hey on this day i learned about you know kubernetes and a little bit about this docker command and uh oh yeah we can do aliases this way in bash and that type of stuff it's not even anything more than that so that's why i've actually moved my technical content out of obsidian for the most part and into log sec and why that's actually my preferred platform for that i also was a little bit using my uh zettocauston for language learning i've kind of moved away from this just because the overhead is not really being conducive to uh you know really facilitating a higher level of learning like the the value provided by doing uh the language learning in obsidian through like aliases on the notes and um because i'm learning norwegian so making the note names and their aliases uh to play and do this but it's just too much overhead it's not really worth it for me when i have all these other great apps and tools and approaches there's a great youtuber i watch lindy boat who's an amazing polyglot and i've learned enough about how to learn about language that i have another enough tools that this is some of this is still left in my system but i don't really use it for that anymore but i do actually use it for ancestry a little bit now this is actually a subvault within my current vault along with my crm both of these are not actually part of my zettle costume they're just in the same vault and i honestly should move them out i just haven't because i've been lazy so i'm probably going to do that during this video but i do have my whole and my family ancestry uh network graph connection information system all that interconnect stuff i'm building my own homegrown solution to that and i'm doing it in obsidian because of all the plugins and utility features like dataview and templater and the network graph and how to use all these tools but as applied to family ancestry so i have a couple i think i have one video on that another one's coming soon but these are all things i've done in here but my main goals that i'm using this application and zettle costing for now is honestly just these three right here mostly one day i might write papers i want to have all my knowledge ideas thoughts and literature notes collected i have an external framework for thought because i need to have all this stuff externalized around my brain not held within it and statistics for those research papers to facilitate understanding of the complex methods to validate research those are really my main goals and some other like auxiliary functions and functionality that i have used this system for but these are the main things that really drive my usage of this application why i like to use it and what i would use it for so a lot of my approach really is built around these three main things so next we have quick capture in my system now we're going to finally start seeing some other applications and some nice things going on the screens i know you've just been listening to me talk for a while now unless you're jumping around the time with the timestamps but for quick capture i actually use todoist and i love todoist and i've tried a couple other things and it's just it does enough to really be awesome but it's not too busy to really distract me from what i'm supposed to be using it for which is gtd get things done so i really like to do this for this because it makes it easy to just press a three key combo on my screen right now so bam and now here is a task bar i can add a new task i can say do the thing but it also has nlp or natural language processing if i type anything that looks like a date it's going to recognize it and actually schedule it for me so i can say tomorrow hell i could even just say tom and it's going to think tomorrow because nlp really useful i can do tag so i can do at obsidian and i can actually give it a tag or i can also put it into a project so i can say hash i'm going to say to do there we go to do now it's in a project it's got a tag it's scheduled for tomorrow i can give it a priority p1 it's a top priority item if i want to give it a comment i can say here's a comment and there's even a new feature now that i don't think it's accessible on here yet used to be where you can actually give it a description too for a more longer form type of display of content that wasn't just a con a comment so i'll hit this now and i'm gonna go hide my personal stuff and i'll show you what my to-do list would look like after submit that task all right that's not too much here i really care about sharing so here is my upcoming view for tasks in todoist and this is actually tomorrow so tomorrow july 6th and here's the task do the thing and all right we have a comment that we made it's priority one it has a tag obsidian it's scheduled for tomorrow and now here is a description we can give it uh here is a long description i can't spell thank you apple there we go save and now it has a description you can close that and oh the description shows us this little paper icon there we go and i can add subtasks if i wanted to great but also now i can go to this to do task and it would actually be right here under the obsidian tag it's right here and i can even look for top priority p priority one items and where is it here it is do the thing so all these different ways of slicing and dicing through the information makes it really easy to quick capture tasks for later and i can do it with a quick key combo on this computer i can also access todoist through a web browser as a web app so i can access this at work too if i want to quick capture that way it also has the same kind of like api kind of thing as trello so i can send an email to a specific address and then the subject and body of that becomes the task name and like description or comment so all of that plus the mobile app and the mobile app on ios you can use the shortcuts application to quickly create a todoist task and have it sent straight to do us no problems so all these different things make a quick capture in todoist super easy because i can say hey voice assistant and i can't say her name otherwise she wrecks my audio settings right now hey voice assistant add reminder in five minutes do the thing in todoist and all you really have to add is in todoist and it will add it to that application instead of like you know apple reminders so to do this for quick capture is absolutely a godsend for me i have all kinds of tasks and to do items and everything in there to manage my life and you probably saw a little snippet of it i got my basic habits too take your meds do take your vitamins um all my basic chores things i can't hold in my head i hold nothing in my head i basically outsource as much of my life as possible to software because with adhd i can't manage that i literally cannot manage my life i externalize everything into software to manage myself because that is the only way i can manage and function like an even semi-normal person so todoist is a godsend for me not sponsored just love the product and i use it every day all day the next thing i use for quick capture is note templates with tags that are already set so whenever i make a new node that needs to be processed it's a seedling and i use my emoji system that if you've been following the channel for any length of time you know i'm big on using emoji they're graphical they're easy to understand it's easy to get the idea especially when you have like a definition of this is what these emojis mean in this context and for instance i have my tag taxonomy page that a lot of this stuff is completely public if you ever want to access this it's on my public publish page but i have like this whole breakdown and a lot of people have asked me questions about this like how to read this and understand it um i'll just go through it quickly now so it's somewhere but um i use the nested tag system so when that nested tag system came out in obsidian i definitely began to use it and it's very very useful so i start off with any input into my system gets this inbox emoji first that's the first level the next nested level is okay what type of input and that would be books tweets podcasts etc any of these types of inputs all the way down to thoughts so thoughts papers articles all these different types of inputs next is actually a color which is what stage of processing so if i have a brand new book input into my zettle costume that i need to process and i have not touched at all like my notes i haven't processed them then it's going to be inbox books and then red and that's going to change when i process it like if i begin orange if i'm done processing but i'm still linking things together or i'm you know sitting on it for it for a while it's going to be yellow until it's finally completed in green now papers are a little bit different in one respect is that there are highlight colors and stuff to deal with my papers workflow that we'll get into later but i also will have have purple on here and purple instead of red orange yellow and green is an indicator from this type of highlight in my paper workflow thanks to brie watson's tips and ideas is that purple means that there are pieces of information or papers or other citations within this paper i just finished taking notes on that i still need to look up so i could be completed like with all of my notes and doing everything i'm going to do with it on the paper that's why it's green but if there are things i need to follow up on or citations i need to like plumb the depths of a citation tree then it gets a purple and that's basically most of the tags that i have i also have um for just general notes like the idea notes or the the actual zettelcost and zettles evergreen notes however you want to call them it's a two two part uh tag which is the first level is just a little memo emoji for the note and then what type of note it's either seedlings um i added ferns here this means that um i have seedlings which is basically like an empty note like here's the title and that's all the content there is it's just the title of the note because that's something i need to you know look at and flesh out but ferns in this case would be the fledging ideas that i have some basic information i had an idea i got the title and i put something inside of the note to look at later when i can process so that would be a fern incubator would be like okay i fleshed out this idea i have my whole write up i am done but i still need to link it to other relevant areas or there's just nowhere else to really link it to and i don't feel comfortable just releasing it into the wild because it's not really well connected to anything so once it gets really well connected and it's just there in the vault it's basically an evergreen note it exists it's connected to other things and i can curate it over time now i mentioned i did my quick capture and task management in todoist i do have to do items along with the difficulty of the to do items in obsidian and this isn't like some crazy robust system this is literally just a quick way of making myself come back to something in line usually where i need to actually finish a task that as it relates to strictly this system zettle constant information knowledge management whatever so these aren't like you know take out the cans take out the trash brush your teeth no these are like hey this needs to have more relevant links or you need to look up this particular concept or does this relate to this note or do you need to make a brand new note out of that and it's just to do's related to knowledge management my map emoji is my maps of content so when i filter my global graph by the maps i get that higher level order um view network graph of my knowledge base of only those maps so that way it's a high level view of the interconnectedness of subject at matter and material in my vault the gear is just like general utility notes like i have a workbench i have just basically things that make it easier to sift through the noise of my vault or they serve a particular purpose a kanban board a page full of queries etc important i rarely ever ever ever use this in fact i could probably decommission this i don't think i use this on much of anything because if it's urgent it's usually something in todoist but it's there still it's i should probably just remove it uh people and this is for like my actual people notes like i have like my at symbol and the name of a person those are my notes on individuals usually it's like authors or notable people who i have linked to other notes or concepts now i might eventually expand this into being just a general catch-all people into being something more like academics or technologists or some breakdown of classification for different types of people but for now it's just general because right now that particular part of my vault doesn't really need to scale i don't have a lot of people notes in my vault so it's fine and then this is just a little piece of information for myself that on my graph i have different groupings where you can change the color and these are basically what the groupings are so when i need to know what the colors of the nodes are on the graphs it's either this or my custom css and that is my tag taxonomy node basically just quick points for me to remember what i'm doing when i'm tagging something so returning back um on my note tab on my note templates i will auto tag with seedlings so i have a brand new idea it's a seedling it has not had anything done to it other than i have a title so for that i would actually just insert my meta template now this is where i use the templater plugin and i will cover the templates i use and how i use them later but for instance my templater plugin is just my template template is just meta so meta is what i insert for any new note whether it be an input or whether it be a a brand new empty node so you can see here that if it starts with one of my characters then it's an input and if it starts with an input it actually inserts the input template which is you know the names of these things article paper so if i opened up a book you know template inputs book and it has all this stuff it has some stuff here it has you know my tag it doesn't have a red status because i could just be entering notes that are already done so really i just leave it to myself and i have some alfred app and again we'll cover later alfred app quick text expansions where i can just do something like rsq red square rs q and i need to enter normal mode rsq and it will enter the rest of the tag for me and that's basically my quick way of doing that for any of those types of colors of status for any of these tags on any of these inputs so this whole template has a couple different templater pieces and it's just blank prompts and whatever this is the book template if it starts with a brace then it gets the book template so for instance if i can create a new note i'm going to call this brace unt titled and if i insert meta it will insert the book template because this started with a brace character delete that now this will do this for any type of the inputs that i have categorized because i have them all set up here but if it's anything else than an input it inserts my new note template and the new note template is simply this with a seedling so this seedling emoji is what tells me this is a brand new untouched idea it's got just the title but that's it and that's all you have that's all you get so with that i can make a new note type the title insert meta close it and i'm done because this will get picked up later and i was doing data view queries for new notes but now i may just have a new kanban board and i will cover that later as well so all of this facilitates an easy quick capture of notes as well if i'm just at my computer but i also have todoist if i need to capture it elsewhere now i was using a combination of markdown tables and um transcluded block references for kanban boards made out of dataview queries to show me my uh my notes but i've since changed and i'm now using a the actual kanban plug-in so i have the uh lanes that actually have each of those emojis for different types of processing so i can see for seedlings i have all these seedlings i i have listed here now these won't automatically update an ad but i figured that's okay because i have so much here that once i get through all of these and i change them to the evergreen status that it's not going to be a big deal anymore because then i will in my tag pane see that oh wait there's a lot of seedlings still here they're not on here or in this case now what i can do is i can just add something through like a shortcut on my phone um to add to quick capture on obsidian if not todoist to the inbox instead of doing inbox i could also just add it to a new seedling item here on this kanban lane and this way i'm able to easily go through these pick out notes i want to flesh out or finish and then once they're done i wouldn't actually put them in here unless they're like densely linked and then i might archive them because i don't want all these notes linked to the kanban board because that's just a useless link so in that case i would move it here when they're done and then eventually i would just clear them out but this is how i'm currently keeping track of items i need to process based on my emoji tag system i do like the dataview plug-in kanban board but this is a little bit more interactive and i can actually schedule these too using just the native functionality so i've chosen to go with kanban board but both approaches are really nice and just in case you wanted to see what my dataview kanban board looked like it was really just three dataview queries with the block reference underneath it and it's basically just saying hey show me a table of the tags and then a bunch of little fields basically showing me the created year month day crea and then the modified year month day from the root vault where the tags equal and then it's my um where tags equal emoji and this is the only way to get around the emoji issue because you can't just say um uh yeah i figured exactly what the issue was but i was having trouble uh searching for um i think it was from from tags equal this or something so this actually works just fine exactly how you'd expect where tags equals and then it's this emoji combination and that would actually show me that that content and then i simply transcluded each of those block references so there's you know that one right there into a markdown table with the headers right here so when rendered it would literally just show me a list or a table with all the details of you know these little things that are tagged with that so both of these approaches are really useful for keeping on top of your inputs and if i zoom out here you'll probably see it better but like you know if you go sideways you can see all the different other ones so the fern and then the incubator ones and they're all the same items and this would actually update automatically based on your tags where the kanban board does not so it depends on what your workflow is going to be do you want to do a little bit more manual and deal with the kanban board moving things through or do you want to deal with this way where you have to go and edit the note change the tag and then refresh this page to see the updated results but those updated results automatically shift things along so it's really just dependent on what you want to do and yeah i mean that's that's basically the kanban board systems i've used i don't use this one anymore so i'm going to leave it as it is actually going to retain it but that is the the kanban board now this last portion of quick capture is something that i don't really do um just because of my setup so if you actually host your obsidian vault on something like dropbox or icloud and you can actually access your cloud storage through your phone then this is something that you can probably do especially if you have an iphone on iphone there's the shortcuts app and curtis mchale actually did a great video on this about how if you send a shortcuts using shortcuts you can actually create a new note into your cloud storage area because it's basically just folders your vault is just a folder so you can have an inbox folder in your vault and have a new note sent there from following a shortcuts workflow now my vault is hosted on github so i don't really have any cloud storage for anything so it's all on github and it syncs to github on i think every half hour or hour so i don't really have a use for that particular workflow if it's quick capture i need i'm probably just going to drop it into todoist or now i can just use the new obsidian mobile app and just drop it into the inbox make a new note in the inbox so you can use either it can either be shortcuts for even quicker it can be todoist or you can just use the native obsidian mobile app which is actually getting pretty dang good i don't use it too much just because i don't really do any of this heavy work on a mobile phone but you can do quick capture straight to an inbox folder from the phone application so that's really useful now going through the rest of this uh status tracking categorization and taxonomy in my system how do we track status of items so i've already gone over some of these things already because i can't stick to a script that i write for myself so the type taxonomy we already went through that about how i break down my entire emoji classification system which things which statuses inputs whatever whatever uh the stop the types of inputs i've done that on processing for their tags but also the actual links to the actual characters for each of the inputs so for instance books would be the brace symbol i also have these meta notes so basically a note that is only named the brace character and what that looks like is simply just okay what's all this when i render this it's literally just a title a image and then a you know link or a native obsidian query for all of the book notes in the entire vault and yeah that's that's it this is just literally just a uh a note that links all books together and honestly i don't even think these are needed anymore for with with the advent of data view a lot of these types of needs are kind of met with data view already so i don't really need these notes anymore but i just leave them in just in case especially if you're on like obsidian publish and you want to just see a back links to every book i have it's it's really useful for that because some of the functionality like having dataview actually work on obsidian publish right now isn't a thing so i have this on there just to make it a little bit easier the query won't populate anything but the backlinks will so that that will work for now now what that looks like is if i was on the phoenix project then you can see that in the metadata section up here i have type and i have a link to this so even if it doesn't pop up in the query because the query and dataview queries do not actually show results on obsidian publish having this link right here will show this book as a backlink on the brace note page so for now i'll leave it but that's that's that so i've already talked about the status of processing through pages based on the tags so that's you know seedlings ferns incubator and evergreen that's just what i do not everyone uses that system not everyone has to use that system that's just what i do tasks i have them on their level of difficulty talked about that already and obsidian only has tasks related to the actual content i have in there my actual task management is in todoist my utility items that are tagged with the gear this is literally only a handful of notes so if i actually went to my tags and went to the gears i got a couple and each of these shows something uh unique so i have my workbench which is literally just like a scratch pad i was messing with a plug-in there uh yeah it was the tracker plug-in i was messing with there but i also have like my kanban board i have a list of plug-ins and some of the settings about them that i have and use i have um some tools that i like and yeah just general utility things that make my life easier or that make managing this system easier so these are just tagged with gears and that's basically all that that tag is and does important items i i guess i didn't actually finish this for myself but i don't actually use that red exclamation point emoji for much of anything um i don't think i have anything tagged with that right now yeah because this is just on the index or the tag taxonomy oh wait no i actually have something on top of mind but it's obviously not as important as something like i need to do this today because that would be in todoist so i don't really use that one too much we will talk about maps of content and when it has as it ties in with status tracking or categorization all that later people my i thought yeah i pretty much talked about all this already when i got caught up on my tack taxonomy because the authors and people in general i haven't broken out that classification yet it's just everyone's a everyone's a person but i haven't broken out to be this one's an author this one's an academic this one's a technologist etc so i might do that when i hit some level of critical mass with uh the amount of people notes that i have but i haven't reached that point yet and right now it's working just fine as it is and then um again the graph groupings in css we've already talked about that all right next section how do i find anything so i've already talked about my special symbol taxonomy that searches for symbols like the brace for books and what that looks like is if i open up the quick switcher and i type a brace the only results i see begin with a brace or in this case i have some other stuff from my code notes these are going to go away when i transition fully to log sex so you can ignore that but when i open up a quick switcher and type of brace i'm only seeing my books the inputs for books this gets even more powerful that if you have a lot of particular type of input like let's say you have hundreds of books or research papers in your zettlecostin and you want to look at all these papers and you only want to look at things from a particular time period that you processed i can do 2020 and ah right at the top the only thing i have for 2020 is started at the top so right there i have right there tidy data everything else is still retained because fuzzy's searching so 202 and then 0 here but if i did something like that then it really filters it down so in that way doing a symbol and the date that you finish processing or some date in the title allows you to not only filter correctly down on an input type but also when you potentially processed it accessed it download it whatever you decide that date in the title means for me it's when i completed processing the item or reading it and adding these two elements to the title of the note already gives you a super powerful way of cutting through the noise of your vault because now i can say hey only show me papers and only from this time and you can start typing the time and fuzzy search your way to what you want or in the end if you remember um there was that one paper um ampersand data oh there it is there you go so you can combine that fuzzy searching with some of these elements as well but that unique character that date and the actual title itself makes it incredibly easy to find those inputs not to mention we haven't even cracked open the tags for that yet to look at the tags and the statuses of those so just the special symbol alone with the dates makes it incredibly easy to find the inputs so let's mark those next we have the regular expressions so i don't use too many of these um as much anymore i think because yeah i mostly just use the native syntax for this one this was my find random notes query which is fine so i don't really need to do too much of anything but let's look for something uh let's try and find a search so search bam and we're gonna look for and it has to be in a forward forward forward slash that's the word so we're going to look for a word and we're going to look for a word followed by the letter z um and so we'll it would find a ton of results i'm sure so then we need to find something that ends with a period so okay interesting and we need to close off with the forward slash this alone is probably going to look for titles so we can see all these titles like we have a word it's a single word or in this case it found a single word that ends with a z and then begins with and then starts with a period so it's obviously finding the names of these notes but that's looking looking for titles this is a regular expression but we can apply this to the content and this is where we combine regular expressions and the obsidian queries because i can say content and then actually point it at this now if we expand more context here it might not show me what i care oh yeah there it is okay so minimal text dot so this is what it's actually finding inside of the note so this is when we're finding content based on a regular expression and so you can do this and you can find regular expressions that work for finding like i don't know uh email addresses phone numbers so i could run an email address regular expression in my vault and find any reference to an email address that i want and it matches patterns regular expressions is basically just like black magic for pattern matching so you want to find any pattern of text regular expressions is how you do it i don't use them too often here just because i honestly don't need to with how much powerful functionality exists with dataview the native queries the boolean searches and some of my organization with the special symbols and tags but again you got that hidden knife in your tool belt that you can take advantage of if you need to get that out there but that's another tool in your toolbox there's also just plain general searching for if i'm going to find something i can just plain search it because i make very long descriptive titles for my notes because think of atomic notes a single note is a specific unit of thought so that single note is probably going to have a very descriptive title to make it easy to search but also so i can reference it inline in text so i could just input something and the whole displayed text of the paragraph is just the name of a link and that's really easy to do i can look for executive dysfunction okay so they're right there i found exactly what i'm looking for i have these two um actually this single note that oh and uh it's a reference here so i found this just by searching through fuzzy text and i could do task management and then right there so we have fuzzy searching for some different things that alone is already really powerful powerful fuzzy search is actually really incredible especially when you combine the command line with fcf or fuzzy finder but moving on besides those things beyond those things we have the actual dataview plugin you get query blocks which are the native obsidian queries which basically is any search you want to run in here you can put that into a query block and get the same results but there's a lot more functionality and polish on the data view plugin i don't think i have too much of a write up on here but there's a bunch of examples on here of different data view queries that i have on here just for my own reference and there's so much it's basically just write like writing sql code or structured query language you know give me notes where this field equals this sort by that where this is equal to this and sort descending from a particular folder whatever and it's a really robust way of asking for the particular data that you want out of your vault especially because this plugin can look at your yaml metadata which means you can make your own yaml key value pairs and dataview can find them so that's really really useful if you're doing habit tracking on your daily notes and you input your habits on in your yaml metadata so for instance if i open my daily note template then i have you know what's my mood typing i have a like some touch typing i'm doing for my habits i'm learning a couple languages reading daily reading um my stoic quote of the day and just some other stuff so this like that's my daily note template and so that way i can easily do my habit tracking but with dataview because i can access these areas so i can actually input the numerical value for my words per minute on typing and build a dataview plugin or a even a chart using the tracker plugin in obsidian based on the yaml metadata from my daily habit tracking so that's a really useful feature is just building these queries to show information and views smart lenses into your vault and one of my absolute favorite one of these is my timeline note which is really just a data view query that combines the supercharged links plugin to show some aspects of uh the ml metadata for my inputs in that note so the supercharged links before we go and show you that is a plugin that basically will show values from your yaml metadata right next to before after or whatever on your links when they reference a particular link so if i open up a book note and let's just open the unicorn project and i have status green and type book so those are two pieces of yellow metadata key value pairs that are not native to obsidian i wrote those specifically for the supercharged links plugin so this one is the unicorn project now if i over down here let's put it actually right here and i'm going to do a unicorn if i can spell unicorn project and bam now i actually have to render this page which now in hindsight i don't want to mess up my outline here so let's actually open up our workbench workbench and i'm going to put that link here and render so now oh hey i have these two pieces of content before the name of the link that's strange so when i actually but it's gone that's because supercharged links just finds the link and in my case prepends those visual the values it's it could be text it could be numbers but it's all basically text and emojis are basically text so it will just render that on there and that's really useful for my timeline plugin or my timeline note because on this note which is my favorite i just have some data view queries the first one is basically finding where there is no type and there is no date in the there's no type on the note and there's no date in the actual file name which basically means find me all the notes that do not have a type and have not been completed because i only put the date in the title when a note or an input has been completed it's not pulling from any of these areas which i can delete those because i move those out now bam just get rid of that and so now what these will do is that this will pick out all the things that don't have those and sort them descending based on the file name and then this one will give me a list of everything except from my journal where the type is not null oh yeah and type not null and where the file does have a numerical value in the date which really should only be my daily notes or these input notes so that's why it's basically finding anything that is completed and has a type or has a type and does is not completed yet so in this case things at the top are not completed things at the bottom are and bam this is my favorite thing because now i have a list of all of my inputs that are not completed in processing because they also don't have dates in the title but i also have these ones that have dates in the title because they're completed but i haven't finished processing them yet so in this way i can easily see and if i zoom out it looks even better because of i actually i just need to close this note but when i zoom out you can see even though the descriptive titles cause a little bit of line breaking but when you see all of these things lined up like this i have a complete timeline all the way back from when i first started my zettocastin of all my inputs the type of input the status and the date it was finished the symbol all of it is completely organized here for a comprehensive timeline of all of the inputs into myzetylcostin this is absolutely one of my favorite notes in my vault which is why it has a star and it's a utility note right there and that is one of my favorite things about some of these plugins supercharged links data view and just some ways of organizing your metadata now i already showed you the kanban board and how i'm dealing with that as well so i have my my inputs that way but my kanban right now is kind of just holding those ideas until i finish processing them fully into the evergreen notes so that's what that looks like and now the ultimate question why do all of this all all of this crazy organization tagging linking taxonomy setting up definitions about this means that and that all the plugins set why do any and all of this ultimately there are multiple ways for me to classify tag link and organize things i can find things based on particular tags or particular links they're linked to the mocks they're tagged with a particular inbox book emoji or their ha or they have a special symbol in the name or i can do a regular expression search there are multiple ways to do this and because there are multiple ways that are done very easily and a lot of them are automated a lot of easy ways to set up all this metadata structure and architecture it means that my scale my my system will scale as it grows i'm gonna have all these different ways of cutting through the noise of all of my notes as i continue to make and create more notes so i don't have to worry about this you know way down the line i have 20 30 000 notes how am i going to find anything i have this system it's robust it's flexible and it works incredibly well so i have all these different ways of filtering information and i'm never going to have to really worry about scaling now i've talked about this particular point on other videos and in my live streams ad nauseam that tags are soft links and actual bi-directional bracket bracket wiki links are hard links and that there is a very distinct and poignant and important difference between how those two links link types are treated and used in a scaling and robust personal knowledge management system soft links or tags group many items regardless of context i could have an evergreen note about python programming an evergreen note about adhd an evergreen note about dunbar's method or dunbar's number and an evergreen note about some psychological disorder or whatever regardless of context they are all evergreen notes under a tag only system which is why i don't really overuse tags tags to me are indicators of status or large contextless groupings so i might want to quickly open up only my evergreen notes regardless of context and then do the open random note plugin to only jump through my evergreen notes that might be an actual reason to use a context list tag otherwise i do tend to just use them as indicators of status for processing for data view queries or other you know types of searches now there's no backlink functionality for unlinked references with tags they're not files so the tag itself doesn't have any way of telling you things that are tagged with that link but don't exist yet no there's no such functionality but with links links are hard links meaning that i'm saying this file directly points to that file and this is what i said earlier is that tags are like an umbrella anything can be underneath it but a hard link a bi-directional wiki link is like a pointer finger saying you and with that it's saying i want that note so if you're pointing at a note that doesn't exist then that shows in that backlink for outgoing notes from your current one or anything that points at that note it shows which things reference you but might not exist yet or what things are pointing at you that you might not know about now that can be regardless of context but the context there is not these the these two notes pointing at my current note are all about adhd it's these two notes i said are associated with my current note on adhd and they actually have a reason to be linked and referenced so that's not really context list the context is you decided that there is a context that exists and you want those two three notes to be associated together via a rigid hard concrete link that is why i don't overuse tags but i really get link happy so when it comes to links i do link a lot of notes together obviously for the same purpose you link related notes but i also do tags differently so the way that people do tags would be like psychology neurology tools society any of these hashtag word hashtag phrase that you might do to make a lot of text tag references to something those are basically how i treat tags in obsidian but my approach is a little different so i'm just going to go to my workbench and say you know other people might be like oh society or you know psychology that is not how i approach things i actually use psychology or society and i actually have links for this if i hover over it doesn't exist psychology actually exists because that's becoming that's actually a mock now because it's gotten so many links but this ties into the point of my tags first links video which is my links both double for the actual oh yes this is related to this adhd note correct but it's also this tag this tag and that looks very different because if i open up the local graph for my workbench we can see i've tagged society society doesn't exist that note does not exist the word society and a note named society.md does not exist so that shows as a red dot on my graph and how this is useful to me is that over time as i make more notes that might tag themselves with society this node will grow bigger on my global graph if i show you my global graph there are some red nodes now if i filter out because i don't want the red of my daily notes to get confusing so if i filter out my daily notes let's look for red there's a lot of little red nodes and notes here here's a decent one bam knowledge formation and look how many green notes it connects to purple or inputs green is actually evergreen notes of any type of uh stage of processing so this way ah okay that's got a lot of links maybe not big enough but when it gets big enough i'm going to make that into a mock so that way i can see when these nodes start to get a lot of additional links and more things get tagged with it so that i can say ah that is something i write a lot about maybe i should graduate that particular note that doesn't exist knowledge formation into a map of content because it is such a prominent topic in my vault that it justifies its creation like right here norse that might actually be something who knows so that is actually how i'm treating links i never use these never using text anything i use emojis it's usually to do those contextless groupings books podcasts tasks and some of their nested link nested tags for like statuses just plain status but then the links themselves are actually to real notes or to these tag notes that don't exist or eventually get promoted to a mock now when i do that and when i promote a tag note into a mock here's the benefit is that everything that was already tagged with psychology it's just that oh this one doesn't exist it's grayed out but this one now exists so basically any note that was tagged with psychology is now linked to that mock that's pretty awesome now if i'm going to stick with my example earlier i might need to refactor some of that stuff to make sure that i don't just have literally everything tagged onto the mock i might need to do some parsing of stuff and change the actual you know structure so here are the major topics of psychology and then the notes connect to those not directly to the mock but at least to organize everything that i need graduate psychology to a mock here's all the related links great now i know everything i need to edit and update for this mock to emerge and for the structure of all of this to get a little bit more robust shift everything down a level so it's psychology concepts then the notes but that whole graduation process is something i can easily move forward with using this system because these tags already tags already exist and i just have to make the note and now it exists and there you go that's it that's how i graduate my mocs is that i link a bunch of stuff i see the nodes get big and i'm like ah i'm writing a lot about that time to make that into a map of content so why did all this weirdness around tagging and linking instead of just using something more familiar like folders well i mentioned before that folders raise the problem of one you might lose something in 17 nested levels of folders two i have adhd which makes it very difficult to deal with the cognitive load of here's all these files i need to file them where do they where do they go there's so many folders oh my god where do i start so reduce the cognitive load reduce the executive dysfunction mountain to climb to get anything done reduce friction make it easier but also organic growth and flexibility so when i link things together the linking is the structure it's an organic hierarchy just based on links these nodes connect to this higher level note connect to these higher level nodes connect to these higher level nodes connect to the main index it basically just looks like a spider web expanding out from the from the center and it's visually apparent when i open up something uh when i open up my global graph and filter based on my mocks so if i was going to search for tags and just on the mocks then i can easily see you know this web growing you know there's some programming stuff here i need to move out but academia law tech there's my actual index note adhd some other topics when i move those up there and you can see that this web grows based on associated topics and this is how it's easy to make your folders like i don't have a folder for interest and then a folder for psychology and then a folder for adhd it's just hey i have interests psychology is one of them adhd is a probably a topic in psychology because it's you know related to that disorder so there we go it just link link link and there you go there is your structure your hierarchy and that's how it all it is you don't have to file anything ever you toss it onto the pile because it has links to other items that have links to your mocks not everything is linked directly to a mock you might have something that is linked to a note which is linked to a note which is linked to a note which is actually linked to a map of content but the whole point of that is you don't want to have your maps of content just be an endless litany of links and spamming you want it to be a guide here is my topic here are the major areas let's dive in a little bit deeper dive in a little bit deeper there and you continue to explore and grow into the different avenues of note links and thoughts that you have and that is how you traverse your second brain through my method and this strategy is you basically explore explore the root system of this tree of knowledge and don't deal with folders and little boxes you have to fit everything into because something might belong in 12 boxes but you don't want to have 12 copies why not have it just linked to 12 different other notes and now you have it living in the pile with everything else and that's all you need i actually forgot to remove uh files that don't exist so this is actually the clean mock look of my vault at the moment but all of this right here is going to be going to uh log sex so it's gonna be a little bit a little bit thinner but i'll have to be expanding out and making more mocks in the future but this is the higher order view of my entire second brain right now is all of these different maps of content where i can dive in a little bit deeper into these areas and explore now just to break up a little bit of this content here i have a newsletter that i try to put out once a month just detailing like new discoveries new tools things i'm currently working on novel concepts i've found what kind of what's my favorite note in my vault lately some different developments new videos updates thoughts ideas all that different stuff basically all things brian what's brian working on what's brian doing what's he thinking about these days that's all kinds of stuff that is in my newsletter a link to that is in the description below and it might even be in the pinned comment in uh youtube but if you are interested in that it's completely free and if you sign up for the newsletter i give out a free pack of my templater templates and my custom css so if you want any of that or you want to just see what i'm up to or be on the newsletter you can sign up to that in the link in the description below hope to see you there now i've actually already touched on several of these concepts already so i'll speed through some of this daily notes and adding temporal components to your notes like the date in the title or using some yaml metadata key value pairs to track the date adding that temporal component is really useful you can add timelines such as breadcrumb links in your daily notes such as a note that links to the previous day and the next day that doesn't exist yet so you can easily just click click click and follow through your daily note or your journal or whatever your uh log might be it might just be this is what i learned today it could be your dev vlog like i do in law sec that's the type of thing you can easily set up with some templater templates there's also the ability to look through the progression of your learning and material as like with my timeline note so i can see all of my inputs because they have that temporal component in the title when i completed processing that item and that's just right there with it and we also have uh i already talked about the sorting of the based on the special character the low friction way to work in the system it's easy to just start with a daily note and just write in there and then link off from there but also the daily note is really useful because then on each of your inputs you can see oh i linked to it on this daily note so maybe i did some work on this or processed it on these five days until it was finally done and that fifth day that done day is actually the date in the title of the literature note now because it's done but also i really like my daily notes specifically just to be like a personal journal and then at the end of each week month and year i actually have reviews so every week i review all of my daily notes for that week and i add the highlights to my weekly note then i take all of those highlights from that weekly note and i put them into the monthly note and then each annual note already has each monthly note transcluded into it so in that way i basically get to have automated annual reviews semi easy and automated monthly reviews and i just do a weekly and daily note and review and i link all of these things together so each annual review links to each monthly note which links to each weekly note which links to each daily note so on my vault i didn't mean to do that i wanted to open it over there on my uh graph if i filter down to just the path for my journal no tags no attachments only existing files and no orphans then i have this giant interconnected web because each daily note links to its previous day and the next day each daily note is linked to its weekly note each weekly to a monthly each monthly to an annual so here's a monthly note linking to the week so here's the week week one of uh 2021 and then here's each of those days bam so and actually this date might be some of the older dates based on when it was in the calendar plug-in so this week one actually includes some dates from 2020 just from when i decided to start it so there we go here's january 1st january 2nd but january 1st is under week 1 and then week 1 links to week 2 just like month one links to month two and this basically just creates this giant spider ball of all of these journal weekly daily monthly review notes and in this way i have everything interconnected for all things you know review i really like this because it lets me see all of my highlights and accomplishments for the month for the week for the year and it really makes you feel good when you look back and you're like you know i didn't really feel like i did a lot this year i didn't really feel like i lived lived up to my potential like i did all that i could but looking back at this and just seeing the sheer litany of things that i was able to accomplish create and do this year i actually did pretty good i did well i feel better now and that's the kind of thing i'm looking to get out of these reviews it's just an easier way of just going through what i have on there and remembering okay yeah so i actually have a particular workflow for each individual type of input and i had a note in my zettel costume that i kind of got a little popular around early on of showing like a giant diagram of how i process each thing and i honestly don't keep it updated because it's more of a hassle to do that and it doesn't really fit on a page easily in obsidian so i have it written here and i'm going to go through each of them as well as showing you what the workflow looks like in the applications i use with that workflow so for books i have several methods if i am dealing with a physical book then what i'm probably going to do is i'm going to be reading it and i will have obsidian open next to me on my computer and as i come up with ideas or thoughts i will take notes and this is where you also get the useful re the useful part of reading a book is what if there's references to citations or pieces of knowledge and i want to go look those up this is when i would do that is that now i can go look up those pieces of information add those to notes come back to the book continue oh citation follow the citation deal with that process that okay back to the book read through there's a really great video that i saw on a youtube channel i don't think it's really popular anything but they were going through the book range by david epstein i think it's david epstein and they were just literally looking at okay reading questioning thoughts okay moving on citation let's look at that what's the validity of that okay and then moving through very very slowly but with a very uh focused intent on the actual content not just reading and letting the author's voice in your head dictate what your thoughts are about it which is really just what people do is they just listen to this passive voice in their head when they're reading versus actually having an active thought process about what they are reading and then questioning reading the citations looking at the citations what is this saying and what are they verifying their claims with and are those reputable sources to even say that yeah that's a that's a very reputable source to be verifying this claim so reading physical books i like to have them open with me and have obsidian open internet access reading things doing back and forth and getting that work done now i like to transcribe as i go so instead of having to write down notes and then type them up later which is what i had to do once when i was up at my family's cabin without a computer even without internet access and i just had to take notes and then transcribe them when i got home that sucked don't want to do that again could probably get around it with some ocr applications or take a picture of it and then use um the tool text sniper or any other equivalent um if you like text sniper i have an affiliate link with them uh link to that will be in uh probably the description but in any case so using that you could probably just take a picture of the text and then use an ocr application to rip the text out and then paste as text but i would prefer to not have to deal with that shenanigans and i would just like to type up my notes as i'm reading now the book is super dense or like heavily academic and it's really hard to just read it end to end and really have a good you know a good mental model of everything going on to capture those ideas and the thoughts and the the web of thought that you have weaved around what you've read on this particular book but also especially if you read multiple books at a time this can get a little tricky so if it's like a single book like that and it's too big to deal with in that way you could just do iterative loops on say each chapter i'm going to treat it as the full book workflow it's going to get a whole book note it's going to say like you know this title part 1 and you can have like 12 parts or something or whatever it is and break it apart and iteratively work through it so that each book note has its own um its own chapter in that case if it's too dense and my book template has a book and it doesn't have a status yet because i signed that later it's a type book it's a status not done here for the supercharged links uh the title fills in the date reviewed fills in i usually remove this unless it's like i'm actually making the note on the day it's completed and then i can add this metadata usually i can grab this from zotero in which i would grab the citation link from zotero if i can get the book in there my notes summaries of key points the context of how this relates to any research in the field that the work is in or any research that i'm conducting um any significance again in the field important figures or tables um a lot of these like have these you know little descriptions that make it you know evident about what is expected there cited references these are things that i might want to also go look up on and this might be why i tagged that note with that purple square it's like oh there's things you need to follow up on here or these are the common citations and i could say easily like link to a citation key i don't think i know one offhand tidy data let's see do i have the citation key for that one wickham 2014 so i could say on this one if i had a bunch of these i could just do you know wickham 2014 and that's the citation key for this paper but i could just have it referenced like that and this is what i might do in this cited references page is that i might make these notes they don't have a date because they're not processed they're inputs that need to be processed i need to follow up on them that's why this book note has a purple square here's the citation key a link to it i can go to that process those and when those are all processed down that citation tree this book note is now completed it gets a green square and we move on with life it sounds like a lot but it's actually a really easy and methodical process to keep up on if you stick with this workflow and use it for as long as i have it's been almost a year now it evolves but it's still basically the same so moving on other comments yeah that's the book template so moving through physical books that's basically how i process those now if it's a pdf book like for instance if i can get a pdf then i might just put that in zotero and read it there because zotero now and the beta has a pdf reader and i can do that there and as long as uh if i wanted my normal robust workflow of extracting annotations with page number links and all that i'll still use the zot file and md notes extensions in zotero to grab those notes with links to the sections in the document but hopefully zotero finishes their nice beta which has a built-in pdf.js pdf reader and editor and their annotation system is nice except that the extracted links don't have accepted notes don't have links to the exact area in the source material and i think that's related to the architecture where they store the notes separate from the actual file the audiata but either way it is a really great way of reading pdfs is either a pdf reader or zotero's pdf reader and using their native annotation system either one works depends on what you really want to go for i currently prefer the old style zotero workflow and i use highlights the app the highlights application for that an example of this being i believe i'm reading it here uh knowledge architectures and blah blah blah so here's a pdf book it has a tag it has this open book i have a taxonomy tag i'll get more of that later but here is the pdf book if i open up this book i can open it up in highlights and i can see all the different highlight colors i can open up this tab here and i can see okay hide sidebar but what i want to see is this one which shows me okay here's a bunch of stuff and then here's all the different colors of highlights like oh purple that means that on this page i want to actually look up these references later on so this would be a purple book note and now i have all of these different notes figures and things that i want to look up later that are all different colors of highlights and so when i extract these with the zo with the zot file and md notes extensions in zotero i will have the content any notes i've taken on the content which i have don't have any here um and then i would also actually have the exact link to the page and the document so that i could click on those links and it would open up this document to this exact location in highlights and it would open zotero as well so that way it's easy to get right back to where i was in the research from those links that are produced revert changes and i will get more into zotero later but that is how i would process a book in zotero i don't really like to do things that way because i don't like having to deal with electronic books like this unless it's in a kindle next i've already talked about it in my actual last video depending on when i when i post this in a recent video i talked about the entire kindle highlights space in obsidian and i was using the amazon notebook link thing and bookcision which are two tools to easily grab out all of your annotations from kindle so like i could grab all of these different notes from this book on my uh amazon kindle service whatever and using just this you dragged your bar have it there it's basically just a piece of javascript and i can click that it would pull out all these highlights for this entire document can't copy the clipboard because for some reason people think flash player isn't dead it is and i can download as plain text and then i could deal with that but it still requires more extra more formatting which is why the actual obsidian plugin for kindle highlights is something i'm going to start diving into a little bit more because that is a really great way of syncing all of those notes into your vault and grabbing them and it also will give you a all of the metadata attached to those notes so it's really easy to just have all the stuff produced isbn the title the author blah blah all of that so the kindle highlights plugin um is a community plugin in obsidian that is really really great that i want to dive in more but kindle highlights this one this is going to be a really great tool for my kindle workflow and i plan to dive into this more but i've looked at it in the past video check that out it's really great so once i've gotten those notes out of kindle what i would do with those is what i would do with any other book notes i have the book it's just in kindle i have my highlights and my notes and i extract them and i put them into an ordinary book template same thing for zotero basically my book template is for any kind of book no matter how i process it but these are all the ways that i would process a book in various contexts ultimately leading to a book type input note in which case it would follow my template if i have all the same metadata tags special symbols date in the title everything that my system already uses so that my system can scale and i have everything that follows a consistent pattern and that is books next input i have for you is tweets there are actually some really good tweets that i've wanted to save or that have started thoughts or notes for me before and i have several ways of retaining them so there is a service called twit frame now i don't really use it too much anymore just because i don't really like the idea of it being transient like if somebody deletes their tweet it's gone i can't access it anymore but in essence you basically just use an iframe none of this meta stuff really matters but you can play with it but it's really the important thing is source and then it's basically twitframe.com show question mark url equals and then right before the equals and the quote you just put the url to the tweet and what that can look like is i have a tweet here of mine i can say share copy link okay and i can put that right before that url here's that link and now if i render this page it's going to actually load and show me that tweet that specific one now that can be really great and really useful um not too big a fan of that anymore and honestly what i prefer to do now is just take a picture of the tweet and retain the picture because it will always be there for me so let's see here i think i have um nope i used twit frame for that one and yes here we go here's one uh jenny bryan from the r programming community um has a tweet that she wrote in response to this one and i just grabbed the image and this means that even if any of these tweets get deleted i'm always going to have access to what actually spurred on this note and the thoughts that i got from it so that's my preferred approach to tweets is to not use twit frame but you can but to either in rather use images and that i capture with like a screen screenshot but there's also another feature on twitter which is uh unroll so unroll me is a uh a service that basically takes twitter threads and lets you aggregate them for easy reading so i have this large string of tweets and then i said you know thread reader app unroll and this is what you need to say in response to a thread and you will get a response from this bot that gives you a link this link takes me to their service and i don't pay for the service you don't need to pay for the service there are some benefits but it doesn't matter and i now have my entire thread here as a single block of text what i can do is i could save this as a pdf if i wanted to but honestly you could just copy all of this text and then paste it into obsidian if you wanted to just have the text in there so in that way your tweet is also accessible as a single aggregated enroll me page but as all of the text so either way you want to process tweets that's a great these are great methods for getting that done and then using this input in your system now the next thing i'm going to talk about is the air application air has gotten a lot of notoriety around being able to take podcast notes it is ios only but looking at their website they do have a beta for android now i don't really talk about this app too much and i haven't made a workflow video about it because i'm just not really great at doing podcast processing anymore i'm just not really great at keeping up on my podcasts so i don't use it as much as i would like or should but in essence what you can do is i have a podcast here by derek cyvers on the knowledge project and when you have something like airpods or you can do this manually with some options is when you're listening to a podcast i have it set on my iphone to like do like a double tap or a triple tap or something and that basically just says hey air the last 45 minutes last 45 seconds of that podcast record it as a clip transcribe that clip and now i can add my own notes to that clip so that's what i get is that when i do that i have all these different clips here and i have like i can play it back i have the transcript um and it's just straight text as long as some of the along with some of the context around it and from this point i can actually go and select all these different things and grab all of these air quotes that's what they're called air quotes and export them so what i want to do is i'm going to go here i want to grab and i want to export all of my air quotes for a particular podcast so i go to air quotes and let's go to share so one of the problems that i've had with air is that we can share as markdown but it only does one air quote at a time it was actually like a weird hack that i had to find like you long press something and then it would actually let you share everything and i think it's if you long press the share button there it is that's like it's not really intuitive i had to long press the share button on my air quotes here for this particular podcast and now i can say share air quote and transcript via share error quote is markdown or and share air quote and transcript as markdown so what i want to do is i want to share them the transcript and everything as markdown and there we go the middle option and now it's going to let me do something and i can air drop it to my computer archimedes and that would put it onto my computer and what i see on here is if i share my screen now let's open should we open this up in my browser but what i should have from this is in my downloads i believe uh no so maybe i need to actually share share it a different way is uh share the just as markdown share markdown via and then draw airdrop to my computer because see this i haven't done this in a while but uh yeah because i can then grab this link and send this to obsidian but that's not good enough what i actually want to do is grab the the content of this and then send all of it to my computer as markdown aha i have found it so what we need to do to actually share all of the air quotes from a particular podcast is select and you're going to select all of them so all the air quotes that you want to send and instead of clicking the share button a little square icon is you're actually going to hold above on the top it says delete share you're going to long press that one or actually not long press just press and then it actually says share air quotes as markdown and that's what i want and then when i airdrop that on my screen you will see in my downloads it will download a dot txt file and that's what i want because now it'll actually give me all these links now that actually doesn't give me the text content which is also what i wanted so if i have to go through all of this again see i don't use this often because now i'm getting infuriated share air quotes via and i think that this is the problem is having to share these individually would be a a problem for me unless just because i didn't take notes on them because see this one this one actually has a little piece of text right there a little dot and that's actually what is also on um this little part right here now the transcript for this particular air quote is all of that but i guess my note was a dot so maybe that's just user error then but this is how i would share all of these air quotes to my computer you know select them all share uh as markdown using that share button at the top and then it sends it all including the text to my machine through airdrop now it's a great ios workflow but i honestly just can't keep up with my uh podcasts it's a great system and i'd love to use it more i just can't keep up on them but maybe you can make use of this and it's sounds like there's gonna be a beta for android coming up but you know take advantage of it if you're the type of person who can handle podcasts better than me i personally am just not great about it so that's podcasts and then once i have these air quotes like that i would then open up an actual podcast template in my system and so it looks like this you know it has a podcast icon all this other metadata and then okay what so inside of there export to markdown and then insert podcast players as iframes so this is another example of something that i've done before is that if i actually want the podcast itself so let's say getting things done here's a podcast now i have an iframe because most of these podcast players actually have embed code that you can add to an iframe so that i can play this podcast in my computer as long as i have internet connection it plays the iframe that's all i need so combining that with something like the air quotes which i don't know if i still have my template anymore i do is uh here's an iframe specifically for the air quote link so now if i went back and i grabbed this air quote link right here i have to open this thing and i grab a link copy that and if i add any of these links to an iframe like this like that and then render it will now give me an air quote the whole thing the whole graphical shebang now i normally need to make it smaller because i don't need all of this but if i actually expanded the transcript that's why it takes up so much space because now i can actually read this whole transcript and there we go but if i might do that only if it's a single air quote for the entire podcast uh maybe but that's just a lot of graphical space so honestly what i might do is just take all of these air quotes and then put them in here and there we go now i have links what i might also do is actually just take uh these parts out and replace them with the time stamps there might be an even better automated way of doing that but i don't do this often enough on air quotes or podcasts enough to really justify having to spend all the time to figure it out i'm just not that good with podcasts but these are some of the templates and things that i do for that and so i might insert that iframe for the podcast in the podcast note as well as the air quote note and then treat it like any other input add my ideas link to other reference other references or other items and just go from there you can see i'm a little bit rusty on it and not so great about covering it cons like thoroughly is because i haven't done it in a while i just am not good with podcasts so that's all i'm gonna say on it air is a great tool if you're on ios airdrop with that to go to like a macbook is a great workflow i am not the greatest fan of apple or and i hate windows i'm really a linux person through and through that i really love linux and i plan to return to my own arch build in the future but airdrop and some of these workflows with apple products is nice but i am just not good at even doing this so moving on right the next kind of input is youtube videos i actually watch a lot of youtube videos and i really like youtube videos as an input there's a lot of good information you can get from them and especially when you can get the timestamp links into the video because you can link to a particular point in a video through the urls so i actually really like getting notes from youtube videos but there's not a lot of great applications for getting those annotations and time stamps out of it that are easy easy to extract information from or that don't cost any money so this is where i actually use the extension service whatever it's called memex and memex is really useful because it's just a chrome extension now they have a bunch of other types of services and things that they offer but it's completely free and it's on any of the major browsers so like i use brave but it's also on google chrome on firefox and there's a lot of extra stuff that goes into it like you can you know have a bunch of annotations notes extract them into templates and all this other stuff for um other applications so i can take notes on a website and have those extracted into a particular template for something like obsidian but ultimately the only thing i end up really using this for is youtube annotations and that's it it's free and that's all i need it for and i don't use it for anything else other than that there's a lot of other power in here that you could unlock but personally i follow the kiss method and all i really need it for is just to grab those annotations and it would collect everything on these like dashboards and then it shows you the notes you take on it but i honestly don't use much of any of that so what that looks like is i have my youtube video templates because every type of literature note has an input template i get my notes i put it into a template so the youtube template i have looks just like this and it has my tag it has status all that stuff mess metadata that i fill in and it actually has an iframe this iframe is where i grab that embed link and i would insert the actual url of the video so that i can have a video player in my note now that still looks at youtube so if i don't have internet access i can't look at the video but if that video also goes offline somebody takes it down it's also gone now a lot of these types of transient references like this with iframes or podcast players etc a lot of the downside is that it's transient so if something gets removed i can't do anything about it i don't have a copy forever something like raindrop io might actually have a retained copy but for the time being this is fine because ultimately the content i'm getting out of this the notes my annotations my thoughts my ideas those just point to this source but having the source forever retained is not really something that i need to keep forever it's nice to have but the important thing is that i got my ideas and my notes and i know where they came from in case i need to cite something and what this might look like in in the end is a note like this i took a note i took some notes off of a youtube video by um i think it's hershey bar yeah harshi bar and it was all about nfts because i was looking at nfts at the time and so i got some you know metadata the i need to put in the channel host but like when i reviewed it the title the special symbol the actual url the iframe so i can actually play this video in the note but i have these and these are the timestamp links to exact points in the video where i grabbed some notes and this is what i generated with memex now if i show the view of this the raw view you can see that okay and here's that youtube link but also question mark t equals whatever this is basically saying this many seconds into the video show me content so i mean this is in seconds so minus 60 so that's 42 left a minute 60 seconds 42 seconds 102 equals that kind of hard to calculate this if you're doing it manually by hand thankfully memex does this for you and then i have my actual notes here so what i can do is i can actually go to this youtube video and i'm not going to play it but if i open up memex and there is a hotkey i have for it which is alt q and i actually have my notes on here so you can see i can say oh there's all of this raw stuff but if i want to actually take a note on this you know insert okay i don't want to link i want youtube timestamp so here we go at one second in here's the actual link and now what i can do is i can actually format this as i'm writing my notes and say okay that's a bullet and then below that i'm gonna insert a space a couple spaces and here's a note and now i can save that and here we go that is how i've taken notes on youtube videos and then when i'm done with a youtube video i can just copy all of this because it's markdown preview markdown there we go grab it and then go back to obsidian paste it into my note and those are my notes those are my notes on youtube videos and it's as simple as that and that's honestly all i use memex for and it does a great job at it that's all i need there's a lot of extra power you could unlock but this is all i need and i was using something like uh i don't know if it's y note yi note wi note or rocket note or something like that i don't use any of those anymore there's too much extra work too much weirdness conversion formats blah blah this is easy grab the time stamp here's the markdown copy paste it's done there's even probably even easier ways to do this but this is what i'm doing it's efficient it works for me and that's all i have to do for youtube videos next another important input is articles articles can be kind of hit and miss it really depends you could have your typical medium articles of top five recommended insert word here and have in these basically like junk food articles they don't really have any meat or substance to them you can consume them easily and maybe get a single thought note out of it or maybe nothing but then there's the ones that actually have some really good meaty information in it they cite other research papers or other articles and it actually gives you a well-rounded sense of things so articles can be kind of hit and miss and my absolute go-to recommended thing for articles and article management and even just some web resources is raindrop io now i've used raindrop for a long time and i've had a video or two i forget on my channel about raindrop and i still use it i love the service and i know that there's people who are have like some concerns with like the developer living in russia or all this other crap and honestly i'm not putting private stuff in here it's really just collecting articles so i'm not bothered uh there's some things i really really enjoy about raindrop that you know i make plenty of good use of my template for articles looks like this um it has the basic metadata and then it's just blank you know for the notes whatever notes i decide to take so i store things in raindrop because on raindrop that's twitter on raindrop you have the actual web app so here's the web app but you also have a desktop app and i believe that it's completely portable because yep install render up so it looks like it's a pwa a progressive web app so it's available basically anywhere you can download it as a an actual desktop application but there's also the extension and the extension is one of the most powerful things because i can be on any web page and i can click that raindrop button and that will grab whatever tab i'm on and then add it to raindrop so if i put that let's see where does it default to i think it just goes to unsorted so i'm just going to grab the page for my raindrop it goes to unsorted i can add some tags to it and there's a bunch of tags i have hundreds of them let's just add a couple blah blah and then zero okay here's the url i don't need favorites i've never even used this tabs thing hmm interesting yeah sure let's allow that whatever and uh yeah so that's all we need to do oh it looks like i can add additional tabs here if i wanted to do that but i don't need to there we go some tags it's unsorted here's the title of it we have the url bam that's it i don't even need to click like submit or anything because i think i have changed an option for that so yeah there's more to this i honestly just don't use all these extra features and now in unsorted here's the link inbox raindrop blah blah so that's it that's all i need and i can click on that and it would be able to take me to like the website if it was something like an article but that's all i need so things drop into unsorted and uh i don't usually use that there so they drop into unsorted and then i deal with them so how do i deal and process items in raindrop so if i add something usually it's going to be oh i need i want that as an input to my zettle costing so i don't i haven't processed it yet but i want to get around to it i want to retain them sort them put them somewhere i won't forget and so my source of truth for article storage is this inbox collection and i've paid for row raindrop io so that means that i get nested collections and i get a snapshot storage additional storage size i think there's a couple other benefits but the main benefits are that i get snapshots which means kind of like the internet archive i get a hard copy of the web page as it was at that point in time so even if that website goes down it never comes back it's not on you know internet archive or whatever i have a copy of it in raindrop forever and i believe something like devon think can also do this too with these long-term snapshot storages but overall i get snapshot and i get nested collections and i really liked the nested collections very simple feature but raindrop is not that expensive so i decided to just pay for it and i like it now when i get a new input i will usually say if it's for my settle constant it goes to this inbox this inbox collection if it's for other things that are not specifically zettle cost and related i will put them into these other folders like i have a folder for linux for different subject matter on linux some videos and things that i want to go through when i rebuild my linux system and some areas around that or some stuff about anki i have some stuff about languages uh yeah it's just different things programming languages so that's where all that other stuff goes but ultimately this the main purpose of my use for raindrop is that'll costing so i would drop things into the inbox now when i you saw me when i clicked on that um the extension and it's adding tags and things to this what are all those tags honestly a lot of them are just suggested suggested things to tag it with based on i guess the content of the page so i will usually just add whatever it's is suggested add a couple of pertinent things if i see that they're not added and i want them to be but the main important thing is that i will always add a zero or a one now what a zero or one means is just my way of quickly sorting to the top of any tag list because the tags at the top are sorted alpha numerically zero and one zero are things that i have not finished processing so think of it like a boolean flag has this been read true or false yes and no one in zero so in this case i have a lot of items 140 that are not processed now not all of those are in my zettle cost and inbox because 140 but in my settle cost and inbox i only have 79 so it can be for anywhere but i can then progressively filter by tags i can look for different tags you know click on this one let's look for a large tag let's say okay adhd and then i want to do also a one for things that are are red okay what if i want to see unread nothing unread in adhd so it just gives me a bunch of stuff or oh yeah actually yeah here we go adhd 0. so a bunch of unread things on adhd and these are all in the settle cost and inbox there you go so progressive filtering based on tags and xero is just my easy way of saying i haven't read this yet i don't really need much more of a complex system than that because that gets me everything i need i go through my inbox and then if i'm actually focused on a single particular item i will then go to the inbox move it to the focus area and this is the article i've been working on for a long time because when i was still streaming some of my zelda cost and work live i was reading the research papers connected to this article about leadership and um the loneliness of ceos and leaders and that's kind of how i work through this i just follow the citation trees and i this article gets an article note and page but then if it references research papers then those research papers get their own research paper note page in obsidian and i connect all this stuff together and then those research papers would then live in zotero when we get to my paper workflow which is next so this is how i'm processing my zettable cost and inputs it goes to the inbox i then tag it and i you know add it to focus when i'm actually focusing on it reading it working through it gathering notes and then once i'm done let's just say okay i didn't really like this i didn't really get any notes from this and i don't care about it i would then put it into this trash collection this isn't the actual trash can it's a collection did i just call trash and that is something that i've actually finished reading but didn't really get any notes from and it wasn't really super valuable but maybe maybe i might want to access it someday to send to somebody else or i wanted to see results i might want to look at it one day i will just drop it in there as a catch-all if i literally don't care about this and it's it is literally trash i'll just delete it but i usually just put things into this trash collection because that makes it easy for me to always have that search ability and it's not really giving into the collector's fallacy because i do actually delete things but things that i actually process get notes from actually go into my settle cost and inputs archive which is just areas where okay i have three tweets that i've processed in here into my notes archive and they're all listed here they have ones they're filed away under this and there you go that's that's all i need to know about this and that's it so i can just put these things in here they're organized they're sorted they're tagged and i process things from the inbox and the focus page that's my workflow for articles and it works pretty well when i can actually get around to focusing on them but also what i have from that is i have my raindrop i o page because once you log in through the iframe you have the ability to do something really cool with raindrop because it's a web app so with a iframe and a width 100 and height 130 percent this means that when i render this page i actually have a window into my raindrop i o account now all you have to do is sign in so once i've signed in to raindrop now inside of obsidian i have a view into my entire collection in raindrop anything i want basically like looking at raindrop in the browser but it's an obsidian so if i wasn't so zoomed out this would be a better experience but this is so you can see it but i could have one tab or one page in obsidian has raindrop and the other actually has the notes for whatever i'm reading because i can read from within obsidian so in this case i can go to my article i've been working on i can expand this to full page and now i can actually read this article inside of obsidian taking notes on the other tab that's it if you were in the web browser it would it wouldn't really play nice but what you could do is you could store your links in here go to this article and say okay i'm going to go to that article and then use something like memex to actually take notes on the article in mimics if you want to do that kind of workflow so there's a lot of ways that you can use these types of tools and applications together but raindrop is still a solid part of my workflow that i greatly greatly enjoy and i think that's actually about it for raindrop and the next is probably the most meaty and interesting uh input workflow which is my research paper workflow now the next input type i'm going to be talking about is research papers actual scientific literature research papers the stuff that most people think is not fun reading i actually really enjoy reading research papers and taking notes on them and i have quite an interesting and robust workflow around how i process research papers now i'm going to talk about several different tools applications and methods of dealing with these items of research now you can construct your own workflow you can copy what i do if you need links to anything you let me know but this is what i've been building for over a year now and it's something that's been working really well for me and i honestly just haven't had time to do a lot more with it but this is my workflow so i have a note in my obsidian vault as my academia mock and you can access this if you want to on my obsidian publish so there are several different areas like how do i find and discover papers or how these papers are connected via the citation tree my absolute top and favorite service for this is research rabbit now there's some other tools like connected papers citation gecko papers with code a lot of these tools are really awesome and if we go to the next page i have research rabbit here connected papers citation gecko which is a little bit more rough and kind of uh open source and then we also have papers with code these are all really great sources for finding and discovering papers i personally prefer research rabbit because there's a lot of excellent tooling that's been going on here i'm not going to go too into it just because i will be doing comprehensive overview videos on research rabbit because i've been working on a potential sponsor sponsorship and a closer working relationship with the developers at research rapid there's some wonderful people with a great mission and their product is absolutely top notch so i really enjoy a lot of what this service can do and it's honestly simply amazing with what this this can do like just finding these citation trees traversing through them timelines network graphs force directed graphs like all of this is absolutely incredible for finding papers now i can just do i can just follow this train all the way down and find and discover new research and oh there's a pdf i could download the pdf now some of these things are not they're not actually accessible but the citations are so this is where something comes in that on research rabbit i can actually grab all these items that i want even if they don't have the pdfs available into the public into a collection and then i can actually export this collection the entire collection to something like a uh let's see we can do it to a dot riz or a dot bib uh file and with these i can actually import those into zotero and zotero has a handy little plug-in if i go to tools and add-ons there is a handy little plug-in which right here zotero thigh hub and if you know you know so this would mean that if i have references to papers and i don't have a downloaded copy well handydandyscihub can go and grab them for you so with that you have a complete end-to-end workflow of paper discovery and citation tree navigation with research rabbit export to a dot bib or dot riz file import into zotero have this plugin refresh and now you have all of the papers that you need and you can continue on with the research paper workflow that i'll get into more in a bit so returning back to obsidian that's when we find and discover papers you can download by conventional means or use some of the rebel options that exist and after we get copies of papers you can put them into zotero which is my preferred citation manager of choice free and open source highly extensible lots of add-ons and plugins for it that really make it a dream to use simple but not too simple but not overly complicated or busy and there's a lot of really great things i love about it like their new beta and dealing with a built-in pdf.js pdf viewer and editor in internal storage annotations and notes so that they now have a mobile app and experience as mendeley just shut down their mobile app and they have x the ability to export these annotations exactly the same as the md notes and zot file workflows that we've been using this for a long time since my channel has been around but those workflows the only difference between the actual old workflows with the md notes and zot file extensions and the new beta is that the old way actually has the annotations on the file so it actually will let you grab exactly a link to that point in the file where that annotation is and extract that with a link the new way does not do that yet because the annotations live separate from the actual files so it's kind of difficult at the moment they might revise this maybe maybe not or maybe the plugins will have to be updated but for the time being i'm still using the old workflow but the new workflow is looking very promising and i'm really excited for when that gets you know polished up to the point where it has the same functionality but after we get the storage and we process our papers we can do writing in genko app or with latex or both because ginkgo app supports latex export and i'll get to ginkgo in a little bit we can publish papers and then you can do all of the you know scientist or research paper writing people networking stuff on lens.org orca that orcid or impact story which both of these are kind of fed from orcid anyways i got some links to various other things and this is all on my academic mock on my publish page if you want to access it so let's go down the line my zotero workflow once we discover papers and my preferred way is by using research rabbit find papers follow the citation tree you can add notes to these papers this way you can find suggested authors similar works and this app is still being actively developed there's a lot of great features coming out from the development team so don't take this as the comprehensive overview of this application because that is coming soon under a sponsorship deal with them so then we download you can download via the conventional means on the actual websites or if it has a download button it looks like we can actually download the pdfs this way or it will at least open up in the browser and let me view it here and then download or maybe it'll just let me download i don't know either way so you can go to these links download the pdfs and then or use the the rebellious methods and we download them they're in zotero now so now that once they're in zotero we can actually begin the note-taking and annotation workflow so i showed you before my tag taxonomy page that on research papers we have different highlight colors and i got this tip thanks to brie watson a contact in the knowledge management obsidian space on how they organize their annotation colors based on the apps that do this so yellow annotations however it connects to orange or whatever it is extracted as in zotero is an important important point by the author pink and red or whatever disagree with the author green is an important point to me purple or magenta is like that literary note that i need to look up oh here's a citation that i want to look up later so this note isn't done being processed until i've followed all those citation trees to my own satisfaction and that's why any of the actual notes for research papers are purple and incomplete until i actually follow those trees and then blue and if there's varying shades varying shades of blue for notes that occur after the initial iteration of note taking on that particular item so if i come back two months later take notes then those notes are actually blue highlights and when i extract them again they're blue those are the actual colors of highlights that i do on my markup so we have um that what i really in in zotero started doing this is that now i have these emoji tags which thankfully sort to the top of the tag pane and i have all these other relevant tags for items and i have a top level collection everything in zotero is stored at the top level in my library now what i do use some of these collections for are let's say i read how to take smart notes the book that everyone's probably read now to get into zettlecoston and any of the citations referenced in that book or any book let's just say i want to keep all that stuff in a particular frame of mind or context and what i want to do is i want to say okay these are all the things particularly from that source and so as i go through it i have the reference of okay i'm reading things from how to take smart notes so all of that can tie into my mental model of how i'm taking notes on this or link them together etc so the nested collections are really transient for me this stores relevant ideas and items based on how uh where i got them from so once i finish processing these i put them back into my library and that's it but in here i have everything and i have a taxonomy note here at the top level it's not inside of a nested collection or area so this is a simple note that tells me what those emojis mean and so i have information which really just filters out to just the taxonomy file i have my inbox my next reading my current reading and things i've finished reading now i really love zotero's tagging system because it's progressive so i can say okay show me things that are that i'm currently reading that about data science oh but also are about version control and oh i only have one thing here what okay so i had i had two but now i made it one and now here's everything that is tagged as reading data science and version control and i love this progressive tagging system because this means at the top level i can just store everything and when i want to filter down to something in particular makes it really easy to cut through the noise when i'm dealing with my inputs here and hell i could probably even add another one like an eyeball for focus like this is the thing i am currently looking at right now but honestly i haven't had a need because i'm not actively reading too many things at one time and uh yeah that's my tagging system and my taxonomy of this and i've made a video before on how to deal with sending these these files to your tablet for using an ipad or a tablet or really any tablet with any cloud storage solution that can put a file a folder on your computer to let you access your cloud storage to deal with a remote annotation workflow using a stylus and a tablet and your zotero papers so all of that all of that stems from zotero so we have all that workflow and then i can say open up any of these files and let's say let's do tidy data here so i have the actual pdf and i have in zotero i have it set to in my preferences i'm not using the beta right now i have it set to open in highlights the highlights application is a mac only pdf application i don't know of a good one on windows i don't use windows so i'm sorry i don't like windows um so here we go i have this pdf and then i've actually highlighted things and i've taken notes connected these notes together and all these notes are right here in the side pane i can actually hop to them and it takes me exactly to them i have this preview over here and this lets me then if i go back here extract by don't going to manage attachments extract annotations and it extracts them into this rich text format and from here i can say on this one md notes export to markdown or i can select multiple and batch export but really i'm exporting one file based on whenever i do it because you can see that there's dates here as well based on whenever i extracted it extract to markdown will then give me these markdown files and from this i can actually download or open these and then put those into obsidian and opening up one of those i guess i can't find that but what they look like is in using my special symbol tidy data right there i can then extract these annotations that look just like this so it has note on page one and then it has a link to ah so zotero the item page one but let's pick something that's a little bit less obvious so here's page three wickham 2014 page three there we go page three exactly this item so now this is a uri link a uniform resource uh indicator i think but the obsidian has these two to link to specific vaults or files so that's also a really useful tool is it basically says knock knock hey application zotero um oh what action open pdf the library items this item and onto page three so what i can do is i can actually open up that url it'll open up zotero if it's not already open and yes and okay i guess it wants to do something like that right now but ignoring that it will then open up the application and take me to page three which i'll pause and reset this because i don't know why it just did that for me alright so i've reset the scene now it doesn't really like to do this with zotero closed it used to do it before maybe i just need to update versions but in any case zotero's open i'm going to go to this link i'm going to say hey open up that paper to page three whatever that annotation is and look at where we are page three here's the annotation a data set is a collection of values and a data set is a collection of values as well as whatever notes i took on this which it does not appear to be anything maybe i just can't see it in here but yeah so it opens up exactly to where it is and that's one of the benefits of using the zot file and md notes workflow is that we get these handy links to exactly where that annotation was to facilitate our note-taking workflow and that's something i really like and don't want to give up so that new beta in zotero of their internal pdf viewer editor annotator and all of that until we really get to that point in the workflow where i have those links it's kind of not not pulling me yet but if when they fix that or when the up when the plugins update to allow this i'm gonna be all over that so next what we have is the actual writing part you know if you wanted to actually take these papers and write something what i actually really prefer is a service called ginkgo app so on ginkgo it is a really useful application and i pay maybe like um two dollars at the moment uh per month for this thing and my i think it's actually going up based on the new version of the application but this thing has apparently been around for a long time like over seven years like 2013 at least eight years it's really useful card based application to write so now i have these cards and i can use even vim keys to traverse and enter edit mode with enter and i've made a video all about ginkgo but this application is incredibly awesome for writing because also i can press the go into deeper levels of nesting here and press the equal sign and now i'm on a focus writing mode or i can do f and i'm in a full screen mode basically this actually makes it incredibly easy to um focus on writing as somebody with adhd and i made a whole video about this and why i love this for writing i write all my newsletters all my articles every bit of writing i do is pretty much is in gingko now and it also will let you export to plain text markdown html law tech word a presentation within press js or just straight json and you can just pick specific areas or even add custom html for headers or formatting and all this other kind of stuff for exporting your data as plain text this is an amazing application that i use for writing and taking all of your research notes for this and writing this is awesome and there's also templates let's see new from template and there's like an academic paper template that you could do and here we go here's a title abstract uh introduction materials there's all this other stuff to facilitate writing so ginkgo and exporting it to law tech so you can do it for any sort of journal publication is another great asset in your toolbox and then finally um networking is just you know these services like uh impact story orchid impact story or the uh i think it's lens.org now so let's go to those so lens dot org so orchid is really awesome because you can actually use this service as a unique identifier for your own work your personal it's like kind of like a social security number but for your academic research so this way you're easily found and no matter where you switch institutions there's multiple individuals that share the same name nobody gets credit for something that's not theirs and it all goes to the right person so in this way like here's mine and i have all of my information some website links my work history education some a single works of mine but all this stuff is available so that people can easily identify who the researcher is but this service orcid and their api feeds into several other things like really cool r packages by building the cv by building your um your works and your list of biblio bibliographical entries on your cvs if you're using like the um i think it's just uh vitae yeah the vitae package for curriculum vitae but orchid is also really useful because it feeds into other things like impact story and i don't have one here because i don't really have any publications for myself um i don't think i have anybody else on here but there's really a great there's this is really useful for seeing like your impact on whatever field of research you have and then there's also lens.org which is really cool because it is also again fed with orcid and i'm going to log in with my orchid here and you'll see how cool the lens.org is and this is also useful for discovery as well so we can actually go in and we can look at let's say scholarly works and there's a lot of cool things you can look at based on that api so all different kinds of really cool metrics and things to dive into and this all feeds from orcid so that's like the way of networking with all this knowledge and academia citations research papers this whole workflow now i'm not going to go through it because i've done videos on it before but editing papers using zotero's editor or just using highlights and an ipad or whatever any sort of tablet cloud service and zotero is written in the web stack so it's on every platform you can edit papers with a stylus and a tablet on your tablets and then you know send those annotations back to zotero and continue on with this workflow and that's a very complex very large workflow nebula of apps and functionality but research papers are probably one of my funnest one of the funnest things for me to process and that is kind of the sphere of things about how i use those things the next type of input i have is just pure thoughts and you're just driving along you have an idea oh i need to remember that that's when i work with my quick capture with the voice assistant and todoist but once i have those ideas and i have them somewhere i can pick them out and then actually make a note in obsidian for a purely original thought something that just occurred to me you know almost nothing's original anymore so like you think about it but it could just be oh you and somebody else spontaneously thought of the exact same thing kind of like how i think it was calculus or something with newton and somebody else or i don't know about how calculus was basically invented in two complete mutually distinct areas of the world at the same time through serendipity so same kind of concept is get the rough idea out brain dump get it out of your head and quick capture it so you can come back to it later and what i do is then once i have that quick capture idea i make a note in zotero on the zotero in obsidian and i write down all this information so the formation date title type tags whatever and then here's the actual like me working through it is what is my thought and then i make that bullet point what's the tldr of that thought it's too long didn't read what's the summary now i think about it i chew on that idea and i really start to okay let's think about this let's really dissect this and then what's the actual refined information of the thought the point then what are any relevant contexts to link this to what led me to this thought and just trying to facilitate that uh that process of trying to distill useful information from this rough idea because this is the input so this isn't actually the idea notes that come from this the evergreen notes this is just the playground though the sandbox to build something and so i get that all that rough stuff out just brain dump onto that note and then i refine those outputs into that input note into the actual evergreen notes in my system and those are the just pure thought inputs into my zettle costa and i start i prepend those with the equal sign and so i have one i haven't really i have a couple i actually haven't dove into too deeply yet like this one um about why people are afraid of languages dying and going away versus moving towards a common method of human communication yada yada there's a lot of just like brain dumping here about why and what is the reason to save dying languages just an idea something that where to get this thought from and this is something that i'm going to dive into and flesh out it's really raw rough here and this isn't something like oh i believe that this is what i believe or anything it's really this is a raw thought raw information just dumped here and so this is the type of thing that i might do for just thoughts that occur to me when reading something next thing i want to talk about is just some terminology that we use in this pkm space there's a lot of like actors and people in this space talking about a lot of really cool and interesting things and one of the very influential people is andy matushak who is i believe a former developer for apple and has done some really important and really big work and one of the cool things we've gotten from andy is also the style of website um right where it has like these sliding panes where things stack over to the side and you continue to open up new notes and i prefer that as kind of like a digital version of spreading your note cards out on your desk because it's all visible top level at the same time it's not quite as nice and easy as a physical note card spread out but it's digital system and a digital way of viewing this and the bigger your screen the more notes you can look at at the same time i guess but evergreen notes i've heard about evergreen notes from andy matushak there's also things that i've heard about like atomic notes or um maps of content or that'll cost all these different terms settle costume being from nicholas lumen the german sociologist who basically just took a note card for each individual thought and idea linked them together and kept citation information for the sources and basically created an inhuman amount and volume of work that still is astounding by today's standards and a lot of these systems are basically just resurfacing and people are rehashing it and talking about how to manage your information your personal knowledge connect your ideas and use those things as external frameworks for thought and let's break all this stuff down a little bit for manny matushak on his website evergreen atomic notes in essence a note should be an atomic unit of thought this note is particularly about language and how it is dying out in certain areas why does a language die that's an atomic thought if it's too big maybe it needs to be brought split up a bit but maybe you can talk about this is why languages die this is why languages should be preserved those two things shouldn't be on the same note they should be two separate notes maybe linked to a parent map of content or something but the the atomicity of ideas is take an idea and make a note only about a singular idea now people in uh using certain outliner applications like rome research or logsec or anything that kind of has all these different relationships between the bullet points of parents and children and all this other stuff talk a lot about how it's hard to do a lot of the relationship type associations and queries that they do in those outliner applications in a system like obsidian that uses markdown files as a unit of thought instead of an individual bullet point so it's a different paradigm but it's still possible when you treat these markdown files as atoms of thought so in a particular file and its very long descriptive name which is what i do is a single unit of thought not a particular bullet point within a file which you still can link to using you know block references or using header references section references all the different other different stuff is possible but the real power comes from just treating a markdown file as an atom of thought and then tying these things together into your framework and the whole purpose of doing all of this is to build that external framework and we'll get into that next but evergreen what the heck is an evergreen note and it might be exactly what it sounds like and every green tree is a tree that is green year-round but an evergreen note is something that is established it is always there present it's evergreen it's always in the peak of health it exists but what we do with evergreen notes is that we actively curate them over time it exists it's done quote unquote done but as we discover new information make new connections associations relationships and we flesh out more information in our framework we connect and revise and update and polish these evergreen notes and so it's evergreen just because it's constantly being under active curation and you edit update and expand on the knowledge you have but it's a done note it's done it's completed but nothing's ever really completed so what we do is we just constantly curate these active evergreen notes that are also atomic in scope so it's a very atomic idea about a particular topic it's evergreen but it's actively curated over time and then we densely link these things they have api like titles application programming interface it's a title that is descriptive of the atomic idea contained within that note and then whenever you link that uh that title of that note into any other note you can basically plop that in line in text so i could say adhd hyper focus is a double-edged sword of both deep work and avoidance and that is just a pure descriptive title of a note that i have on that topic that i can then drop inside of text in any other note and actually it reads like plain language prose and that is exactly the point so now those titles are descriptive they're like an api you know exactly what you're going to get and you can go into it and then get the data from it and then if you even wanted to link it to specific blocks in there using the block references and obsidian or if you're using this system in as an outliner like this there are ways of dealing that with this in log sect too there's a great video by um santa younger about using both logs and obsidian at the same time as two views into the same vault but we densely link them we curate them over time they are atomic in scope and then just constant curation of these systems through something like random note traversal or just following the links and associations is an active practice in space repetition it's not as structured and formalized as actual timed intervals which there are plugins in obsidian to do that on your notes i just don't but there is that option available to you so if you want to do that you can combine not only zettelkostin but atomic evergreen notes with a space repetition workflow to basically treat this as a huge incredible and useful external framework for thought that helps you retain connect and grow your knowledge base and your second brain and diving into framework for thought a little bit deeper let's talk about that a little bit an external framework for thought has kind of two major meanings for me one is the one that is kind of applicable to everyone who's really doing this nowadays and is in this space dealing with xenocostin and thoughts and notes and obsidian and all this other stuff the other one is actually how my brain works because of adhd and i talk a lot about adhd because it's my knowledge it's my normal it's my life it's something that is pervasive and affects almost every aspect of my life so of course i'm going to talk about it and i'm going to be speaking from the frame of reference of somebody who has this now the external framework for thought in the conventional sense to me is we can't hold all this stuff in our head and just like a programmer if you're sitting there for an hour focusing on a problem you're building all these abstractions you know there's a great comic by xkcd about it about how you're sitting there and you see these thought bubbles forming forming forming and building and there's little structures and stuff building in these thought bubbles somebody comes knock knock hey how was your weekend everything goes away all the abstractions you were holding in your head just disappear because you were interrupted in that thought process of holding all this stuff in your head building these abstractions and building the structure this visualization in your head of what is going on how to conceptualize this and with that external framework for thought you're not holding that in your head anymore all the connections of these ideas their relationships the actual fleshing out of the content is already in an external source a digital second brain with links and connections and tags and searches and filters and sorts and anything that can be operated on programmatically or with searching all this stuff is already available in a structured curated system by you over here you have an active practice and space repetition through random curation or an actual formalized practice of space repetition so not only do you actually have a better chance of retaining what you have in there but it exists external to your own brain which is the important point because now let's say you want to write a paper you don't know where to start oh hey here are all of these notes with their relationships and their connections that already exist let's pick a um what's something that you want to talk about and okay here's what i want to talk about i have a note about that then follow the links follow the links to every associated idea and all of their links and all of their links and all of a sudden everything begins to flow the structure the outline the prompt topic areas even some of the content is your own original creation and thoughts on topics so it's not paraphrasing it's not copy and pasting or copy pasta it's actually your own unique content on a particular topic so you can't always just directly copy and paste your notes into a paper but you have all of that work already done for you to then apply to this paper you polish it up you make it read consistently like prose follow the outline build a story and now you have that piece of content uniquely generated from your own content and thoughts but you don't have to sit there getting writer's block where do i begin have to build all these abstractions just to get into the zone to write something cohesive and even then is it really cohesive or is it only what you were able to abstract and build in that current moment versus having all of these relationships and links already made and built that you can then connect plop on the page and polish it's much easier to revise something than it is to create it from scratch in regards to writing at least that's how it is for me and my opinion because i already struggle with writing in general ginkgo app makes it a lot easier to deal with but doing anything like that without having some system like this to outline bullet point link my thoughts and connect my ideas together for writing is a nightmare i hate writing until i discovered this and this whole system of having this external framework so this ties in with adhd because i already have trouble holding anything in my head i will build my abstractions and then i get distracted because i can't retain all of that unless i'm in a hyper fixated state that doesn't always happen unless i'm actually interested in something interest-based attention so i can do this with programming no problem i can sit there for five hours nine hours straight building abstractions about code and figuring out a problem and doing some really intense deep work but if it's something i'm not super interested in like that like writing then it's a nightmare and i can barely handle it which is why these tools and approaches really help this external framework makes the abstraction process the organization the links and relationships and the prompts easy to deal with i can just look at that write some content okay we're flowing now it's building it's going it's going it's going and i'm done now i just polish and look through this draft it was a lot less effort than writing from scratch and now i have something that's a better quality product and that is why the external framework for thought works so well for me but also why this is a valuable system to even attempt to build why take notes and create and collect all these notes and knowledge if you're not actually going to apply it and use it even if you don't want to be an academic paper writer you want to write some fiction you want to make a dnd campaign or you want to just have some place where your thoughts are and live in an organized fashion so you don't lose anything and hey maybe you want to pass this down to some descendants or something here's what i thought about all these things and how my brain was organized linking this like dendrites in your brain rhizomes of tree roots the structures that occur commonly in nature this is a great organic system that grows in scales and becomes deeper nested and connected and has all this great information to help you facilitate a creative process as an external framework for thought it's a really great concept i get really excited talking about it as if you couldn't tell now i've already talked a little bit about uh mocks or maps of content already and i'm not going to beat the dead horse because i've already really kind of hit the point home of like what a map of content is like dendrites or the interconnected web of your mocks together um yeah there's the the term map of content came from how to make a complete map of every thought you think by leon kimbrough and they're basically useful higher order notes for jumping off points into your knowledge base if you have 30 000 plus whatever notes then you might want to have some level of structure even if that structure is organic network graphs versus rigid folder hierarchies because now you could say here's the topic here are the major areas of the topic here's some discussions about that major area and then here are the links and connected notes to that topic and the things that they're connected to and follow it from there but you jump off into that particular scope and area over there versus just randomly opening search which might not be helpful once your system scales to a point where you reach like a level of density of notes that it's not it's unwieldy at that point but also using hard links instead of folders and tags for loose association or status we don't need to file everything there's nothing that gets filed it's just a giant pile but using some of these structures of metadata and linking and search filter sort all this facilitates the discovery and rediscovery process without having to deal with a lot of cognitive load and management of a system where you have to find where something lives and file it and file everything there is none of that so you reduce the cognitive load of having to deal with all of that processing by just toss it onto the pile give it a piece of metadata give it a hard link and now you know and how you're going to find it there you go and i talked about how i made my mocks where i make my notes and i use tags which are really just bi-directional links to something that doesn't exist like the word society and when enough things tag that that note that doesn't exist the note called society then i can see the red node on my graph get larger and larger oh actually not that one i can see that node get larger and larger as a giant large red node on my graph if i can get my filters set up again and i can find those and say okay where is a great node for mocks and i probably need to filter out my journal again because i have many notes from there let's find a a large one and okay here's what magic okay uh where's another let's see okay here uh we got knowledge formation again so seeing these nodes get a lot of connections look at all those notes tagged with that and seeing them get bigger it's like okay that is a very large topic area in my vault that i should probably talk about and make it into a mock and that's why each of these mocks are big enough because i have so many different things connected to them that it makes it really easy to say okay i talk about this a lot i talk about adhd quite a lot make them into a mock and then every bidirectional link that exists to that note that doesn't exist yet all of a sudden now has a link to that note i talked about how you might have to do some refactoring after that to deal with not everything should be linked to the mock directly maybe you have subject areas but that's something that can happen over time as you actively curate but the whole graduation process of a note tag that doesn't exist yet into a full-fledged map of content is something that you can actually do with intention and make that happen over time and then use it yeah using the graph to visually see the nodes gaining prominence we can promote that to a mock and let's just say you want to have a view of a bunch of different notes on a mock that you don't want to have all those links to well this is where something like dataview comes in handy is that you can have a table of links to different notes that reference that maybe or some other search but when you have results in data view even though there are links that you can click and follow to the notes having them in data view doesn't actually connect them to the mock itself so you don't actually get all that link spam it's only what you actually hard link so dataview is a useful way of getting a lens into what is actually connected to your mock or not but without actually building excess links let's see here and you can use the backlinks pane with mocs to see what's connected to them or just what you actually have in line and then yeah the the higher order views so if i actually opened up my global graph and filtered based on my mock tag which i can do if my system will let me here and filter to a tag of my maps of content then this will show me only the maps of content and shows me the higher order structure of my fault my second brain all the different areas that i talk about that are outlined in a tree dendrite rhizome-like structure here's my main home index note and then all the areas that span off and around from my index note already right there there we go this is a great way of organizing your system organically there's no nested folders nothing has to live in five locations and be copied five times they all live in an organic network diagram like this and i can then show this higher order view of everything with absolutely minimal effort which is another key aspect is that it's not a lot of effort to do this and set up this process so i don't have to worry about all the cognitive load of having to organize this i just make my notes graduate mocks when it becomes applicable to connect them and then we're good and this is a high level view into the content of my vault and that's really all i have to say unlock at this point there's been several videos lots of explanations about it maps of content are a great way in my opinion of organizing your vault to see and connect and organize whatever you want without a rigid folder hierarchy continuing on with some of the reasons why xetocaustin obsidian and adhd all seem to kind of revolve around each other like binary or triple um orbiting stars there's a lot of struggles that come with having adhd and in regards to this field this practice a second brain frameworks external thought blah blah blah all this stuff there's a lot of struggles with adhd that really are made easier or reduced by having the system and the way that i use this system for me personally so like i struggle with working i think it's non-verbal working memory is the one that adhd people struggle with so thinking about something if i'm walking from one end of my house to the other and i need to write down or remember three things i can't literally hold that in my head i actually have to speak it so i would be walking through my house be like laundry dishes milk laundry dishes milk laundry dishes milk and i have to do that until i can like either write it down or i can chant that until i actually accomplish all three tasks and it's really strange to some people to see that but i literally cannot hold some of that stuff in my head at all if i just hold it in there don't say anything just walk to the end of my house i might remember one thing but i lose it and it's a real pain because i might need to actually remember something and i can't for the life of me remember it so working with that that's when something like quick capture comes in handy quick capture into todoist or something like obsidian if it's like a note but i also struggle with um it's not necessarily object impermanence um i've somebody actually corrected me on this but it's just the preference for top level structures and i have a note about this about how the with adhd something like putting vegetables in a crisper drawer or having tons of nested folders if it's out of sight it's literally out of mind and i can't find anything or i just won't even remember it that it even exists because they don't see it so i prefer the the top level structures and adhd people seem to do better with top level structures and everything spread out which is why you know clutter for us is not really clutter per se it might just be i can see everything i know where everything is if you don't move or touch my stuff so it's not so much that i'm you know messy it's just that i need to see everything and then it all has a place when i look at it but sometimes that gets to be too much too busy too stimulating too much going on then i need to put some stuff away otherwise i'm too overwhelmed then i can't actually do anything because i get overwhelmed or some sort of stimulation overload so with this point is i avoid nested folder hierarchies or i keep it very minimal like johnnydecimal or i rely on things like search because this makes it easy for me to find things because i don't have to dig through folders everything's top level i can just open up a search bar and find it and it's good and that is what i prefer about the issue of finding things and keeping top level structures so this whole zettlecausing system with maps of content no folders that facilitates a top-level structure of my knowledge management and my external framework for thought that it facilitates a better experience for me when it just comes to thinking processing and remembering things um and then i'm impulsive because impulsivity is kind of like a hallmark of adhd especially if you have like an a hyperactive type um and so what i might do is impulsively oh i'll read this later and then add it to a collection just constantly building uh up i wanna read that i wanna read that watch that later watch that later build up all these lists of things i'm going to get to and you know it gets that it feels good to build that list of oh yeah i'm going to read that later i'm going to read that later i'm going to read that later and just hoarding things isn't actually processing them isn't actually useful if you just read 50 articles about your top five whatever from medium.com that's not really useful or facilitating like new knowledge in your system it's just i mean in essence it's masturbatory it's not really getting you any value it just feels good to feel like you're processing things and moving forward and getting information it's the collector's fallacy you collect things and you build up this this collection of stuff but does it actually get you anywhere does it actually give you any value does it move you forward to your goal or are you just spinning your wheels feeling good about collecting stuff so getting away from the impulsive collector's fallacy is a really useful fat feature of this because also when you have to process things in this rigid way for xettlecostin you're basically looking at something and asking questions reading slowly really digging into the material not just reading something in the author's passive voice you actually have to think about it and that extra effort is both an issue with executive dysfunction of i have to go through all that effort to process this so therefore i don't have the effort right now i'm just going to do that later that's one aspect the other is you're only going to process things of quality input because you don't want to waste time with junk inputs top 5 vs code extensions that's not really going to be helpful for me when building my knowledge base over here something like why vs code revolutionized the software industry blah blah might be an interesting article you might want to read and understand something about the software industry and then add some notes about it that's the type of thing you need to be aware of is what is actually a quality input is it worth your time to process because you have to process it in a way that actually is providing value to you and your system so getting away from the collector's fallacy is a constant battle of dealing with impulsiveness but then again also executive dysfunction this is a lot of work and effort to go to to process an input in this manner in style so you reduce your need for decision making on where to file things that reduces the executive dysfunction issue now i think of executive dysfunction it's kind of like a mountain you have to climb now if it's a very low level of executive dysfunction i need to take out the trash that's not a mountain to climb that's a hill to walk over but i need to write a research paper that is like climbing mount everest the starting energy and preparation you need to do to get to that point of doing that type of task is huge so doing things like reducing the amount of decisions you need to make to reduce cognitive load and making finding things easier reducing decisions and making basically grease these grooves reduce friction make everything fluid easy top of mind top level and facilitate this work in a way that reduces as much friction as possible but still requires the rigorous reading and analyzing of the content so that it's still value added this is how this system both works and facilitates an active process for me having adhd and ultimately i don't like to lose anything ever which is why i outsource basically my entire brain to software i live off my calendar i have all my tasks in my task management system so todoist and ical insert calendar here doesn't matter but i have tasks i time block my calendar i live off my calendar i go through my tasks and then through all of the system of mocks filing filtering tagging all this stuff this is how i deal with my my life because i cannot hold any of this stuff in my head otherwise it takes up too much time energy decisions cognitive load and i get overwhelmed and i can't handle anything the more i externalize the more resources i have in my brain for actually having thoughts instead of storing them and that helps me manage all the things that i'm interested in and i'm doing in my daily life people ask me all the time you have adhd how the hell do you manage to do all of this i thought you guys were supposed to struggle with things like this i do struggle i just don't broadcast a lot of the struggles all the time but i also have identified strategies that make my life easier by using these tools methods approaches philosophy strategies and different things to help me manage my life without which i wouldn't be able to do half of what i do and i still struggle you just don't see it all the time and it's not always on camera and i do talk about it sometimes but there's a lot that just goes on that you don't see and this is how i honestly can keep on top of a lot of things that make my life easier to manage software externalize things to software so now we're going to get into something a little bit more like technical or personal which is what are the plugins i'm using in obsidian and why do i use them so let's go look through my plugins so in my community plugins i have add code mirror match bracket js and excuse me this really just adds more quality of life to vim mode because i use bim or the vim emulation inside of obsidian so without this yank a or um i guess yank i and then a paren here would be yank inner inner parent basically yank the contents inside of parentheses so if i actually did that down here and i did now parentheses hello and then i'm in vim mode that's why i have an orange cursor block i could do y i and then paren and that would give me the inner interior contents now if i hit p for paste oh it actually works but now if i do y a paren it gives me all of it so maybe that plugin isn't necessary anymore but normally there are some quality of life things in here that do not actually function and you need to usually make custom vim rc or bim configuration stuff to work but i'm just going to leave it on just because it doesn't hurt anything but that is also something that's really useful is delete inner yank enter for these different symbols that's more quality of life stuff for vim mode next is advanced tables advanced tables is freaking incredible i love this plugin and it makes life so easy because i'm going to add a table down here and again already with the plugin is table or whoops that's my templates table and i could say open the toolbar or i could say insert table um i guess it doesn't have the insert table anymore but uh oh that's right because i have a template i don't do this often as you can see so table insert a table template and so now i'm inside of here so title but here's where advanced table is really really awesome as i can hit tab then go to the next column next i can hit tab again and i'm now oh wait do i want to make a new column yes and i can hit tab uh and it makes it for me i can hit enter and now i'm here tab again here and then finally here now if i hit tab again you see how this one is all this pipe over here is like super stretched out i don't like that well when you hit tab and move in the columns of advanced table then this actually reformats your tables for you this doesn't change how it how it's viewed like if i just did that and actually rendered the preview it wouldn't change anything it would still look perfectly fine but this makes edit mode reading a lot easier for you and i love this this is without even using the toolbar because honestly i don't need to do too much with this and i would if i actually need to what i would do is probably just insert you know a column or a row so i could just do you know command uh row you know move row up down sort delete and so here's all the commands but oh my gosh assert row before current bam there's a new row new row here enter and now i'm here now you can't see my cursor because of my theme which is kind of annoying i can fix it but i honestly just don't care i don't really have a need to but now i could also like say um column uh insert column before current and now we have a new column and these are the main things i do for you know table management because there is a command to shift a row down or up but i mean i can just put my cursor here and do you know alt down up and down or option if you're on mac and that's all i need to do for that but inserting new rows and columns is an incredibly awesome feature the tabbing between cells or enter to go down to an excel is again really really awesome and a really value-added feature so that's what i use advanced tables for and i think it's a really useful plugin so next better word count and calendar plugin and the copy button for code blocks so better word count is really just this down here now that normally will just tell you like the the amount of words on a page um there's one for reading time but this one does characters i forget exactly the pros and cons but i do like that and if you're on the global graph view it will also tell you things like this many files this many words this many characters out of your entire vault and that is really neat as well there's also the calendar plugin which is absolutely a godsend that i think everyone should probably be using if they don't already there's ways of using like metadata tags on the actual daily notes to display tags here as well i don't really use that the dots show you the amount of writing on your daily notes but you can click on this and it would actually prompt you to make a daily note or not weekly note and then i don't think my request has been added yet the pop-up here yeah i think it was actually a request to make up a monthly note by clicking the month or the year either way but this is a great way of managing when you make your daily notes keeping your daily notes going like oh i missed one make it and so i usually create my weekly notes by clicking on the week this is a great way of keeping track of you know yeah your your journal and your weekly daily notes and the other one was uh code blocks so if i insert something like html and i want to say a paragraph tag hello world and now you can see that this has actually syntax highlighted that's another plugin is to have syntax highlighting in edit mode but now i have an html code block here now if i render this now the style of this is just based on css that i have so you can ignore that but the copy button here is the other plugin copying that i now have that content copied to my clipboard so i can now paste that and there's the content of the code block that is awesome and essential because if i have a lot of code or anything in code blocks that i want to copy and grab and use somewhere else i can just quickly click that button and now i have my snippet on my clipboard bam that's it and that is an incredibly useful feature when you have a lot of code in your system next three we have our cycle through panes dataview and discord rich presence i'll start with the last first and then the second so discord rich presence is really just um this little i think it's this icon yeah reconnect so it basically just says on discord that you're playing a game called obsidian and you can even have it set to say what note you're on that's kind of just like a cool status thing um the other thing ah my working memory fails me again because i don't remember what that was already cycle through pains okay so that one's a really useful one because now if i open up another note and let's say i'm on this one or i have several over here i can do control tab i think it is for me and i can tab through these different notes but also that would put me all the way over here but then when i close out of these notes it just sends me back back back down in my order of um where i was on it and that is actually a really useful feature for me because i often have many things open and i want to just tab through them or i just want to go tab to go to the next so cycling through panes is actually an incredibly useful feature for me as well as the maximizing panes which is i do with command shift x or ctrl shift x if it was windows and then i can quickly hit escape and get out of that mode it doesn't play nice with vim because if i'm in full screen mode and i'm in insert mode in vim and i hit escape to go back to normal mode like bam there it removes me from full screen so it's kind of a pain but bam and then finally data view i'm sure everyone has heard about dataview right now dataview is incredible because you get queries that really are incredibly powerful because you can also access the metadata in the yaml header of your files so i can easily just have all this different type of content available to me through simple list and sql-like syntax so i can basically just ask questions of my vault and have items returned to me it's incredibly useful and oh just an all-around great plug-in there's a lot of documentation to unpack and maybe i might make a better video about it in the future but dataview is probably one of the best plugins for obsidian some of these i'm not going to go into too much detail editor syntax highlight is just being in edit mode and you saw that i had syntax highlighting on the code block for html that's this is the plugin that does that i have extended math jacks for when i actually write um you know mathjax law tech code so it actually displays equations this is for an additional preamble for packages and extensions for other different things and so i think there's actually some stuff i do with this for managing equations with color descriptions but i haven't used too much of this recently but this is a really useful one if you do things with mathjax we also have file explorer note count this is okay so i guess this is not the word count one but this actually shows how many notes oh wait this is different yeah i love this one i just found this recently this one now so we have file explorer and we have full screen full screen mode so file explorer i love because now i can actually see under each of these folders no matter how many levels of nesting there are how many notes are inside of each folder so i can see i have 352 daily notes in there i got 15 monthly notes 57 weekly and two annual notes and it rolls up into into that total same thing for any of these other ones like i have all the counts of everything in here now the only thing is i don't have uh oh yeah i do have a root count for the root of the directory so that's a really useful facet of information for me because i like seeing the count of items on folders especially the nested levels and then finally full screen for the other one that i had open at that time is just what i showed you earlier is just i can now make this whole thing a full screen mode and that's really useful when i want to zoom in on if i have a bunch of leafs open and i'm cycling through the panes and i want to say oh no that one full screen that one to work on it there we go that would be like my workflow for that next i have highlight public notes i haven't done this yet and it's turned off but what i want to use this for is that when obsidian publish gets some option to basically have a yaml front matter key value pair like publish true or false and have that basically be what determines whether you want to have something to be published or not instead of just having to click on every item in the menu then what i can do is i can also have a key value pair that basically asks public and then say yes or no or have it look for the published keyword true or false or whatever and basically showing it is this a public note and then this would highlight it in red saying this is a public note so be careful what you put on there and this is a great visual indicator of when something might not be okay to put out into the public so be careful what you put on there i've already shown you my kanban boards before but this is done with the kanban plug-in and this is a great plugin that is also incredibly useful i like both of my kanban approaches with the dataview query table in markdown for that live updating thing list of things that are tagged but the kanban board is also really useful for moving things manually through processing if you wanted to do that as well kindle highlights i haven't dug into too much yet i still on my to do list i made a video about my kindle workflow with the kindle notes and i'm leaning towards doing kindle highlights plugin versus my normal bookscission and amazon notebook interface workflow so i haven't dug into this too much but that is what i'm going to be using for this meta table and mind map meta table is really useful because if i go to something like my map of content now this is edit mode when i go to preview this nice visual display is not done with css it's done with that meta table plugin this basically shows you a collapsible visual of the metadata for your note up at the top in a more aesthetic and pleasing manner and i really enjoy that next would be mind map and mind map is really useful for something to show based on the structure of the outliner or the headings of what does your note look like in a mind map and i have that linked to option m so for this particular video script for this whole video this is the mind map for it and it's really detailed so i have a lot of stuff going on here and we are about uh right here and so all of this stuff can be really useful to view through mind map because now i can just collapse different nodes if i wanted to you know collapse that one collapse that one done with that and we can move through all these different areas and work with this mind map and i really really like this plugin sometimes it's not the best experience if you're doing it in the mind map view and having to edit this you can't save this particular view of things so it's sort of unwieldy sometimes i can't add something from here now if i had it open on the side and i add new things that might work but it's also just useful to view and so that's what i might use it for here are three more natural language dates is basically just nlp or natural language processing you can type tuesday and it knows that you're talking about the next tuesday or if you could say in three days so three days from now whatever that date is that is the value and this is used in a variety of other plugins to help with natural language processing of date inputs by people so you can say for the review plugin i want to review this in three days and so this would then take that whatever your whatever link you're talking about and then three days from now add it to that daily note in three days um paste url and selection and pain relief are two really good ones now pain relief is another really great plugin that lets you use hot keys for manipulating and moving through pains as well as having pain history that is incredibly incredibly useful because now i can go forward and go backwards into the different history of each leaf pane that i have open so when i'm cycling through them they each have a history i want a full screen one i can do that and i can go back and forth in the history all three of those plugins play very nicely together and then one of my favorites is the paste link and over selection so if i have my website here and then i have some text i can select that text and paste link into selection is saying i'm going to paste over this text control shift v and now it's a markdown link to my website that is a very useful piece of functionality that i use all the time instead of having to type a markdown link or you do some special hotkey or anything i just ctrl shift paste and if i just do that um over blank it doesn't do anything but if you have any text selected and you do it there you go and i love that plugin because it's incredibly useful for me next i have periodic notes recent files and relative line numbers so periodic notes i use only to facilitate making a monthly note whenever i'm doing it so i can just do a periodic note and i can do open monthly note that's the only thing i use it for i could just do it a different way i could get rid of a plug-in but honestly it's just easy i just set it up and i just do that i have recent files which show me a pane like this that shows me the recent files that i have edited and i use this often because i might edit something and want to go back to it instead of having to open a search here is that search it's another one of those smart lenses into what i've just done today and then i also have relative line numbers so if i use vim mode this is essential so now i'm on line 219 but i don't want to have to type line 221 go there i can just say hey two down and now i'm two lines down or four lines up and there we go and that is what i love about that plugin i wanted relative line numbers for so long in here and now if only rstudio can do it too but relative line numbers using code mirror awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome because now i can easily traverse with vim up and down line numbers next i have review show current open note and sliding panes show current open note in the title is just this show my currently open note and the file path that's useful sometimes for seeing the file path um the review plugin is saying hey i want to review this in two days so in two days and looking at the calendar plugin is the the eighth so i want to say i think i just have it set to option r review add this note to a daily note for review or a block so r or capital shift r and yeah so let's just do this whole note so option shift r and i want to say in two days and so set review date there we go set note this one this whole script for review on the eighth and now the eighth exists if we go there it actually uses my daily note template which doesn't always play nicely but it does and i have some of these templates that actually work based on the name of the note which is a useful aspect i need to change that one but here we go review and here is a link for something that i need to review on this day and that is incredibly useful for prompting yourself with reminders when you get there awesome and sliding panes is simply just the fact that these panes can open up sideways so i can open up that daily note and now here's a pain to the side if i turn that off they would just be vertical panes that take up the equal amount of space but sliding means that they can collapse like that and if i open up that one then oops if i open up that one then i also have um i actually don't want to open up that that way but here we go see it slides it collapses these are the sliding panes and this was popularized by andy matushak and it's an incredibly useful way of viewing your notes and i absolutely adore it things like this or like ginkgo app that show like cards or panes or columns of content are really useful for me to conceptualize and visualize information and to have it all in front of me top level these next three are incredibly value added smart random notes supercharged links and tag wrangler so supercharged links are what i showed on my timeline that is actually what renders the links based on some yaml metadata some information that i have on it so if i went to here and show the raw view the book renders it with a book icon and the status actually renders the actual status item there so this is actually really useful for me to display metadata like this in a visual way supercharged links now i also have the open random note from search this is useful when i have a starred search for things that i only want to see like my only my evergreen notes or my zittle costs and stuff i can also just exclude paths i can say from this search open a random note and that is my active curation and that's really useful for me so i can just open up a random note from that search result and then i already forgot the last one because my brain hates me tag wrangler so we'll do tag wrangler and templater so tag wrangler is exactly what it might sound like is i can take a tag and i can right click and i can rename every instance of this link through my vault now when i do this through the command line with like said it actually changes a lot of the metadata about a particular tag about each particular file so it kind of screws up a lot of the modified date created date stuff for data view because of command line editing so this is probably a better approach but it's also really useful to make sure you don't accidentally change things you don't want to so it actually only changes the tags as entities of tags through the i'm sure the typescript interface for this so that's tag wrangler and then templater is absolutely incredible i need to make another new video specifically on templater but i have i think it's over a hundred templates so 104. i have templates for everything for anki for formatting for my input notes and the inputs are really just used with meta so meta just calls any of these inputs based on the file type and that's it so i don't even access those mark is a useful one i have so i can insert a template called marked for a markup or i just like to i know that mark is the html element for highlighting so i can do mark and i get prompted like what color okay let's do blue and blue and then i can actually do hop over there render it and now i have a blue highlight and now i got that from um i forget it's uh i can't remember their name uh somebody on the discord server who's a css wizard um yeah so i got that one from there but there's a lot of other templates that i have and templater is really awesome and their documentation is incredible because there's options that basically just lets you use arbitrary javascript so what i have like in my meta template is if statements if the file first character of the file name begins with a character that follows my special symbol taxonomy then insert the you know include the file my book template and so what this does is this basically just lets me say based on the first character of the file find the character and then insert the template for that type of input and if it's not any of those then insert the ordinary normal new template which is just my uh new typical uh evergreen note there we go a little sprit uh sprout seedling and that is just some of the magic of templater template is incredible and the documentation about it and then also just some of these plugins like dataview or templater letting you run large chunks of javascript is simply amazing like if i do mark here we go here is a straight up javascript code that is the um you know the the template template or template for mark and this is all done with templater and there's stuff you can do with dataview to have arbitrary javascript using dataview js that gives you even more functionality than ordinary dataview with just like the sql syntax sql-like syntax so there is a lot of power when you can just straight up write code for these plugins that allow you to get a lot more additional control over what you're doing and it's just incredible what you can do so dataview and templater like this are two of the most powerful and amazing plugins that exist especially when you start replacing certain fields in your dataview queries with templater when you make a new note like every daily note i have every daily note has a query that is inserted for looking for something every note that was made on a particular day and i just insert the name of this daily note into that query so every time i make a new daily note it shows me every other note that was made on that day and i have all these to relatively show me links that i care about so no matter when i make a day or if the review plugin makes a note it actually correctly identifies okay for this day this daily note this was the day prior the day next instead of it being on whatever current day i'm on and this is an incredibly useful part of date manipulation using this syntax and basically just javascript in general so i highly recommend dataview and templater plugins because they are incredibly powerful last but not least is the zoom plugin this was in the outliner plugin but i don't really like the outliner manipulation of bullet points very much so i kind of just stick with just the zoom plug-in because that's all i really wanted was the zoom functionality which is really what you see me do here where i have this and i just do a the hotkey which is like command period and i zoom in to this particular area and i get my little path link of breadcrumbs that's really what i use it for and this is really awesome for writing in obsidian when there's just too much stuff going on i don't have like a ginkgo app interface in here because no one's made that plugin yet i would really like to see it but until something like that exists this is a great way of zooming in on a particular point adding content and then zooming back out to get a focused view on what you're writing so i really like it and i use it all the time except if there was a day a ginkgo app plugin in which case i would be using that one all the time but those are the plugins that i use there's hundreds of them over 220 plugins as of right now for just the community plugins and i don't use all that many and most of them are just like for little pieces of quality of life they don't need all the shiny toys what helps you get work done be productive and facilitates your process not just what's shiny this last section is really just things that i recommend for people just getting into this or want to get some ideas of tools and applications and things they want to use and if you want to support the channel too there are ways of doing that without having to spend much if any money or just affiliate links or codes you can use so first off is and i will put links to all of these things in the description and or pinned comments so you can find these things there how to take smart notes a lot of people love or hate this book i really liked it because it doesn't tell you how to do this system because ultimately there is no clearly defined a to z way he could they could give an example um zonka arens could give an example of like this is a system but that's only one kind and by giving that kind of example you also kind of limit people's uh view of like okay well that's one and then i could expand to change or do something completely different but no framing it in like here's an example could also just point to this and then people might run with that saying like this is how i have to do it no so some people don't like the book because they think that it doesn't really tell you enough about how to do the thing and it's more about just like philosophy about why and where and um more about that which is why i hope that some of these videos and something like this video kind of fills in that gap a little bit hey here inspired to do this video to do this this type of work now this content a second second brain knowledge base personal knowledge management zettle cost and all that you read the book you're really inspired how do i begin well hopefully some of my videos and these types of videos like this one really help you do that and give you a starting point and show you like what what a productivity pkm personal knowledge management system comprises and what i think of it and maybe this would be a good starting point for you to get something up and running a minimum viable product and then iterate on it and change it over time to suit your unique needs and desires so i really like this book as a short quick introduction to why do we do this what are some of the pros what are some of the history and just why it's not too expensive it's like 10 bucks i think or 15 bucks uh it's a really great read that goes very quickly i read it in a day and it's just a really great book to also get some notes and some citations from for research there's some great academic citations in here that i still need to read up on but really recommend that book obsidian duh i mean that's why most people seem to be following my channel these days is my obsidian content so obviously i highly recommend obsidian for a zettle coston application i mean there's other things too that you could use you could use rome notion uh zettler there's there's a myriad of applications that are trying to expand into the wiki link bi-directional link because that'll cost in space now because it's such a hot topic these days everyone and their mother is getting bi-directional links but i still remain you know really committed to obsidian for zettel costan everything around this application the plug-ins the the markdown as a first-class citizen and using everything plain text offline first like obsidian is my go-to application for all things pkm now i do use logsec for my devlog but that's basically the only thing that's really external everything else i do is pretty much an obsidian and i really really really enjoy it for that raindrop i o you don't need to pay for it it can be completely free and still do almost everything you need you can't have nested collections which is really one of the major drawbacks or the long-term snapshots but if you don't mind it's really easy to use compared to something like pocket or some of the other equivalents but basically i really like raindrop for capturing articles and things i want to read and for a while i'm not sure if you still can do it but it was able you were able to actually read medium articles without the paywall through raindrop but i mean you can easily do that without just going to private mode too so there's that i do highly recommend and love my kindle i use a kindle oasis i'll put an affiliate link to there if you want to pick one up but i really really enjoy kindle and for reading books especially non-fiction or things that aren't too heavy or dense that requires a lot more annotations and note taking a lot more thought in which case i probably would use something more like a maybe the kindle application on my ipad or something and use like a stylus to markup or whatever i might do something different but for kindle for like non-fiction or easy books i really really really love it because it makes it easy for me to read in a place that is like you know not a remote forest area if you're on ios or have a macbook for airdrop the air application for podcast notes is incredibly helpful and useful if not a little weird trying to find out how to export everything but it is really useful if you're really big about podcasts i just am not i'm not really familiar with it anymore because i don't do it too often but it is really useful it's probably the go-to podcast workflow for notes from podcasts on ios and mac anki there are a myriad of space repetition plugins and tools in obsidian and i made a video like a comprehensive like the absolute state of space repetition which showed like all these different tools and applications um that are available in obsidian for doing space repetition natively but also how to actually set up obsidian to anki the sinking service between it or just doing things in anki i highly recommend anki as a service it is completely free it's open source you don't have to pay for anything if you're on ios you have to pay for the ios app but that's the only version of the application you need to pay for if you're on android it's free i love anki i use it every single day and it's one of the best things for honestly helping me through school research rabbit is my absolute favorite paper discovery service i love the developers i love what their product is i love their mission and i hope to do a lot of long-term partnerships and relationships and sponsorships with them in the future currently a lot of their service i think is actually still on the wait list and if you want to jump up to the top as well as help out the channel you can use my code tall guy jenks all one word try all caps and that would help you get a little bit more ahead in the line and it also helps me out with no cost to you research revit is amazing and i plan to do more videos on that in the future like comprehensive overviews and how to set up everything and do everything zotero completely open source free to use my absolute favorite reference manager now reference manager is an absolutely critical uh tool for people working in the academic space with research papers i've tried things like mendeley gibraf i don't know if i've looked at instapaper or any of these other things but zotero has my heart i love it it's highly extensible because it's open sourced and their new beta is looking incredible as long as it could catch up to the old style workflow with zot file and md notes but zotero i love it there's also some great alfred workflows with it too and the uri links ginkgo app i love ginkgo app for writing um it is a paid app and it's relatively low cost like two to five or so dollars a month at minimum i think it's pay what you want with a minimum of two dollars right now but ginkgo app is an awesome application for writing i absolutely adore it i do all of my writing in ginkgo app for school my business newsletter any articles from medium i write it all in ginkgo and i absolutely adore it it's something that has actually made writing easier for me with like focus mode full screen mode and the card workflow it's just incredible i highly recommend ginkgo i covered memex for actually doing youtube annotations i talked a little bit about that it's free you can use that and grab all the annotations you want copy paste into obsidian and done and i love that highlights the pdf viewer for mac that i use for zotero pdf editing because i store my papers in zotero in the zotero database i can open up the pdfs in highlights make my annotations and my highlights save it close it and i can extract those no problem highlights is a i think it's freemium is the term you don't have to pay for it i haven't paid for it everything i do with it is not paid but you can get like extra stuff for paying for it i just haven't um text sniper this one is also for mac only but there are equivalents for other systems but i love text sniper it's ocr or optical character recognition and what i love about it is that i can just do a hotkey which is command shift 2 for me so instead of like command shift 3 for grabbing a screenshot this will actually open up a text sniper to grab a screenshot of text like this and then it copies that to the clipboard i can paste and it does ocr to grab the text to make copy and pasting easier doing that with um anki has made it a breeze to copy text from other sources like pdfs which is kind of like scraping which is kind of grabbing text from pdfs is like scraping an egg off of a hot sidewalk it's messy i don't like it so using this is a great tool for grabbing text and putting it into anki quickly for making new flash cards but what i also really like about it is a feature that doesn't help me when i have headphones on and i'm reading my textbook is i have speed reading in my browser so i have an extension that will actually grab the text and speed it up and read it back and show it to me at speed but sometimes i want to just scan my eyes across the actual text but have it audio as well because that's an adhd hack which is read while you also have the audio book going and you can listen to the audio book on faster speeds than 1x so you're actually receiving input at a speed that is actually conducive to holding onto your attention and then you can actually scan the text at speed while also having it read to you which is enough to keep your attention and focused on reading to actually do reading in a normal environment so i actually really enjoy that hack but what i do is text sniper i'm not sure if you'll be able to hear this is that i also have a hotkey that while i'm in grab mode for capture i can do command s to turn text to speech on which i can also adjust the speed of and i can select some text and i'm not sure if you can hear that but it actually will read back that text to me out loud using the the apple mac default voice thing but it's really awesome because it is helpful when i'm reading a boring textbook sometimes and i just want to scan the text and have it read to me it it helps me actually put information in my head because i might be scanning but not actually reading in my internal voice to actually understand the text which is a problem because then it's like i just scanned this entire paragraph but i didn't actually read it so i need to reread it three four five times to actually get anything out of it well this actually having it read to you helps a lot which is why i really really love tech sniper and there's an affiliate link there if you do want to pick it up it's a little low cost application but it's absolutely awesome i use it every day to be honest next is logsec which is a free and open source application they just now have a desktop client but there is a web app that i've been using for a long time that syncs directly to github which i love i use it for all of my dev log and my technical content and notes so anything related to tech applications code all goes in there not myself costa and there's a great course on it by santa younger who i am using the his affiliate program for you can check out his log set course through this link which i'll post down there and i really really love logs like i use it every day at work i even got my my coworker and my boss onto it it's a really great tool for recording all of your technical notes and keeping track of all of this stuff again another mac thing is alfred app on linux it would be something like d menu maybe or there's some other stuff you could set up around d menu to help with this as like an application launcher but there's stuff like text expansion or shortcuts or workflows like opening up the zot hero workflow for opening papers in zotero there's a lot of workflows around alfred it's a kind of pricey but pay once application uh it's pretty much the one thing i would recommend like absolutely the number one paid app i would always get on a macbook which is alfred alfred is pretty awesome it's kind of really fully featured there's a lot of stuff you can get on it so i highly recommend that the next one i haven't used too much but is math picks this is really useful for you know grabbing a screenshot of a math equation and then making it so you can actually export it to things like um math jacks or pure law tech so if you do a lot of things that work with formulas math picks is awesome there is like you know there it's freemium so like there's only so much you can actually uh gather with it like it's like a maximum of like a hundred screenshots or something per month on the free version but uh if you don't use it more often than that like obviously i don't because five months ago it's a useful free tool to appoint and i really do recommend it because it's actually really great with how it captures formulas to displays you know in other formats and then finally todoist for quick capture todoist has been incredible that you can email tasks to it and it can go to a specific project there's projects tags priorities natural language processing quick things like you know app for a tag and then the hash for a project and then uh p1 for the project or for the for the priority and you could say tomorrow to actually do a nlp natural language processing reference and then i don't think you can do due at 8pm well there you go so then all this stuff is all done with natural language processing and quick capture hotkeys so you can just do you know p1 there's the priority hashtag there's your projects at there's your tags and then do natural language processing and then your actual task itself todoist is incredible it's good enough it's not overly complicated it has enough features and enough uh bells and whistles and functionality to really get everything i need done without over complicating the system and me getting lost in just endless configuration which as much as i wanted to like um which was it uh it wasn't alfred it was um marvin amazing marvin as much as i wanted to like amazing marvin there's just too much and i got lost in the configuration and all the features and the shiny ui and it was just too much for me to actually be productive so the same thing goes for notion too much for me but todoist is a perfect middle ground it looks great it works incredible incredibly and it's enough to get the work done highly recommend these tools links to all of them and all the stuff will be in the description and or the pinned comment depending on what i have space for and do check them out if you want to support the channel these are some great ways to do it along with just the typical github sponsors is my number one top way of supporting the channel because they don't take any fees patreon or one time donations with paypal or buy me a coffee or if you want to support with no monetary means at all or anything like this just sharing the videos commenting liking subscribing being active and helping the algorithm is probably the next best way to help out and thank you so i want to say a big thank you to all of the patreon patrons and github sponsors for supporting this channel this is never required but i highly appreciate everyone who does support the channel it does make it more motivating for me to continue to produce content and i finally got around to doing this video it's been long awaited long asked for and i finally got over my executive dysfunction to make it and i'm really happy and thank you for everyone's support for helping me get to this point where having content like this be desired where people ask me for it support me and you know show their appreciation it's just it's an awesome and incredible thing and i love to speak to all of you through my newsletters through email so thank you for sponsoring and thank you for supporting the channel and i hope to see you in my newsletter and on my sponsors and i would love to talk to you more [Music] you

Channel: Bryan Jenks

Views: 44,641

Rating: 4.9608521 out of 5

Keywords: bryan jenks, obsidian, obsidian app, obsidianmd, obsidian.md, obsidian note taking app, zettelkasten, evergreen notes, tallguyjenks, obsidian workflow, personal knowledge management, pkm, obsidian graph, bryan jenks obsidian, obsidian bryan jenks, comprehensive obsidian workflow, zettelkasten workflow, obsidian zettelkasten workflow, comprehensive zettelkasten workflow, comprehensive obsidian zettelkasten workflow, bryan jenks workflow, bryan jenks comprehensive workflow

Id: wB89lJs5A3s

Length: 244min 30sec (14670 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NorsemanCrafts]

So I don't really have it in me to do things like making digital courses the way I want to right now and I have many other priorities to balance, so I just filmed 4 hours of pure PKM content live premiere on Monday 0830 UTC-7
You can watch it here on Monday!:
https://youtu.be/wB89lJs5A3s

[u/EttVenter]

Yo dude. Fellow ADHDer here. Your videos have been so helpful!

[u/steamingtoad132]

I'd prefer this being posted when it actually can be watched...

[u/morningitwasbright]

Thanks for all your work, Bryan!