Master a Zettelkasten Note-Taking Workflow in Notion from Scratch

hello and welcome back to another video my name is martin and in today's video we'll be covering how to do the zettelcaster method in notion so before we get started i just want to say that this video is proudly sponsored by short form and we'll be covering more about them later so what is the zettel casted method i'm going to assume that you roughly know what notion is um if you don't know it is sort of a a free-form collaboration tool for notes and documents and uh productivity as well um uh and you can create almost anything you want in it so zettelkasten so the word uh is an unusual word it's german for slipbox and came from the german sociologist nicholas lumen it's a note-taking method that helps you really um distill your understanding of the books you read and the articles you'll read and help you create essentially cards of atomic ideas and then you link those together and where it's really powerful is that once you have these cards once you have these notes you can start seeing the insights between different things so i put this graphic together so you start with say fleeting notes and these are just like your ideas maybe you've seen a quote i use fleeting notes if i'm watching a youtube video or reading a book i'll just scribble down the bits that i find relevant out of there then you've got literature notes and that's where you take those bits and you start forming your understanding and you're you're really drafting where this is going for you in from that original piece of work and then you move that into your permanent notes where you're starting to take those and you're placing it like a piece in a bigger jigsaw puzzle you're making sure it fits with your existing understanding and your existing notes and you're bringing that all together so fleeting notes are just literally the temporary kind of raw capture the literature notes is where you take that and sort of formalize that understanding and the permanent notes is where you place it in the bigger jigsaw puzzle of your overall understanding so that's from all the books that you've read and all the videos you've watched those kind of things now where the zettalc acid is really amazing is that when you have an atomic note you can then link it to something else you don't have to repeat things you don't have to go too deep and the idea here is that one note you should be able to pull that out of your zettle caston you should be able to read it and it still makes sense to you and if it doesn't make sense then maybe either you're not clear in your note or you've just got more questions of which then you have the links to start answering those questions so that's really really really powerful and it helps you essentially organically grow your notes without having to do big documents and complete things from top to bottom to end you know in one big chunk and when you have all your notes in a zettel castle you can then start asking questions against that and that helps you form your understanding and test your knowledge and you'll either find that you can join things together out answer a new question and gain an insight or it means that you've got gaps in your understanding so you can go and then find the right books and articles and things like that to feed back into the process to help answer that so uh if you're curious about more of this um if you really want to go deep on this uh the book how to take smart notes by songkate aarons i highly recommend that that is what really distilled my understanding of the subject and i've got more videos on how to use it and different techniques uh on this channel so do consider subscribing so moving on notion what we're going to do i'm just going to rattle through notion and show you a workflow for the zettler cast and that may work for you and if you're new to sort of some of the in-depth parts of notions setting up tables and bi-directional links and things like that then hopefully you'll gain something there um but we'll basically just go through it and the goal here is to give you a framework of which to create your own zettel cast and workflow in notion so um this is a brand new notion uh it's completely free to use for personal use so that's really cool and um what i'm gonna do is i'm going to set up a notion table which will be the container for all the notes that we have so i'm going to do that very quickly and uh this should make sense so i'm going to call this zettocast and i'm going to go and create a table and i'm going to call this my uh which local i could call it my second brain strictly speaking second brain is a variation of note taking it's not really originally from the xether and i could call it the slip box um but i'll for me i'll call it my um my slip box okay so my notes i like to give my notes titles i don't give them names so let's call that title and we can keep the tags so you can just free form just kind of tag things if it's a particular subject like psychology or health or diet those kind of things you can just tag things up there and it's a nice way to just recall things back out and see where you're at i then like to have a note type and this would be a select type and here i would say whether it's a fleeting note a literature or permanent note so i'll put these types in and there's two more types that i like to put in one is a map of content and a map of content allows you to um organize sort of a table of contents into a subject because when you've got lots of individual notes it's really hard to know where to start so you use different maps of content and bring that in like a yeah just a high level overview like an index to it and the other one i like to put in is questions well it's a question so i could ask a question and here i would start linking in the notes that are relevant to that try and answer that question and then maybe that becomes a new piece of insight where questions are really good is you may be thinking of creating a blog post and you want to start with a question like the example i like to do is how does um how does imposter syndrome and uh what if i go to my example yeah so your brain stress triggers an imposter syndrome how do they come together there might be an insight in there and that's how you can look at things in a slightly different way and the other thing that i like to create here is a status so i know what part of the workflow my notes are in and we can then build workflow views off of this so let's create a status and here i would say to do in progress i like to create ready to process so i might have a backlog of things i want to study i want to create fleeting notes from them i might be doing that so i put it in a to do so like going through a lecture or a book or something like that and then once i've done that i'll put it in ready to process which means i'm ready to start taking it through to literature notes and the permanent notes so i'm sort of capturing this workflow to go from here to here it's here and then finally done okay so here i have a table where i can now place things in and as we go we may want to create more columns for this just to get a feel for things that are useful to capture um an example might be if i'm reading an article i might want to just put the link to the original article in that would be pretty cool so next thing is to create some kind of template that we want to use when we create a new note and i keep mine quite light but i do prompt for a couple of things so in here we can go and manage our templates and we can create a new and we could separate a fleeting note template a literature notebook but i'm just going to call it a zettle casting template so in my template i just want to capture a couple of things um for example the main thing i like to capture is a references or see also section so i'll just place that in here and put something very light in to signal that i want to link things together and i'm going to create a numbered list and just leave that there and i'm gonna turn this into a heading two okay there's not much more to it than this but the idea here is that you can create templates and you can if you have a style that you you want to capture properties you want to capture maybe even default some of these then you can absolutely do that so i'm going to just leave that now and now i've got a zettle casting template so let's run an example of this so one of my favorite books that i read many many years ago is called grit by angela duckworth so this here is a book about why people are successful and what are the traits that make people successful and i originally listened to the audiobook and absolutely loved it so i have some notes on that at the moment so essentially i would call this a fleeting note so let's create this here so i'm going to say grit by angela duckworth again i'm just going to create a zettel casting template here and that will now populate uh this i could be more um verbose at how i do this i could have like a link to the book and then put the type you know put the graphic of the book in i could certainly do all of that and notions really great at that and you can create a gallery of just your books which is amazing um but i want to go um quite lightweight just to really get through the workflow here um so let's take my fleeting notes i'm just gonna paste these in so you get an idea of what they would look like for me so um as you can tell there's probably some spelling mistakes in it and that's all fine it's a fleeting note so let's call it fleeting note and uh let's say this is in progress because i've already got the notes already but i could create that backlog and um in this case the tag would be grit for example and maybe i want to tag it as a as a book reference as well and things like that again this is your note-taking system you can customize that um just a word of warning if you go really rigid in terms of your structure then you might find that it doesn't quite fit i personally like to just be quite freeform i feel that the tools should uh allow me to go at maximum kind of you know speed of thought and then figure out what my intention was i don't want to have to stop and organize things up front so you'll see my approach is generally quite lightweight but that's you know personal preference so here are my notes now what i would do here is now use this to start creating some literature notes from this i won't go in too much depth over this because we're really talking about the workflow rather than the book in particular but some of the some of the ways i would approach this so we have some higher level concepts so perseverance passion grit versus con versus consciousness for me those are sort of the keys that i would use to create an individual note from so let's do this so what i want to do is create i'm quite uh quite lazy and i like to let's bring this out as a separate window so i can work side by side so i want to create a reference and then kind of the work that i'm doing so on the right hand side we'll have my my book just open that as a full page so what we have here is something to work from so i can create notes about say uh angela duckworth in in particular and i would probably do this directly as a permanent note because i'm just merely sort of stating a reference a fact so i would do that so in this case so i'd create an angela.worth this is a person and so i can look and you know filter all the people i've referenced and uh without really spending too much time i'm just going to paste in these bits of information so what's really good about this oh that didn't copy properly is let's say now i'm i'm writing a blog post where i'm talking about angela's work and i want to introduce her i can just link in this note i've got an overview she did a ba in neurobiology an msc in neuroscience and a phd in psychology and she runs the character lab project and again i could go and dive into that in more depth if i really wanted to i won't at this stage so that's a person and we'll call this a i'll call it a permanent note because it's sort of my final thinking and i'm just going to say that one's done okay so let's now look so talent and in and intelligence um so there's some thoughts around this so let's create a literature note on here so talent and intelligence and this is a literal note so i'm gonna just now think about this let's create a zettle casting template first of all i just want to reference back my fleeting notes and this is where you get the bi-directional linking so if i do a double square bracket i can then search for the original page which is called grip by angela duckworth gripped by angela duckworth and now i've got that reference and you can see over here we've got this backlink so now i can see where i've referenced this i could have done the same for uh the angela duckworth entry there so talent and intelligence what does this mean to me i've read this in the book um so i'm just gonna just free form my own thinking about what i've learned from the books then i can start just cataloging that high-level thinking so i'm gonna do that right now there's really not much more to put on this at this stage i might find other things further down that i want to populate in here but i'm just capturing that andrea duckworth concludes that talent and intelligence is not as critical to success than grit is right okay well now we start needing to talk about well what is grit so let's go and i can tag these later i wouldn't worry too much about i want to i want to keep the flow of my of my thinking and catalogue later and all of that so um so let's say let's create grit so this will be a literature note and um and again now if i've if i've accidentally lost the ability to create template i just press backspace to clear the contents create this i'm going to reference the book again so here what is grit i'm just going to write this down well actually i'm just going to copy these um again because i've got the reference that's where it's come from and i can add my own thoughts here if i if i wanted to um sort of conclude what that really meant so that if i'm reading this back in say six weeks time i can look at that and it still makes sense okay so let's assume that you go through and you keep creating your literature notes and you can mark these it's ready to process ready to process what we want to do is we want to create a bit of workflow now around this so here we have our slip box now we can create some linked databases to the slip box which is really fun so let's go and create a linked create a database link to the slip box you might have to search if you've got a quite a big okay now this for me will be i'm just going to expand this out this for me now is my workflow view i'm going to add a view called workflow let's create a board um so and we can create galleries boards so if you just want to have like an overview like you create gallery of just books that'd be cool and you could filter by tag if it's a book for example okay so here's my workflow and i can change the uh the grouping i have to remember how to do this by not note type by status okay so now i can see all the things that i have to i've got in my backlog all things i'm doing all the things i'm ready to process and i could just hide the done ones so yeah i can basically create this workflow here i could rename this if i wanted to say actually call that um uh to do or yeah so these are the things that i want to work on these this is my to-do list of things to to do and i can drag these around to prioritize which ones i want to do and the idea is that you keep sort of do your studying do your processing keep that workflow going feed stuff in and move it through the workflow and eventually you start building up your slip box and then i might want to create a new one called questions so let's create another link back to the table and say well what are my questions oh uh i did that wrong and then i could call create a view and call this questions and now what's really interesting here is i can filter this by the note type where it is a question okay so now i could say uh what if one of my studies wanted to say can you gain can you practice grit for example okay i might have that question you see how it comes up now in all the views this is a no type of question because we're filtered by that and i could put that as a to-do and so i can start formulating ideas of this and then i can go in here i can create the template and i can say well what's going to be my source of reference here and i can double double link and say bring in things like talent and intelligence and reference things that would be in my my permanent notes for example so this is really just showing how you can create different views different parts of the workflow you can filter you can sort you can group um and another one that's really kind of cool is say the gallery view so let's create um a map of content and we'll we'll just call this one grit and the type of this will be a map of content let's just say this one's actually in progress okay and here we could say like a table of contents where we would say you know one and then you can start linking so we got i could link to this to talent and interest now i don't have many permanent i haven't got any permanent notes in here at the moment normally i would link to those um but i'm just showing you how you can create a map of content um and then you could add a cover to it for example let's change that cover and do an unsplash we'll call this so grit uh i don't know something hard work um there you go grit uh a random random picture that shows someone being gritty very literal in in that but the cool thing here is now i can create a page which has again a link back to the database back to the slip box but this time i'm going to add a view of gallery call it maps of content and i'm going to filter this where the note type is a map of content so now we have this but the cool thing with notion is that you can change the properties you say i don't want the page content i want the page cover and you can build up a really rich view of the content you have in here and it's almost like your own kind of visual library of your understanding and as you build up the things on grit on health on psychology whatever whatever you're interested in you can build that up and you can organize these into different different pages and um and essentially basically what we're doing is we create one master database that stores everything and you create the workflows around there and then you create the views based on that to move it around the workflow and uh yeah you you work work on it um i won't go into too much detail about how to create the notes specifically i will cover that in another video especially around this book in particular it'll be a study session so if you're interested in how how i would take knowledge from a book and actually create those notes um i'll cover that in another video this video is really about how to utilize notion as a way to create multiple views multiple ways of storing and thinking slicing and dicing and all of that you're you're zettler cast in slip box so don't worry too much about the specifics of like why i've created this note here and not there and um it's only because i'm going through it in a tutorial of notion rather than a tutorial of the zettel casten but hopefully this will give you a good good overview what i would do is i'd probably reorganize this page move this maybe out of view and sort of work more in these so if i wanted to create something on the backlog um on my to-do so like a good example is i read an article i just quickly throw it in there give it a fleeting note put it in to do and now i can go and read that notion has a web clipper so you can actually if you're reading something on the web you can just push it straight into notion which is which is really cool so yeah that is sort of the overview of how i would use notion to create a zettel cast and notetaking method so this leads us to our sponsor of the day which is short form short form is an online book summary tool that basically takes the most popular books and distills that down into not just the summary but the insights as well and that's something i found very useful in my research when using this service um when you read a book you normally just get the narrative from the author's perspective what short form are able to add is to counteract that with what others are saying around there and i think that's a really unique unique position for them to be in so what does it look like so here's short form and basically you have a growing number of books completely relevant to the things that i love um for example the book grit which we covered in this video um was summarized from short form to help the creation of this video and that saved me a lot of time it has been a number of years since i actually read the book and i have to confess i did not remember everything about it and short form have saved me quite a bit here so there are several categories that you can choose from my personal favorites which ones i think you'll love will be things like the productivity um because we're all about you know being put up productive with our note-taking um i particularly like the motivation side because i think there's an autoduct journey in being a knowledge kind of someone who loves knowledge and wants to do something and that comes from within that intrinsic motivation is really there and i'm a big proponent of that and self-improvement as well i mean we want to get better at doing things and we want to optimize things and we want to learn more about ourselves and i think the self-improvement sections are really great there but of course there are many other genres that you can cover as well so um in my case the book i read was grit for this video and um the true lifesaver of this was the one page summary because i had read the book before i didn't have time to really go in deep i knew the concepts and i sort of remember it but i couldn't get the specifics the one page summary is fantastic where you can go in you can highlight what i did is i created my fleeting notes from this and uh if if i found that actually it was a little too light in kind of my understanding i didn't really get what the book was on about don't worry they got you covered uh the full summary goes in in depth uh throughout all of those so short form thank you very much for your service here uh i really appreciate it as a content creator i certainly appreciate it and as a automated act as well who loves note-taking and learning and self-improvement and sharing that this is a valuable tool that will be hugely hugely valuable so if that's of interest to you then you can go and get a five day free trial by going to short form dot com forward slash martin and they've kindly told me that the next 100 people who sign up to the yearly subscription will get a 20 discount on that price and i did the maths and that works out roughly two months and 12 days of short form for free if you go for the 12 month subscription so go check them out and thank you short form for sponsoring this video so there you have it this is a conclusion of using notion and the zettelkaster method together it's a bit of an overview it's really showing how to use the workflow and how to look at the zenfone casting in that lens if you want to see more content around the zettelkasa method and notion and maybe some uh study sessions so you can really see how it works then give this video a like do consider subscribing and if you've got any questions leave them in the comments below because i do listen to those questions and it does make me think of what content i need to cover to help you with your zettle cast and note-taking journey so thank you very much and catch you in the next video you

Channel: Martin Adams

Views: 66,757

Keywords: grit angela duckworth, how to do zettelkasten, how to take smart notes, how to use notion, niklas luhmann zettelkasten, notion, notion app, notion tutorial, notion zettelkasten, second brain, second brain notion, smart notes, smart notes notion, zettelkasten, zettelkasten in notion, zettelkasten method, zettelkasten note taking, zettelkasten note taking method, zettelkasten tutorial

Id: dbdgMuBplW0

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021