Obsidian: The King of Learning Tools (FULL GUIDE + SETUP)

almost a year ago I started building this you can call it a personal network of knowledge but you might know it as a zetto Casten or a second brain after years of searching for the perfect approach to my learning I think this is it by far it's been the most valuable asset for reading for writing and even for my thinking but before I hype it up to you and show you how to make your own there's something I should warn you about a hidden danger it's one that left me incredibly frustrated when I first started to make my own it was a pain in the ass to get started and I mean that if you look up how to create a zetoc in obsidian or how to build your second brain you'll find probably hundreds of videos with each person showing their own method and their own way of doing it and don't get me wrong some of these were great like I used them to build my own and I couldn't be here without them but the problem is as I kept watching more and more videos I was digging myself a trap one that would be harder and harder to eventually climb out of when I had to every single YouTuber I watched had their own method of creating it one that was slightly different to the next and if you end up watching 10 or 20 of these you start to pick out points from every single one and then it fills you with this almost toxic sense of perfectionism for example I'd find some nice features from one video and then watch another video and they have something different that stands out to me like a shiny gem I take that and then that process repeats and if you combine all their points from all these videos you end up with this mess this Frankenstein's monster of a setup that tries to be everything but fails I was deluded in doing that I thought I could steal from everyone else's workflow and make the perfect one but that's not how how it works in fact all it did was bug me down for months I didn't really do much writing I was just obsessed with getting the perfect setup which doesn't exist anyway but thankfully I eventually realized that this system was never going to be perfect in fact every time I added a new feature I was only adding a pointless gimmick that was a distraction from the true work the writing and without wasting more time I just gripped my teeth and moved forward with what I had already I abandoned all the weird gimmicks the plugins and all the features that didn't actually matter and I focused on on the Bare Bones and suddenly a weight was just lifted off my shoulders it felt good because now I can actually do what I wanted to do which was to write I didn't have to worry on finding the perfect system and optimizing every single step of the way I do realize now I'm just an extra voice in the conversation but I just want to reassure you and say that this setup is free from there are no pointless features there are no gimmicks this setup is simple it's minimalistic it focuses only on the key features that actually help you get to where you want to be and I have the experience to vouch for this system I've used obsidian for I think 9 months now almost every day and since the start after hundreds of notes it hasn't changed the setup is exactly the same and to me that's solid evidence that it works so if you're feeling intimidated by the idea of starting your own I get you I was in that same position but I hope this setup can free you of some of that stress and really give you the building blocks you need to just get started if you want an immediate walkthr and how to set it up then please do skip to that but for this next portion of the video I want to talk about why should you do this anyway like what's in it for you it seems like a lot of effort and it is but I want to cover three main benefits that make it so powerful as a learning tool over the years I've tried many learning techniques cuz I was sick and tired of walking away from my books the same person forgetting all the important things and failing to reflect on what was inside it was exhausting and I felt like all the efforts I put into the learning was just Vanishing Into Thin Air and it was all for nothing this all changed when I read a book called How to take smart notes by sunin now I think that's how you pronounce it but do correct me for German this is the book I chose to bring on a 3-hour flight and I thought it would just be a casual laid-back experience on you know maybe how you can make your notes a little bit more effective I was so so wrong by the time the plane landed the course of my entire reading from that point would change forever those 3 hours I was just captivated by what I was reading cuz this was revolutionary I had never thought of note taking and learning quite like this this book tore down lots of misconceptions I got from traditional education and it gave me this fresh and exciting perspective to reading it was the idea of a Casten a slip box which is exactly what we're building today now I do recommend you check his book out cuz it is really good but to keep it brief the zetto Casten is a note taking system that builds your notes from the bottom up it let you take the ideas you read and embed it in this network of knowledge one that serves you in all your goals from learning to reading to writing there's three main ways it's so so effective and almost unlike any other note taking system the first reason is that it forces you to slow down now a lot of people don't like to hear that all the hustle grinds set Bros they don't like the idea of abandoning speed reading and they might hate me for saying this but it's true in most cases speed and reading are not a good mix the best thing I ever did for my reading was to slow it right down and take thorough notes in the process the slowness of the writing forces you to dwell on the author's ideas of course it's slower you do lose speed but to me that's a worthy sacrifice because all the ideas will have a lasting impact on your mind it's like when you eat too much at Christmas and you sit there all stuffed and Bloated and you have to really wait and digest to be able to come to life again this is kind of the same thing but with your brain the result is not only a way better attention of what you read but you also start to understand things more deeply because you know some of these books are chunky and it's not like you can speed through them and just remember everything the second power of the zal Casten is that it gives you instant feedback on your learning I'm not sure how it works in the USA but in the UK we have this thing called a levels and that's 2 years of study before going to University and you can pick three or four subjects for that and I did history and in history there was a lot of essay writing we did essays almost every week now normally you hand in your essay and you get feedback a week later but let's say there was a Twist this time every time I handed this essay in I would never get any feedback if that pattern continued for a year or two I would get to the end of my a levels and my essay writing would be just as as when I first started because to get better at any skill you need two things you need practice and you need feedback now in that case I had lots of practice I wrote every week no problem there but I didn't get any feedback and if there's no one there to correct you you're going to end up making the same stupid mistakes again and again and again writing notes is the exact opposite of that situation because by doing that we get instant feedback by writing we get an instant reflection of our own understanding because if we struggle to put something into words then that's a sign that we haven't understood it it's a sign for you to go back to the book and check your understanding this is a prime example of the fame and technique in action which says that if you teach something in this case writing you actually learn it better yourself the third benefit of this system is that you allow your notes to form connections most people store their notes by subject in these clear subdivided folders now this makes sense in our head we've been taught to do it in school but there's actually hidden danger to it because it has the tendency to isolate your ideas and that stops you from seeing the bigger picture you'll see what I mean with the example and it's going to sound really weird at first but bear with me why are reptiles mostly in hotter areas of the world it's because they're ectotherms which you probably know as cold blooded now this means to effectively hunt and Escape Predators they have to warm up using the environment like when a lizard sits on a rock to absorb the energy of the Sun but because we're mammals we can produce our own heat from within but this is expensive because unlike lizards we have to eat a lot more to keep ourselves warm well the hidden strength that we have as mammals is that we can stay active even in the cold if you travel North to the Arctic as a lizard it's going to be so cold that you can't properly move and you end up either starving or dying to a predator but since we produce our own heat we can stay active and that means we can avoid predators and also hunt effectively we can out compete the reptiles even in the coldest temperatures our okay that's that but let's slow down a second why am I giving you a biology lesson I gave you a simple explanation of that topic but if you want to understand it in depth you have to know things from chemistry from physics from biology from ecology to understand the bigger picture you have to pull ideas from all four of these subjects and if you fail to understand something in that chain of reasoning you might not get the whole thing in that same example if you have no idea why muscles slow down when they're cold then you won't be able to explain that properly to me but there is hope because if you understand the physics and the chemistry and the biology you can somehow piece everything together into this clear picture and you can understand it and you can explain it to me this is true wisdom this is the end result of learning the most valuable thing you can achieve and this system this zetto Casten is exactly how you'll get there the second major benefit of the zto Casten is how it helps you store and mix ideas before I started taking notes like this I would write all of the things I learned in separate notebooks I love the feeling of pen on paper because you can be free with it and you can draw all the diagrams you want it's satisfying now this was all well and good but as I was a few notebooks in I started to realize a problem that was creeping up on me how the hell am I going to manage this later am I going to end up with 100 notebooks like what do I do then so I made the painful decision to overhaul everything and prevent This Disaster it may have hurt in the moment but I knew that this physical method of notetaking was going to hurt me in the future and it had its limits with obsidian the app we're using today all of your notes are in the same place whenever and wherever you need them instead of of carrying 100 notebooks or flash cards you have your whole personal library on your phone or computer and if you store your note files on the cloud you can literally travel across half the world and you'll still be able to find them even though I love taking notes on paper this is the obvious best choice nowadays so the storage of notes is already perfect but there's an extra benefit of having everything in one place it's the power of connecting ideas to make new ones in this system like we said before your notes are free from the restrictions of folders this means you don't have to go through the annoying process of open opening 10 different subfolders to find that exact note you were looking for in this system they're all in one Arena they're all free to mingle and to connect insights from Socrates Dante and the Bible can connect with those from maybe Virginia wolf or n or any other modern author you can think of every new book video and article you read can add something valuable to the conversation something that can form these exciting connections that you never saw coming your network of notes only get stronger with time and you can't say the same for a system of folders because the more you add the more messy and confus it gets this is the exact opposite and I know what you might be thinking this looks chaotic it looks messy it's ugly and I will admit mine is uglier than most people's online without a system of tags and hyperlinks it is a mess and it is hard to navigate but if you follow some basic rules in how you construct the notes and organize it it's actually really easy to then navigate this Maze and find exactly what you're looking for and I'm not giving it enough credit here because sometimes you write a note and then months down the line you completely forget it exists but because of your system of links you end up rediscovering it by accident and it's the nicest surprise and here's the nice part if you're more of an organized type of person which you know I am too I like folders this system still caters to you if you use tags you can add this extra layer of organization to your notes and if you want to find something related to a specific topic it's still easy and if it sounds confusing no worries because we're going to walk through these steps in detail a bit later on the third major benefit is easier and faster writing and this is by far my favorite one it's so exciting to talk about when I first read about this idea in how to take smart notes I swear I almost got goosebumps because at the time I knew this was big this would change how I WR forever the best way to show you this is to compare two different writers our first writer has an idea for a book and you know he's got a rough idea of the structure so all he has to do now is set out to research whenever he finds a useful idea he just takes it and puts it in his planning draft he then uses subheadings to sort it out and see what will go where after many long hours lots of caffeine and maybe an existential crisis or two he's finished fin the book that sounds all good right well yeah maybe for now but you'll see he's screwing himself over in the future our second writer also wants to write a book but he starts without an idea for the title he doesn't know what the end product might be instead he just reads about whatever he's interested in and on the way he picks up the ideas that resonate the most with some simple organization of his notes he begins to see these areas of Interest form around certain Topics in the case of obsidian this can be literal clusters that begin to form for example the more he reads about human behavior the bigger the area of disc discussion gets and before he knows it he's got the building blocks for a book with a quick look through the notes the writer sees how he can order them in a linear way now all it takes is some rearranging some editing and of course a little bit of extra writing but then suddenly you have a book it was a relatively quick process because most of the writing was already done in the form of the notes way before the idea of the book even existed the first writer didn't have this opportunity and he's also missing out on a second benefit because the second writer collected his ideas outside of the book draft he can reuse these notes as many times as he wants in all sorts of different projects in other words none of his research is stuck within the book draft or his article or blog or whatever else he wrote If our first writer wants to do the same thing and maybe write a second book well we has to start from scratch he has to go through a long and painful process of finding all this research again it's kind of like how we're taught to do it in school we start with the essay title and then do all the research and once the essay is done we just throw the research away and this system is crazy if you think about it it's inefficient it's slow and if forces you to repeat all the research you want to spend your time writing not finding the same old notes from before with this system you make your notes work for you and not the other way around I'm writing a book now and because it's on a topic I care about a lot of the research already exists in my notetaking software and as I'm writing it up notes I made from months ago will resurface to help me and most of these notes I totally forgot about but because of the links and the tags it allows me to find them when I need them if you invest in this system You're Building yourself a personal writing assistant one that only gets stronger with time I hope I've sold the zetting system well but if you want more details then do check out the book because I've only scratched the surface to be honest so we finally reach the setup stage and I want to show you how you can get the ball running without that usual frustration at the start CU believe me when I was building this for the first time I was pissed off at every corner there was so many things I didn't understand and it was just frustrating I want to also show you how I'd write a note from start to finish using all the different features there's no gimmicks there's no pointless complexity and there's no just simple and effective note taking the first thing to do is install obsidian from their website this is super easy and of course it's totally free you're then given the option to name your Vault but what the hell is a vault anyway this is where all of your notes are stored and it's the highest level of organization in this system when you first make a vault you have to first name it but also choose the location of the Vault this is because a vault is just a folder on your computer and you can choose exactly where that folder goes every note you make an obsidian will become a file in this folder this is great because not only does it let you use obsidian offline but you can also easily copy and transfer your notes because they're just files I would recommend storing your Vault on the cloud somewhere like Google drive or one drive so obviously it's backed up and you can access it from any device mine is in my Google Drive in a folder called obsidian and you might notice that when you do this it creates an extra folder called obsidian this folder holds all of the system files and you don't need to worry about it but it's just good to know where they are and what I love about this system is once you choose the location you you don't really have to worry about it ever again all of the notetaking happens within the app itself now before we dive into the setup with all the folders and stuff I want to let you know that this is going to be a step-by-step approach I may be wrong but I think this is the easiest way for you to understand things instead of you know dumping everything onto you at once this means some things might be confusing in the moment but will'll begin to make sense as we progress through the steps now let's get into the folders I use six in my system but you know to reassure you only three of them are really active in your note taking the other three kind of sit in the background most of the time the folders we're focusing on are the numbered ones so the two at the bottom you can ignore them completely they're just some extra things I use on the side so let's get into the setup and I'll explain each as we go this is what you see when you create a vault I first like to delete all this crap all the tabs and that gives us a clean slate to work from much better next I use this icon on the top left to create six new folders but you know to keep things straightforward let's start with one the first folder I call rough notes Here I jot down anything temporary things like ideas I had maybe reminders or of course rough notes it's like a notepad where you write down things you don't want to forget and anything else you might need for example here I keep up a list of ideas that I might want to research further I also keep a track of my daily word count for my writing habit and to be honest I don't use this folder that much because I prefer to keep all my rough ideas on paper so whether you want to use this folder or not is entirely up to you and your preferences the second folder is called Source material here I store the insights from anything I consume not just books but also videos articles podcasts even Twitter threads anything I like to make different subfolders to store different types of source material but of course this is totally optional and you'll notice that some at the bottom are unsorted and this is on purpose these notes are active meaning I'm still working on them and I haven't finished the writing but of course once I do finish I can then neatly tuck them away where they belong now that's just a setup but don't worry I will dive into these notes a bit later on the third folder stores my tags tags are your best friend in navigating your network especially when it gets large you'll need these if you want to avoid drowning in your notes later on in this folder I store all of the tags and this sounds weird like since when do you store Tags now you can make tags a traditional way using a hashtag and that does work but I prefer a different approach one that I think is more powerful instead each of my tags is just an empty note let's say I'm writing a note about humility and Leadership now of course one of the tags is going to be humility which is a topic I'm interested in to apply the tag to the note I have to make a link to it to do this I type the square bracket button twice and then this brings up a search function from here I type humility and then I close it off with two more square brackets here I've created a link to a note but the reason it's grayed out is because it doesn't exist yet once I click on the link it automatically creates the note and this is the humility tag this is simply a note called humility but we're going to use it as a tag in this case and I don't want it to appear in the same folder as my notes so if you click on the top right it pulls up a drop- down menu and you get the option to take this note and move it to the tags folder so now whenever you write a new note and you want to add the humility tag tag to it all you have to do is use the double square brackets to then link to this note you can create as many tags as you like now I have quite a large list cuz I love to read about lots of different subjects the point of this folder is to keep your system tidy and free from all this clutter if tagging still sounds confusing to you then don't worry cuz we're actually going to revisit it later the fourth folder stores indexes once your knowledge Network grows it can reach a point where it's a bit tricky to navigate and this is what repels most people from starting one they see this horrible ugly spider web looking thing and think how in the hell am I going to navigate this it's just too much and that may be true but luckily we have indexes they come in and solve this problem do you remember the tags from last step well because the tags are just empty notes we can use them as indexes too when a tag gets big enough as in you've connected a lot of notes to it you can actually turn this tag into an index an index is almost like the contents page of a book you take all of the notes within the tag and give them some sort of logical structure and this is super easy because our tags are empty notes and we can just go inside the note and start filling out the index let's take the cility tag again you can see here I have a few notes linking back to this tag now because there's only a few I don't bother making an index there's no point of it cuz I can see everything in one place easily but let's say I choose my learning tag now this is a much bigger one because it has 51 relevant notes linking back to it so to turn this tag into an index I add some subheadings and then under these subheadings I link all of the notes that fit that category the idea of the index is to add a basic level of structure to your notes so that if you want to visit the learning topic you have some sort of entry point for the discussion now I have a confession I got a bit lazy and I didn't actually put all of the learning notes in this index but once yours gets big enough do have a go at keeping things neat don't be like me of course if you're just setting up things now you don't have to worry about this stage it's just good to keep in mind for later on when you do have this problem the fifth folder is called the template folder this has one simple job and it stores the template for your main notes once we set this up later you can totally forget about it so don't worry folder number six is the Workhorse of this entire system this is where your main notes go some people call this folder the zetto Casten or Atomic notes the name is up to you the point is this is where every single main note goes in one folder now it sounds weird to put every note in one place but remember from before the lack of folders is what keeps this system flexible and open to connection plus as you add to this folder you will naturally begin to see different areas of Interest form because of the links chaos will slowly turn into a and you'll begin to see patterns in what you're reading I know it's unlike most other systems but if you trust the process it's going to serve you well so there's each folder covered once you set them up with or without the optional ones there's a few important settings we have to jig around with to make the process seamless like butter what butter is not seamless first off we go to files and links in the settings here we'll change the default location for new notes you want to select the one that says in the folder specified below then in the drop- down menu select your main notes folder or whatever else you called it now my notes are kind of ugly but if you want some more aesthetically pleasing ones go to the appearance section in the settings and you know have a play around with the themes next we're going to set up some hotkeys to make your reading as rapid as possible we want to save all of our mental energy for writing not for creating the notes to do this you want to go to the hotkey section of the settings search for template and where it says insert template add any hotkey convenient for you mine is control T which works a charm on Mac this would be command t next go to the core plugin section in the settings these are like extra quirks you can add to obsidian some of these are built into the app but others are made by members of the community in the call plugins you want to turn on the templates now there are a few others you can play around with but for now templates is all we need if you go to the community plug-in section you'll be greeted with this huge list of plugins to try all made by obsidian users you can Overlook all of these for now you don't need any of them but in case you're interested I use two I use one called better word count to upgrade the word count feature but also one called smart random note because sometimes I like to be able to generate a random notes but to clarify this is just my personal preference you don't need them and maybe after you've got into the flow of using this system do have an explore and see if you can upgrade your process somehow but be careful because the power of the system is in its Simplicity if you add endless plugins you might just over complicate the process and distract yourself from the real work so just be wise in what you choose there's a reason that after 9 months mons of use I only have two installed do you remember the templates we messed around with earlier now you'll see how useful they are in action in the settings go to the template section and in the top part select the folder that you created for your templates if you now exit the settings and press contrl t or whichever hotkey you set up for the template it's going to bring up this menu it's empty because we haven't yet created a template this is called a template because with the click of a button you can paste the contents onto empty note and this gives you some basic structure to work with it lives in the templates folder and because of the setting we changed earlier obsidian knows that this is the template you can copy my template for now at the top you can see date and time in between the squiggly brackets now I don't actually know the name of those but the point of them is that once you create a new note the date and time will automatically go there below this is status and tag this is where you add some important information for categorizing the note you'll see this in a bit it's super simple next you have the title of the note and once you type in the title again it's automatically going to be pasted here to make it big and bold like you see here you simply put a hashtag followed by space you can add multiple hashtags to make subheadings and the more hashtags you add the smaller the subheading will be under this you want to leave some blank space so you can actually have room to write your notes then at the bottom make a heading called reference here you're going to link to the source material but also any other similar notes from here the setup is complete so well done I haven't touched these settings since I began this system so thankfully from here it's a low maintenance process now let me walk you through the fun part how you can actually write these notes to create a new note you press crl o now this will bring up a menu and in the search bar you can type in the title of your note and then press shift plus enter to create it the good thing about this menu is that it works as a search bar so if you type in something and you have a similar note already created it's going to pop up for example I might want to create a new note about purpose and when I type in purpose similar notes will come up anything with purpose in the title this helps me avoid writing the same note twice which does happen because you might write a note months in the past and completely forget about it if I have already written the note I can simply jump back into it and maybe elaborate and add something but of course if the note doesn't exist then congratulations you made a new one once you create your new note it's going to be blank and you want your template to be pasted on top of it to do that press contrl T which is the hotkey for your template and then you'll see the one you created pop up press that one and within a second this slaps some structure into your note and it sets you up for right writing without hesitation now for the writing itself you want your notes to be written in a way that serves you the easiest way to show you this is to make a note myself from start to finish recently I read a book called Confessions of a cartel Hitman and yeah it's not the most deep or insightful book but you know I wanted to change the pace I also love to study crime from an anthropology perspective and of course this guy is a cartel member he had firsthand experience which I found interesting I have read this book but now I'm in the notetaking stage where I run through the book again from start to finish and I look for anywhere I took notes I then give these notes a formal write up to solidify them to start off with I make a new note in the source materials folder I give it the title of the book and of course if it was an online Source I would add the link here too this is a book so there's no need for that whenever I encounter a note in the paperback or maybe something I underlined that was interesting I make sure to write the page number down and maybe a relevant quote below this note I then expand on the topic in my own words I talk about my thoughts on it maybe what it reminded me of or even just explain it to myself your in a way that I understand now it's so so important to use your own words here otherwise you risk falling into passive learning of course it's easy to just copy the quote and move on but because this is a quick process you're not really forced to think about it so if you want to remember more and actually understand what you read it's best to take the time to flesh it out as you see it this forces your mind to reflect to think and to truly dwell on the ideas my first note here is about how Martin corono the author felt extreme loyalty to his fellow gang members even early on when he was on the streets I have a page number I have a quote and below it I expanded on the idea I explained how loyalty was the backbone of gang life probably because it feels fulfilling to be part of this close-knit group I carry on through the book repeating this process page number quote elaboration because I write a lot for each one this is a timec consuming process but you know I'm okay with that if it helps the ideas stick I'm willing to make that sacrifice of course you don't have to do the same you can write as little as you want or as much as you want once I finish writing all the source material notes I then create the full notes again I start at the top and I put a new tab to the side by pressing CR o I bring up the search menu I can then type in a new note and create it I then press contrl T which shows me the template and of course I insert that and there you go there's the full note the notes from The Source material were in context but these ones the main notes are not this means they're independent from The Source material and they're self-explanatory because of that one simple change it almost standardizes them and it lets them connect to other notes freely it also gives you a chance to talk about the bigger picture once you write the notes in the source material you can then ask yourself so what why does this matter what does this mean so throughout the source note I might see the same idea pop up again and again and to me that's something worth talking about the main note gives me a chance to take all of that and wrap it up as a key idea or a key takeaway I explained this process a little bit more in a past video so I'll try and remember to link that here for example this note I've created says that criminal gangs are united by a deep sense of loyalty and belonging now this makes no mention of Martin Corona the cartel member but what it does mention is the bigger picture the thing I want to walk away with of course you can reference people or events directly from the book But be sure to explain it you want to be able to return to these notes and actually understand what's going on immediately let's now go through the notes from top to bottom the status tag is not that important and honestly you can do without it I will use it for two things first I'll will either write # bab # child or # adult this sounds weird but all it means is how develop the note is if the note is new it's badly written and maybe unconnected or write # bab which tells me it's kind of in its young stage once I write more edit the notes and connect it to other things I can upgrade that status to a child and then adult all this does is help me know which notes maybe need more attention and more work again this is a less important feature so please feel free to remove it from your template if the note contains a quote I also like to put #t quote in this section I love to use quotes in my writing because I feel like it's a a Punchy way to get your message forward so by putting #t quote it just lets me find them more easily next comes the tag section now we've already talked about how to make tags but I must confess this part can be tricky for months I looked for advice on how to tag my notes properly how specific should I be how many tags should I add should I do it according to my interests or the subject I had all these unanswered questions and I was lost for Direction I want you to avoid the same Rabbit Hole so here are some pointers for Effective tagging ones that I learned the hard way first try to avoid tags that are too vague now for example I'm technically into self-improvement but what does that even mean it's such a vague idea that could mean Fitness it could mean Health it could mean business it could mean religion it could mean all sorts of different things if I showed you a note that said self-improvement you can't really guess what's inside of course you don't want it to be too precise either otherwise you'll end up never using it again you want it to be somewhere in the middle when I feel the need to create a new tag I ask myself a simple question will I ever use this tag again is there anything I might come across that will also have this tag another tip that saved me so much irritation in tagging is to keep tag tags related to your interests rather than what other people think is a common category the most obvious tags will be things like Fitness sociology maths things like that now those make sense in The Wider world but this is your system so the tag should serve you above all for example I have a tag called dangers to male female relationships now this sounds quite weird it's not a category of content you hear about every day it may be a bit Niche and precise but it works for me because it's something I'm interested in I know for a fact that I'm going to encounter more ideas that's going to be relevant to this topic and this means that the tags are serving my interests and not necessarily what the rest of the world is thinking remember this system is your second brain it doesn't belong to anyone else and that means the tag should serve you and you alone in the early stage of the system you're going to find yourself creating loads of new tags but remember after creating one and moving it to your tag section you can infinitely reuse it as you progress and you've covered most of your interests things will calm down a little for this note I know I don't have to create many new tags I've already talked about ideas similar to this and the tags will already exist so I apply the Loyalty tag I apply the meaning tag and this is a good start but I see something's missing I haven't accounted for the criminal side of this tag now I love to read about cartel history and maybe criminology in general I know I'm going to encounter this idea again so it makes sense to create a new tag for it so maybe I'll create a new tag called cartels or criminal life something not too vague but not too specific another common problem I have is that sometimes I forget tags exist and I forget to use them where they should be used now it's a real pain in the ass but I found a work around what I do is I search for similar notes using the hyperlink function and then I go into those notes and see what they have tagged and sometimes this reminds me of tag that I forgot about and I can just reuse it in my new notes the final nugget of tag advice is to not put too many down you can add 6 Seven 8 but at that point it starts to get confusing and messy I aim to keep it below four and five most of the time and you can't even go wrong with just one tag Now we move to the bulk of the note itself there's not much to say here it's as simple as discussing idea in order to better understand it yourself it's an outlook for reflection almost because I've already written a lot in the source material note I tend to just copy paste it sometimes I then maybe expand upon it edit the structure improve upon it and do all these things to make it as useful as possible for me or I can start from scratch and use the source material notes as inspiration most people write Less in the source materials and then use this step for the full write up so really it depends on what you prefer I just like to write a lot because as I said it helps slow down the flow and helps you remember it better the format of these notes is also your call I love to write these notes as mini essays which I talk about in an earlier video so do check that out but of course if you feel like a single sentence is enough to capture the idea go for it you can use blunt informative sentences you can use a story to tell something you can use a personal experience to make light of what you read literally anything goes because remember these are your notes and you can do whatever you please I'm not going to be assessing them like a teacher and neither will anyone else and speaking of mini essays you're going to see some in my newsletter so do be sure to subscribe with the link in the description it's totally free of course with that said I do have two small tips that help me keep my notes focused and free from clutter first I recommend that you keep these notes quite short so that you avoid turning them into this full-blown article or essay you want to use these notes as tools for learning or maybe to write up something you don't really want the note to be the large writing project itself this defeats the whole purpose of the note because it's no longer versatile I recommend keeping them below 500 Words And as a rule of thumb I try and write so that everything fits on the page without having to scroll down it just keeps things focused and concise the second tip is so important and it's to keep each mini essay focused on a single idea again you want your notes to be as clear and as flexible as possible you want to be able to use them in all sorts of situations whether that's writing something or maybe just to refresh your memory if you create a complicated note that pulls together many different ideas you end up with this messy jumble and because it's short you don't really have the time to flesh them out it may feel insightful but you may just be diluting the message and making it hard to understand what the note is about now connections are great don't get me wrong it's great to mix and match ideas but you should save this probably for a larger piece of writing maybe a full-blown essay there you have the room to expand upon these ideas and to really flesh them out and give them the attention they deserve if you want to expand on a note in obsidian simply make a new one and then write about the next idea there and maybe connect it back using a link it's the same end result but by doing so you've kept your notes clear and flexible also here's an underrated piece of advice format your notes so that they're easier to read trust me your future self doesn't want to revisit these notes and be met with this big fat ugly block of text text so try and include spaces between the lines at natural break points this keeps it easy to read and it takes less mental energy and that leads us to the final stage at last referencing at the bottom of the notes in the references section I create hyperlinks to any notes that discuss similar ideas I also like to link to the source material that the idea came from in this case it would be Confessions of a cartel Hitman the book in The Source materials folder again this is easy to do it's the same function as tagging you press the square bracket button twice and then search for any notes that connect and then you just press enter the same problem happens with tagging though you might forget about notes and forget to tag them the easiest way to get around this is to look up keywords and because those keywords probably exist in the title of the notes you might end up stumbling upon ones that are relevant to be extra sure I'm not missing anything I might even go to the tags of the note and at the bottom of the tag you see all of the linked notes and chances are something in there might be relevant enough to connect and finally at the bottom I link to the source material this is just a handy way to know exactly where the idea came from and if you ever want to revisit the source you know where to find it without tagging The Source note you might have to end up scaring the internet to find where it came from and of course you don't want to be in that situation I think that's everything that's a long video so thank you for watching and the thing is with these setups is you can't mention everything I I know for a fact that I've missed some points here and I've missed some details and there will be questions so of course the comments are open my email is open feel free to shoot me anything that you don't understand and I'm I'll gladly explain it because this is hard and it might take a a few days few weeks few months to get into the flow of things but trust me if you persevere through that you will understand you'll get a feel for how the app works and overall it will start to work for you so I really hope that I've covered everything well enough to get going but again feel free to ask questions feel free to check the comments for any answers you might have and of course thank you so much for watching

Channel: Odysseas

Views: 550,458

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Id: hSTy_BInQs8

Length: 36min 26sec (2186 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024