My 2020 Comprehensive Obsidian Workflow For Zettelkasten and Evergreen Notes

[Music] welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and today i'm going to be talking about how i use obsidian for my personal knowledge management system obsidian is a free application that you can go and download off of obsidian.md and it has a very welcoming and very active community of developers and supporters it's a very awesome application i've made a small video about it about it versus rome for personal knowledge management and i'll probably link that up there and i will be doing a walkthrough video as it currently stands when i'm filming this september 21st literally minutes ago version 9.0 or 0.9.0 was just released for insiders which is what i will be showing you today and some of these features may not be available by the time this video is posted unless you are an insider so without further ado let's jump into obsidian so my approach to personal knowledge management with obsidian is a combination of nicholas lumens zettelcosten and andy madishak's evergreen notes and atomic notes i kind of combine these two different paradigms in a way that makes sense and works for me and i'm going to take you through a to z what i do and how i use this application you can see my graph view here of all of my current collected works knowledge and notes and how it's currently organized but a little bit of an overview on zettelkostin and andy matashek's evergreen notes there are plenty of other videos that have actually done far more research and can give you a better rundown of exactly what those systems entail but i'll just give you the gist and kind of like what i'm taking from them so zado costan and nicolas lumen was he was a german sociologist who used his this own system that he created with note cards and by linking these cards together was able to basically put out enough academic work that it was just incredible the amount of output that he was able to create through using hit this system that he developed and what he would do is he would read literature academic papers books that type of content and then you read this this material and then you form ideas the ideas are the precipitate of this you know knowledge acquisition and you capture these ideas because you're not copying pasting you're not paraphrasing you are generating your own unique ideas your own unique content you take those ideas and then what nicholas did i believe it was like linking it to the bibliographical information he saved on a separate note card system but in essence these ideas would be linked to other idea cards through a certain like indexing like system or pattern that he developed and we don't really have to do this anymore because obviously we have digital tools at our fingertips but when nicholas lumen was doing this uh using this system they didn't have these digital tools available and what he'd had was this amazing system of like 90 000 index cards all interlinking together and forming trees and trains of thought and so what he would do is he would review these cards and lay them out on a desk and read them and see where the ideas were flowing and he would write and the whole purpose of a zettel costan is to have your thinking aided and in the most part done for you it's a thinking partner so if you're sitting down to write and you're staring at a blank page you have to do all of the footwork then and there whereas if you relied on a settle costin it's okay i have a jumping off point i'm gonna look at some cards and i'm gonna read and review some of this stuff and that's an interesting idea i'm gonna write about that okay you start writing a little bit okay but now how what do i connect this to where do i go with this well what was that card linked to you start following these pathways to different pieces of information and see how these connections are made and then you generate content writing video whatever it may be the whole point and purpose of this is that you have an output and there's a very great book about and the whole purpose about why it's such a great system for fiction writers academic researchers anybody who really writes and wants to have a creative outlet and utilize knowledge work and it's how to take smart notes by zonka arden this is an amazing book it's a quick read it's about 140 pages absolutely worth your time do check this out i'll put a link in the pinned comment but this is an amazing book this details how nicholas lumen used his system and why using a zettle coston is so useful and helpful to your own process and one of the key points that i took away from this was when you're writing a research paper for instance you start off with i want to write about that now let me go and look for the sources around that now if you have a prompt and you have to write about something you know that's that's the way it is but if you're going to do something in like a field like research maybe you don't want to find only supporting arguments and basically reinforce confirmation bias you want to look at the whole view but human nature dictates that we are already constantly trying to reinforce our own echo chamber and we only want to look at things that agree with our you know opinions and our own basic premise so where zettle costume kind of turns this on its head is that you start first with reading broadly read differing opinions read all over the place generate your ideas the precipitate and then you take those ideas file them in your system your zedelkaston and you can reference those papers and where you like got the ideas from and you'll have that network created but where the power comes in is that now you can just write about your ideas and see where all the research was connected to so i can just follow my train of ideas talk about what i think and how i've uh generated this paper and then my sources are just whatever was connected to those notes by their original source literature note and with that you could also get papers that were in a completely opposite perspective of an issue so you could have conflicting papers seamlessly used in a single consolidated form so in that way you're not reinforcing your confirmation bias you are looking at the whole perspective and using your ideas as that first roadway to really generate that content i'm probably not getting 100 all this 100 right but in essence what i'm what i do is sort of in line with that and then i mix in parts of andy madishak's evergreen notes which is really just distill an idea down to its simplest component so it is a note in of itself and it has one one concept one purpose and you link heavily to that note from all the other atomic notes and it's really the terms is the atomic and evergreen notes an evergreen note is something that you might return to over time improve it add new new content new links new update it and over time refine these notes to just be something that is like an evergreen tree it's it's constantly growing it's mature it's stable it's there and you have this forest that pops up over time of all these evergreen notes that is your collected knowledge so needless to say i'm a little bit you know obsessed with this whole realm of pkm zettlecoston atomic notes evergreen notes i'm obsessed with all this stuff at right now so i have been deep diving into obsidian into all of this sphere of things so enough waxing poetic about it let's actually look at okay what do you do how do you do this this is cool but what are you actually doing in obsidian well let's dive right into that so because we have digital tools now we no longer have to rely on analog analog index cards some of the greatest features that i use in obsidian are searching and mass editing for instance so if i could just open up a search window and i could type let's just say anki and i have a bunch of stuff in my templates i guess so let's actually do space repetition and i can see everything that pops up for space and it uses fuzzy searching so i can actually find other things that might be close but not related in this case it's easier to jump into an avenue of thought because it's easy to fuzzy search something and then oh no i want to look at that actually and find out something that you want to search for now another great thing is we can take a more programmatic approach so let's say i want to refactor a bunch of these notes and change a tag or do something i can just easily run like bash or pro or python scripts and whatever and mass edit files in a single go because it's all digital and because it's all digital i can also cloud host this and there are plain text files in obsidian it's just markdown files so i have portability i can put it on the cloud i can access it anywhere and this is something that nicholas lumens 90 000 index cards couldn't do because they're not portable you got a giant desk drawer or some big case system to hold those cards whereas this it's just it's just some memory on a computer so besides being able to edit easy search and mass editing and cloud hosting of your notes what are some benefits and drawbacks of being digital versus analog with this well if you're analog you're going to lay all these cards out on a desk one thing i like to do is with you know andy matashek also has a specific website layout that allows for an interesting way of navigating notes but one thing i like to do is say you know you're looking at some notes and you want to you know imitate andy matashek's mode of note-taking what we can do let me find a good note here actually which one let's just do how to take smart notes you can see i have all these links in here for different notes that i've made from this text now if i hold in my case it's mac on its command i can hold command and click and i can open up a couple of these notes there we go all right i just well what's going on here well with andy matashek mode basically we just called andy mode in obsidian i can now lay out my cards on my quote unquote desk i can now see all these things side by side and i can change them i can open them i can close them and i can easily have them all spread out on my desk for review this is something that i personally felt was essential because one of the benefits of analog is that you can lay all this stuff out on your desk and see how it's all connected well with this you could also follow those trains of thought open each connected interlinked link and have it all open like this on your quote unquote desk you could also follow the local graph view and do the exact same thing find a a note and then you know command click and now i've opened up another note same thing having all this stuff open on your quote unquote desk is a great way of performing these reviews one potential drawback or a hiccup would be if you decide to use your digital system because we have these digital tools available to us if you decided to not follow the approach to zettlecostin that many people do you might be tempted to copy and paste notes from one source to your obsidian xettlecostin this is not the best approach one of the benefits of doing analog is that you had to actually painstakingly write these notes which means that you probably were you know as most humans lazy and so you only want to write what you actually cared about retaining it's expensive to transcribe your thoughts onto cards it's cheap to copy and paste text on the internet so the benefit of analog in that instance is that you don't have to is that you basically are forced to only care only write down what you actually care to remember and you can't copy paste so you need to be aware of that when you're using a system that is digital like this you you don't want to just copy and paste literature notes or paraphrase or deal with plagiarism you want to distill your own unique notes and then thoughts so for my thought generation process reading literature forming the thoughts and ideas linking it to my existing knowledge base what is my workflow well let me tell you i constantly change everything i do to be as optimized as much as possible for me particularly because i have adhd and just the way that i like to think and operate and work i constantly am changing my workflow to better help me actually get work done like it's not just oh this is cool bells and whistles all that stuff like and it's what does what actually helps me get work done that's because it's the point it's not just i want to constantly be fiddling with this system and that's fun but it's not actually productive it doesn't actually do anything we need to actually and reinforce the workflow of incoming content idea distillation produced output and that output could be video writing whatever so what i've done is because mermaid js is supported in obsidian i actually make flow charts for my workflows and it's kind of big here so this is my my content influx workflow meaning i will process content in this specific way so if i have incoming media i have a variety of tools that i rely on if i have let's just start from the right so if i have a physical book how to take smart notes by zonka arden i'm reading this book which i did up in the mountains i'm going to read and take notes cool if i have my computer with me i might take digital notes but you know i might take physical notes that's fine too that's what i actually had to do up at my uh cabin when i read that book and i took seven pages of notes it was kind of a pain to transcribe all of it so what i might do is if that book is super long and really you know really technical content really hard to you know digest i might just work on one chapter at a time what that what i mean by that is i might read a chapter take my notes read those notes and then form my ideas and make those idea seedlings and i'm going to use gardening and forest and plant analogies because this is what i like to do so i from those literature notes i will distill my ideas into seedlings those seedlings are currently in the seed box you know so they're like okay we got some ideas brand new what do we do with them so the seedlings move from the seed box and go into the incubator because we're trying to grow them we're trying to you know mature them and we do that by actually putting your idea onto quote unquote paper so you'd write out your note and then what do you do from that well after the incubator we want to plant that little seedling into the evergreen forest how do we do that well we link it with our existing knowledge i might link it to the original source material which is okay this is an idea cool where did i get this idea from what inspired this idea and i want to remember that that stuff so i actually connected to its source literature note and then i will connect it to the actual you know knowledge i already have how does this fit in to the other knowledge and what what i gotten from some of this material and books and movies i've read and watched on settle costin is it's not where do i want to find this it's where do i want to stumble upon this because this isn't dealing with folders and hierarchies of structured you know layouts of everything it's it's all a top level just pool of cards basically pool of notes and they're all linked together so it's not where i want to find this because it's just a pile of files it's in a single directory top level it's where do i want to find this and or what do i want to stumble upon this what ideas connect to this by reviewing the notes i already have and where can i find this where it might fit in and connect and then i can stumble upon that note in the future because i'm reading this thing and oh wait that's connected to this follow that avenue of thought and by heavily linking these files to other related material you build this network and web of information and knowledge that will then aid you as you write because it's a an external framework for thought it guides your thought process shows you what you've already thought about in your own words not copy pasta not you know moving stuff around and paraphrasing literature it's your own unique thoughts on something connected to all your other thoughts a second brain and by following that you're able to more easily stay in the flow state get your writing done and see how different things are connected and generate unique and insightful content through serendipitous discovery of linkages of ideas that's a lot of talking but how what does this actually look like in practice so i have the workflow here for the book and so i'm just going to use how to take smart notes as my example i showed earlier a little bit of the um the literature notes i took on it so how to take smart notes and i love that search so i have you know some metadata about the the source note you know so i'm tagging some people the name of the of the note and then some tags when i reviewed it when was this published a little bit of the bibtex entry um i'm gonna i'm gonna describe a little bit about that in a bit but what i actually want to show is this is my literature notes in this case like i didn't copy and paste this i just started taking some notes by hand when i was reading this material and i made some bullet points and then i review this later so i'm reviewing the book i write these notes and then i say you know as i'm going through my second pass after i finish the book because this wasn't a super long and complex material so i just reviewed the whole book now i have my literature notes now i do my second pass if it's a big complex book i might do that chapter by chapter it depends on how how taxing the iteration cycle is so i can say oh okay well-defined tasks negate the need for the use of the limited supply of willpower cool that is a good bullet point that's an idea okay let's elaborate on that and then i turned that whole piece of text into a link and you know the whole point of this is that this is a curated system i can change the names of these links over time and maybe i might chop this down i might simplify it into a more atomic idea but that's the point is that these things mature over time it doesn't have to be perfect right off the bat so if i go here i can then see like i reference some other things i reference some stuff about adhd and executive function related to the limited supply of willpower and how that might relate to willpower um a little bit more about how to take smart notes cool so basically i flesh out this whole idea note from that one string of text which is now the title of this whole note page and i generate this idea i find things that i can maybe connect to this and then i connect them and so then i would then once this is connected it's gone through its incubation stage it's now an evergreen note maybe a young one but you know it can mature over time and so i make it an evergreen note and then i file it under evergreen note and i'll get to my filing and naming and tagging system in in a little bit but that's this is this is books this is how i would process a book all right so let's look at the next item so from books we have videos so on youtube i like to watch a lot of youtube videos i have a specific add-in called uh i think it's yee note why not you know i don't know but in any case i use this uh chrome extension to take notes on videos with time stamps and it uses uh google drive my connection to google drive to get you know markdown out of it so let's take a look at what that looks like so i might be watching a video and let's you know let's watch a little bit of this this is brodie robertson so if we were going to watch a little bit of this video and this is about the unix philosophy so let's just say i want to take some notes on this content here well with y note or e note i'm i don't know how pronounced this thing um i can start typing so right now oh okay new note 248 yep that's the time stamp i can say brody is talking about the unix philosophy great i can save that note awesome let's go a little bit farther um ah new timestamp is added the content continues like it's not as a matter i'm going to watch this later but um cool i got some notes here and just so we have enough just get some stuff in here cool so what i really like about this is that one well it's free there are some other options i would have preferred like i think rocket note but it costs a little bit of money it's not it's not a lot it's like 15 or across a year or something but it's not expensive it's just i didn't want to pay for something as simple as time stamps notes when this works maybe i might spring for that for the ease of use but with this i can easily just hear some notes now i want to manage my notes and then okay cool but you can also export to onenote uh send to google docs and evernote we're gonna send to google docs because this is what i want to get so when i go to google docs now i have this whole page of notes here i got a folder for screenshots but i don't care about the screenshots i just want the notes so when i open up that document i have time stamps and the actual content this is really useful so what i might do here is for this specific type of note taking on a youtube video for instance i would probably you know find and replace and remove the word screenshot everywhere on here and i could easily just pop this into obsidian and then do like multiple cursors and pop all these things up next to their timestamps uh or i could just do some vim macros whatever i the whole point is that now i have this content in plain text like this and it does the time stamps for me which is really what i care about is if i have a note here and i want a little bit more context on it when i'm fleshing out that idea i might want to watch that video again and so i might do that and so if i'm watching that video i don't want to watch the whole thing i just want to watch okay where did i get this note from that timestamp and so that might be why i wanted to keep these like different you know times so what would a youtube page look like in my note system so for my actual like literature notes what i might do let's actually open up a new note so if i have a brand new note here i might input my youtube template i have a bunch of templates so i'm going to do youtube template so what i get with iframes and i use iframes extensively is that if i have internet connection i can actually render a youtube video in obsidian if i wanted to so with that video that i was watching i can just grab this little piece of the url go to the iframe embed that and then preview it preview and now i have the video in here and so if i had my timestamps you and let's just grab those i'm not going to bother formatting on live but if i have my timestamps in here now i can see okay at that point we were talking about this one one thing he's talking about the unix philosophy at 248 okay 248 ish that's fine and now i can actually watch that and review and flush out my ideas i also have some meta data in here and you know that's great and i can start getting some work done on this and that's how i take notes on youtube videos so one thing people really like to get information and content from is podcasts so if i'm listening to podcasts on the go or if i'm not on the go how do i take notes on podcasts effectively and efficiently this is actually something that was a relatively recent change in my workflows because i found a really great app to help with this because i'm on you know a mac and iphone so i have this ability to use ios apps so let's first look at the simple one if i'm not on the go which means i'm sitting at a desk or i'm i can sit there and take notes as i listen that's the purpose of what i'm doing what i'm going to do is i'm probably just going to put the podcast player through an iframe into obsidian and have two copies of the note open so i can re listen and take notes at the same time so that would look like let's just say what's a good one getting things done and then i would have another copy of this so i have two copies of the same note open one they're both in preview but if i take this one and i change it to edit i can now take notes while this one is previewing i can play the podcast you know it'll load but it'll be playing and i can take notes on this awesome and so that would be how i might take notes on a podcast if i'm not like mobile but if i'm actually you know out and about and i'm in the car or i mean i probably can't do this in the car because of you know camp stuff in your ears but if i'm just anywhere else and i want to quickly and efficiently grab clips and take notes on those things what i do is i use the app air for air quotes so going down here i would grab air quotes so using the app air i can actually double tap my ear pods and grab sound bites and you can custom set how long this is for like i think it defaults to 45 seconds it grabs a sound byte the transcription of the text in that sound byte and then you can add your own custom caption to that that's really awesome then what you can do is you can then take those captioned air quotes and then export them to markdown with copies of the transcript so then you have the time stamp the link to the timestamp on their site your own personal thoughts the caption and then the transcribed text cool that's a little bit of copy paste but you know we're going to take that and we're going to distill our ideas from that and so because we then have that text on in my case on my phone what i can then do is because i have a mac i can airdrop that to my mac my macbook and then from there if it's only a single quote i might do an airpod or an air quote template page and so what that would look like is um an air quote which is really just a link to it on their site and it has a whole player and all the text and all that that's that's all that would be but if i have a lot of air quotes i'm not going to use the embeds and i'm just going to paste the text and let me go get some of that and show you what it looks like and so what the air quote text might look like is just this like i can just export the entire transcript my actual thought and then a link to the actual air quote i can just air drop that whole file to my macbook in a single instant and so then when rendered it's just you know all this interesting content and i can just take this and then do with it what i will now the cool thing about the iframes is that now i can also take that and inside the document i can insert a air quote and inside the source i can put the link to the air quote render the page and then it's actually a link to the player itself with the actual air quote i took some air quotes from this tim ferriss podcast i can say it's an interesting podcast it's an interesting podcast and it actually gives me the transcription there and i can play it just like the podcast if i only have one error quote i might do this if i have a bunch then it's just those are my notes for a podcast and i'll just embed the podcast player it really depends but i'm probably just going to do podcast pages for the most part but this is how i'm actually taking notes on podcasts effectively and i really like air because it's super easy to use i can just double tap an earpod and it's free i could just export all this stuff to markdown air drop it to my machine and i'm done i can just put that into my whole system and i'm good to go so now one of the most important sources of literature is well literature research papers there is a lot of workflows around this because there's a lot of people who do lots of work with research papers especially like phds masters students phd students candidates all those people in higher academia and anyone who really touches research papers could probably benefit from this system and this workflow if they're going to be making content from that and they don't want to risk you know plagiarism or paraphrasing or whatever so what does my workflow look like for research papers and actually getting good literature notes out of that and into this system so the way i structure my actual research paper pages um let's just do for instance do i have any good ones that are done already hmm i currently don't because i'm still trying to change my original notes because i had a bunch of research papers i already read and took notes on i'm trying to redo them in this fashion to actually get better value out of it so i currently don't have a finished one to show but what the workflow looks like now is zotero two plugins and obsidian so let's take a look so if i'm in zotero and i'm reading something let's see what's something i can grab here in my inbox um let's pick yeah space retrieval absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing excellent so now in zotero i could easily just uh when i find a paper i like i can just grab the doi i can just input that doi right here zotero will download all this stuff automatically or auto magically which it did which is how i got some of these papers in here and then i have a copy of that research paper i can then open it cool i can then read i can highlight and take notes so let's do a little bit of that let's just say this i can highlight that and then i can say you know i want to annotate this where's that annotate button add note or and don't so this is an annotated note in a pdf within zotero so then you could do that all over the place you know click on your notes see your notes there's the highlighted text that it's linked to absolutely excellent you can grab all that stuff cool so we got a couple of annotated highlighted notes and stuff in this file excellent let's save it let's close it because we're done all right how do i get that into obsidian i don't want this to be complex it shouldn't be a million steps it shouldn't be a headache it should be as easy as possible from to go from a to z so with two specific plugins and let's see which ones i have so using i believe it's zot file right here this will grab out your notes your annotations from your pdfs into a text file within zotero in the same you know sub level that the pdf was in then i use md notes to then convert those notes into markdown which then i can move copy paste into obsidian so what does this look like i can say hey pdf that i have notes in i'm going to right click and then what i want to do is i want to manage attachments and i want to extract annotations so then it's going to extract those annotations into this note and right here you can see it's in a rich text format which is what you get in zotero and it has even hyperlinks this is also really cool because now i can just say if i'm in zotero again i can click on that and i can say hey open that link and it will actually open up the pdf exactly to where that note is which i think is really useful and awesome but now i want to export this to markdown so let's export to markdown and it'll ask me where i want to save it i'm just going to put it in downloads save it cool so now if i opened up my downloads so then in my downloads i have the extracted text and you can see right here ah i have extracted annotations it says you know what date but really what i care about is the content and right here you can see it actually has you know that says the page that it was found on note on page whatever and it actually has this relative link to zotero interesting so let's actually copy this and let's see what this actually looks like in obsidian so now if i open up a brand new note and i can say all right we're going to do a research paper and in my content i can then put all that text cool render all right we got some hyperlinks here note on page whatever if i click these hyperlinks it opens up exactly the same place incredibly useful if you have zotero on your system this way especially because i keep all my files like this in zotero on my icloud and along with my obsidian vault i have all this stuff on icloud so i can easily just reference all this stuff from the same location and it's good to go and in that way i can also take my literature notes just looking at the pdf don't have to be distracted by anything just pdf take notes extract notes notes are an obsidian generate ideas continue on from there and through the use of those two plugins zot file and md notes i'm able to easily get my notes from those pdfs into obsidian for the rest of my pipeline last but not least and probably most frequent is all that random stuff on the internet that you want to read that you just can't get around to yet how do i manage all of that so i'm on a lot of different mailing lists i have a lot of rss feeds i subscribe to i use an app called rss reader just to have all of my rss feeds available and then when i find something i want to read i then also follow this workflow but if i find something on the internet that i want to read like a medium article or something i want to watch or listen to that's not a podcast or a video i might i have different workflows for those things like you know my watch later list on youtube i frequently use that podcast it's just whatever's in my queue is there but if i have a bunch of like articles like medium articles i want to read i use something called raindrop io this is free and how i use it is free so what i have is raindrop io i have a bunch of folders and it basically has a web clipper so if i was on medium medium.com and i want to go to an article i can pick you know whatever i want to look at and i want to save that article to read it for later so what i can do is i can say ah the 10 statistical techniques data scientists need to manage i obviously need to read this so what i can do is i can say i don't have time to read this right now i'm going to save it for later i have a chrome extension here save to raindrop io excellent that's what i want to do and i have an inbox in raindrop io and from there i add a tag of zero or one i'm going to add zero so now it's in raindrop i can close that and get along with my life so now in my inbox in raindrop io i have all of that stuff so let's look at data scientist let's just start with that and it probably has to sync first so once we sync it it'll be in there but all of my articles and everything that i ever want to read that i can't get around to goes to raindrop and i was playing around with the idea of the my mind app that does like the artificial intelligence for your tagging type stuff and i was looking into that i wasn't really going to make a good use out of that so what i ended up doing is going with this one because i can add my tags myself and it doesn't clog up anything so here's that article awesome i can open this and i can actually read it here um you don't have to pay to read medium articles if you're reading them through raindrop io hint hint um but really it's everything in my inbox is stuff that i want to read or review for my obsidian idea generation pipeline eventually all this stuff will get processed so i have a couple folders here um this is just my inbox stuff i have some stuff for r and twitch i want to read but inbox is where everything goes everything goes to my inbox now if it has a zero it's unread and i want to read it if it's one like this one i've read it and i want to actually just send notes to obsidian now why do i use 0 and 1 for that why don't i just use red and unread well because i add a bunch of other note tags in here i actually want to make sure that they're always up at the top so i use numbers it's basically boolean true and false is it red zero for false it's not red is it red one for true yes it's red and then if i like what i read because the whole point of a lot of this system is you don't just want to like consume content and then just garbage in garbage out you actually want to get your meaningful ideas so i might read all this stuff but it doesn't mean i'm actually going to use all of it so what i might do is i might read this and be like that wasn't really that helpful i don't need that delete but if i like it and i take notes i can add notes to obsidian i have the article or the file or the thing and then i can actually file that into you know my folders i have here for the type of content that it is and then add relevant tags like for instance i have a blog post in here for i think it was a space repetition so i got all kinds of tags on this you know space repetition active recall memory memorization anki learning if i want to search for something with those tags i now have the tags available i'm not going to waste my effort on things that i don't care about so this is when they're done and filed i've read it the notes are in obsidian i file this and i add its tags so i can search later this is my curated pool of like my reference library of like just stuff that i've read i like i want to keep but i'm not going to reference reference this every day i have the links in obsidian but if i want it if one day i want it it's here it's searchable and i can find it and it all goes to one place that's the critical thing is that i have all of my information everything goes to one place it's this is my my caption my catch-all drop point for all things that i want to process other than like you know youtube watch later playlist which is what i use for youtube videos but in essence this is the collection point that i rely on the most to say all right i don't i can't read this right now send it there i'll get around to it and beyond raindrop i o it's really just my watch later list in youtube and then my inbox folder here for zotero i have all this stuff in zotero that what i what i want to read what is next on to read and what i'm currently reading and you know once i'm done with that i'll move it to red now the folders in zotero don't mean anything they're all basically at top level but i will then just move it to this other one and then delete it from this folder which doesn't really do anything other than just you know change it visually for me and that's really how i organize like my in my inbox pipelines of content that's like my whole workflow articles research papers podcasts videos books all of that and that culminates and comes to a head at i now have literature notes in obsidian notes from podcasts notes from videos notes from books or articles or research papers whatever the text is in obsidian now now that they're in obsidian we all have one straight shot for the rest of the workflow i review the notes that i have taken i did not copy paste i took notes on things that occurred or whatever or what i thought about it and then i review those notes and i form ideas like do i get ideas from this and i think oh yes this is an idea about that now i have a new seedling so i then add those i generate those seedlings i then incubate them and flesh out those thoughts so like you know executive function okay here we go here's a fleshed-out seedling thought great and then i will then plant those seedlings in the evergreen forest which is really just i link them to a bunch of other stuff that i would stumble upon this idea because it's connected to those things and that's basically my workflow in obsidian for this zettlecoston and evergreen note-taking system i love using this process this system and this application for this type of work i have already gotten so many new insights and ideas on how space repetition and social interaction adhd and memory are all linked together just by trying to file my notes and that's one of the things that is really useful about zettlecostin is when you're trying to find out places for your notes where you want to stumble upon them not where you file them it's an active practice in space repetition of the content and ideas you've already made because you need to review them and read them and say does this fit here let me read ah it does then link and so it's an active practice in space repetition and active recall maybe not active recall but you're reading these notes over and over again to find out where you're going to place this note and stumble upon it and by constantly reviewing this material it's top of mind you then write and read and develop your outputs papers videos whatever by the interlinked ideas that you've generated and i for one really enjoy the process and the most important thing as always is to keep in mind is that you should have an output that you don't just do this for the sake of collection the whole point is not collection it's synthesis you want to read process form ideas and generate output from those ideas now i'm not a phd i'm not writing research papers maybe one day i hope to but i also don't have just you know literature notes and idea notes in this system i also do have some technical content like programming uh statistics coursework and it's not like my my class notes or anything it's like terms like i have a uh map of some of the content of stats terms that i have here so let's do standard deviation so i might keep like a list of terms for like standard deviation it's connected to variance to mean to range and i can follow these to find these definitions of these terms maybe some documentation or video explaining that and so what i use this for is one so i can better understand statistics but also if i need to reference a statistical method that was used in a paper and i'm not 100 sure on what that is because who remembers 100 of everything about statistics is i can easily link to that test that concept that equation in a note and say hey see that note about this equation okay here's the note of that equation i still don't understand it okay it's got links to all of its component parts and see it broken down in processing and what i also like to do is if it's a complex formula i can actually break it down using latex equations and then i can also have a chunk of r code on how i might actually implement this in an r code or script and so i have this type of content in here as well and it's all densely linked together and this is just the more technical stuff less on ideas but it still actually serves a purpose for me more on the build a second brain versus personal knowledge management kind of it works for me is the point the whole point is find what works for you and this is what i'm doing for some of what i have going on so how do we curate these notes how do we care for our evergreen forest and our seedlings so we could do a variety of different things one thing i really love is the random note feature so i can open up a random note and it jumps me to any note just random and what i really enjoy about that is that you stumble upon things first of all that could be a great way of stumbling into your train of thought of what you might want to write about or it's also useful to say ah a note oh this doesn't look right i wanted to change my formatting from this to that now i can make that change and you can hop to different notes at random and make edits review just have fun play around but you can also use like command line utilities to do regex replacements so you can do regular expressions to then replace bits of text that you want to change or fo or use grep and find a bunch of different pieces of text and everything but honestly there's so much searching and capability in obsidian that a lot of what i really need to use the command line for is not much so i'm going to go and make a video about all things obsidian a to z a complete walkthrough but as far as like my workflow i i rely on very few command line utilities for a lot of this and it's honestly a very robust system and is able to easily take care of itself so i will do random notes i'll just review stuff and mass and you can do like tag searching context searching so i can i have a bunch of saved searches in here and you can search content tags or whatever and i know you're saying okay but you haven't talked about your tags at all or why you have weird symbols at the beginning of your file names here what's up with that well let me tell you there's a lot of back and forth and debate and talk in the discord server for obsidian about how to effectively use links or tags or whatever so this won't work for everybody some people do things differently and you know what it's all fine but what do i specifically do so what i do is i use links for both actually files but also for tags so if i went to like executive function here i have tags for adhd psychology productivity mental health these notes don't exist adhd does but these ones do not exist because i haven't made them yet and my plan for this is using nick milo's framework for using maps of content is over time as my notes you know build up i can see like these larger dots what things revolve around these ones are already established mock moc map of content and what i might have is something might emerge like i could have a large map of content built around say um let's find something productivity right here so let's say productivity gets a lot more linked notes and it grows and it becomes a very central idea or concept in my note system well then i could make it a map of content it emerges the whole point is that the structure over time emerges you don't immediately just define structure like this is where all my productivity notes go this is where all of my mental health notes go or whatever you go and you let the structure emerge based on seeing the connections between your quote unquote tags which are really just hard links treated as tags the notes don't exist but the connections on the graph still appear now i also have tags and what i have tags are just these like single emojis which honestly is kind of for aesthetics and just because it's also easier to select and type and i just like it better than just plain text in this case i have a couple things here defined so i have a red exclamation point which is really just for like important or critical things i don't have any at the moment um i have a uh let's see here i have an inbox which is really my seed box so the seed box is all of my current literature notes that are sitting at obsidian so i've taken notes i've gotten those notes into obsidian and they're ready to have seedlings generated from them i don't just leave a bunch of stuff in here excuse me i'm trying to actually process as much or as soon as possible because i don't like things sitting in here but you can see i got a bunch of other stuff popping up that's because my default templates uh actually have that emoji on there so or that tag on there so i actually have a saved search for removing all those items and now it's only the actual seed box items so with that i also have seedlings so once i generate a seedling i have a list of those seedlings and so here's one that i just recently made about i need to flesh out called the social contract of the returned shopping cart interesting right um and then after that seedling is you know fleshed out it's got links and it's an evergreen note i have a tag with a tree for my evergreen notes and these are this is my evergreen note forest i also have a tag label one and what this is for is for those tags that might become emerging maps of content i tagged them with a tag because this is actually meant to be a tag note not necessarily an evergreen note or a seedling or anything like that i also have a gear which is for my like utilities or just things that are about my obsidian system like for instance i have my workflow document that's you know a utility and i also have a map which is going to be for the mocks the maps of content i have a check mark for to-do's or notes that need to be fleshed out in this case like some of my stats content i need to filter out like uh regression has several items i want to flush out for regressions and then that's it so those are i basically use tags as statuses or in this case a way to avoid using folders for utilities or maps of content whatever this helps me easily find stuff using minimal tags and a more visual cue for them so what's up with your file names all these weird symbols at the front so coming from linux in the command line looking at those symbols in the beginning of the file names you know immediately makes your eye twitch because that's like strings that cause problems for like bash scripts but where it actually serves its purpose here is that on my index for instance you can see i have the definitions for these characters let me zoom in for you each of these characters is assigned to a type of input so i have books i have tweets podcasts videos articles research papers people and each of those symbols at the beginning of those file names helps me easily search for that content so instead of using a tag for paper and making it get lost in here and diluting how many tags i have because i don't want that many i can easily just start with a single special text character so let's say i want to look at all of my research papers it starts with an upwards carrot or a carrot symbol i can do open the search bar i can type a carrot and now these are just my research papers i don't even have to type anything more than the carrot symbol and the same thing for people and it only pulls out the records that actually exist because i might tag other people with an at symbol and so i do this for all the different types of my content because that doesn't clog up my tags but it also makes searching for those things easier but if i also want to search for like tidy data the paper still pops up and it will but it also makes searching for the actual types of input easier for me when i'm looking at my source literature notes kind of similar to rome research uh the functionality to do a daily note or a journal or something where rome just drops you into here's today's note right the plugin in obsidian you have to actually like opt in for it and you have to like select that you want that plugin to be used but you can make a daily note and what i use that for is in my daily note it's basically just my private journal which i'm not going to show obviously but on that journal i will talk about whatever's top of mind i'll just ideas and thoughts out of my head but then i also list off here's what i read today here's what i watched today here's what i listened to today and have literature notes for i will then link to those literature notes and they're in their like actual pages so that way i actually have a link you know of time to those literature notes and then on those literature notes i linked to their actual ideas like oh i generated that idea from how to take smart notes well it's linked on that page so i can see from idea to source note to when i actually read and process that source on my daily journal so that's actually how i use the the daily journal and then i also have a bunch of templates here which is really just like templates of how i you know add the metadata and structure to different types of input i also have like a meta which is just like a catch all for the idea notes i have some lorem ipsum text just for testing stuff um my daily note which is just you know some prompts and some reminders to fill out some things and formatting for like footnotes or folds for instance folds aren't in obsidian by default so i use just plain html for that air quotes doing two column splits with div tags iframes all different kinds of stuff and one really cool thing is there's this really amazing tool that somebody in the discord server or in the obsidian community made that basically will let you use your obsidian vault and your markdown notes as a way of defining anki cards for the anki space repetition software and i'll make a whole video about that in the future but basically i have these templates for making anki cards even close deletion image support audio file support all that different type of stuff all available to you in markdown in obsidian so that way you could also while you're taking literature notes add these enki cards to those uh literature notes so for the things that you critically want to remember using spaced repetition you can use these like templates that i've made and actually commit information to your anki decks for memorization and i think that's really useful because some things you just don't want to forget even if you're going to generate ideas from that original content and when you change the cards in the markdown file because it assigns a unique id this this script is really robust because it will actually update your anki decks with changes too so i use that to support some of my like programming stuff or just general ideas and concepts i want to remember the anki decks and the integration with this script is awesome it's not an official plug-in it's just a python script that you run but i'll put a link to that in the pin comment and if i forget about it just remind me but that is an amazing tool that really deserves the recognition because it is an awesome tool so looking over some of the other things that i utilize in obsidian and what i do with it i do have some regex searches here i save them so you can actually save searches like i can just search and then i can actually go to the star and then save my current search i have ones to search for all instances of people tags um you could just search for a person's name with my tag syntax but like this that for that's for that commonly referenced pages this one is for finding all notes that do not have any outgoing links so in a way kind of like orphan notes but this one doesn't catch the ones that are that have links to it but not going out and this one is to find all of my seed box items so things i want and i need to review without any of my templates being involved and then this one actually searches for all email addresses or occurrences of email addresses in my entire vault useful not sure how often i use them but they're there this awesome command here though using egrep and all this this actually will run through all of my files and generate a list with a count of all the different links i have and the output file will look like this and it will actually show you what is most commonly referenced through your tags and so what this is really useful for is finding through numbers you know account which things might wanna you might wanna put into your map of content for a specific area and so with this you're easily able to just grab all of that information with a single command and i did that with this command that i think i got from the obsidian forums really really useful and if you ever want to add drawings to obsidian you can actually do it with excalidra which is really cool because you can actually just copy this and paste it as i think an iframe or an image and you can even like make the background transparent like it's super cool because i can just easily you know send this and i want to send it to the clipboard with no background and yeah i got it now i can go to my in index and i can paste it and now here's a square box in my index for whatever reason i wanted that for uh but easy to just add some quick drawings to something and add that or at that diagram in there if you didn't want to like write out a bunch of mermaid js code like my workflow uh workflow like this so that's overall my workflow for using this system as for like my goals and purposes for it i'm a horrible writer admittedly i am really bad at writing and i think a lot of that stems from adhd being able to focus on writing being able to hold the ideas long enough in my head connected together to actually put it down on paper in a consistent manner like i just am not good at writing not for like lack of trying not for lack of skill or being able to write well like words that make sense it's just i can't i just have so many issues with it so some of the ways i'm getting around that is i'm using zettlecoston and this whole system for using that framework of external thinking to help me write so i don't have to focus on holding the ideas together as much i can stay in the flow state i can write text and then i'm also looking at using grammarly and testing it out to see if that will actually help me with you know writing in a specific way too and using these tools to hopefully actually be able to put out good writing either in medium articles i hope one day to actually be able to contribute research papers and do things in a field that actually is contributing research and i'll even use this for my youtube videos if i get enough ideas like if i get to a critical mass i can start making youtube videos just by having you know bullet pointed scripts that just link to a bunch of different note concepts and i just talk about those notes and what they talk about chronologically for in that video and that's and that's the goal to reach is eventually when i can reach the point where i'm just generating content with this system and just adding to it over time so a closing idea about this is a lot of people get tripped up by the graph in obsidian don't think that you need to do anything for the graph like people look at this and say how can i make my graph look more like x or y or z or whatever don't focus on the graph it's not about the graph it's not about the graph at all the whole point is that the graph is just a visualization of how your ideas are linked together link your ideas don't focus on the graph as the end as the end point it's not the the goal the goal is to actually have output synthesis so don't focus on trying to perfect this graph and put all your energy into making it look nice by over engineering connections that's not the point the graph is a useful tool it looks cool but it's not there to be your final output your final output should actually be something that you produce from your ideas so i hope you enjoyed this my workflow changes all the time i try to live stream some of my obsidian workflow and just doing work in this so you can catch that on twitch or on youtube i'm i'll be exclusively streaming on twitch when i can make affiliate there if you want to ever chat and hang out and talk about any of this stuff i have a discord server links to all this stuff is either in the description or the pinned comment below and i hope you enjoyed this i really love talking about pkm build a second brain obsidian i love talking about this stuff so if you'd like more videos please let me know what you'd like me to talk about i have some ideas planned but if you want me to talk about something specific please let me know and as a closing remark thank you to the patreon supporters that support this channel thank you alberto devin klaus brandon thank you guys for supporting the channel it means a lot and i'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Bryan Jenks

Views: 125,113

Rating: 4.9376621 out of 5

Keywords: bryan jenks, macbook pro 16, new macbook pro, macbook pro, catalina, obsidian, obsidian.md, pkm, basb, personal knowledge management, build a second brain, research, roam research, should i pick obsidian over roam, note taking app, note taking, zettelkasten, how to take smart notes, obsidian workflow, obsidian zettelkasten workflow, obsidian 0.9.1, evergreen notes, atomic notes, andy matuschak

Id: Ewhfok91AdE

Length: 64min 0sec (3840 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020