Ultimate Notetaking: My Neovim Zettelkasten Based on Obsidian - Complete Walkthrough

hello today I would like to show you my notetaking system I recently created a video about my whole workflow on Mac OS which is based on the terminal and neovim and in there the my not taking was a part of that as well and a few of you have asked me some questions about the system and were curious about it so I created this mind map to help me sort of structure my thoughts around this and I invite you to come along for the journey as we explore this mind map so in the middle here we have note taking and I'll tell you the the story of how I got into note taking I studied at University and I used to take notes in written journals and I I passed University just fine doing that and this is also the time when digital uh formats came along uh where it was becoming very established to hand in things digitally so I also had this sort of growing collection of things that were in a Google drive somewhere but there was never really a system right everybody has this everybody has these notes and files floating around without any system behind it or without any sort of thought behind it then about 3 years ago I changed my career to it I made a total switch and at the same time I got into a phenomenon called personal knowledge management this is part of this whole productivity Niche on YouTube by the likes of um Ali abdal and all those very interesting people and that really inspired me to sort of build an my own system around this and to be very intentional about how I create notes and it has given me so much benefits that I um yeah my hope is that by sharing this this this system that I use or the way I have used this that it might Inspire others to do this as well because I as I made this career change it was a very good moment to start taking notes because I was learning so many new things and I had to document these things and keep them as a reference so yeah that brings me to the point why right and and here I said the reference it's basically because I I basically have a bad memory I I don't remember things very well verbatim and it's very useful to me to have a sort of personal database of knowledge that I can search search in or look look look up things that I need and one of the big why here is this it's summarized beautifully by this quote by Thiago Forte uh is as you are looking watching this video I assume you know who he is if you don't if you don't then I highly suggest you check him out and his book building a second brain which is a very yeah very big part of my whole system here but this quote says your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively and I totally totally agree with this this is so so true especially if you are a knowledge worker like myself like I'm a devops engineer I work with infrastructure as code cloud computing programming coding all these kinds of things and this world that world is constantly under development there's constantly new technologies coming out and it really makes such a difference to have a system established for yourself where you can efficiently store and retrieve information from and so this quote has been a really real guiding principle in my own system and how how it will function in the time to come because yeah not trying to speak highly of myself but I have managed to completely change my career and and I I have get I've been getting very good feedback on my my output and people really um appreciate my presence in teams as I join them as a consultant but also other people who I greatly respect uh techn in the technical sense like in in terms of their technical knowledge but also their personal skills uh there are a few few very senior people out there that I respect very much and all of them have something in common and that is a not taking system which they use extensively and and the best ones are e also willing to share the the notes publicly um and that brings me to this point of content creation so one of the wise is uh content creation I I have a Blog and I'll show you my I'll just quickly pull it up here my blog is uh a collection of markdown files rendered by Yugo but this is basically the public part of my my not taking system of my zcast the notes that I take for myself are live in a system but they are also published on the internet as well so my my zelc the the notes that I decide are not personal and which can be of use of others are actually published on a Blog and I'll go into that a bit later so that is one of the reasons why I let's open the drawing again uh here we go one of the reasons why I do it because it helps me to create content to write articles to write blog posts to create YouTube videos and uh I do that by sort of thinking of a concept then searching my database of notes and then Gathering relevant information being inspired by the other notes that I have there and then this linking of notes and reading things as I go through my my my system helps me to generate new ideas and and do creative thinking because that's all creativity is right it's it's creating links between things and coming up with new original ideas or or links between notes or concepts and also I take a lot of notes on um yeah on my on my life basically I uh as I write here thoughts and feelings under the what section so I keep a Daily Journal and I write about my feelings my thoughts the things that I'm doing and noting down everything and I find that very therapeutic it helps me to reflect on what's going on in my life and to understand things better it's it's very often that I find that when I write something down that it helps me to process something and I wrote a little article about that which is called the power of writing on my uh channel here which you can look up if you are interested in how I think writing is very powerful so let's just add that straight away um here I'll do power of writing and I'll just uh finish clean that up later I will be take adding some few notes here and there and then um this this entire mind map will be available for download later just so you know so what do I take notes on well the basically everything uh I am constantly learning new things I love learning I love discovering new Concepts and and doing new new things and this happens in the form of reading books listening to podcasts watching YouTube videos and every time I uh create every time time I learn something new I will usually just write it down so that I can reference it later and sometimes I create a new note based on the podcast right so I'll go into the the zcas method a little bit later and how I have implemented that but basically usually a podcast will be its own note and I just write down all sorts of all of the thoughts that are in there and then like Concepts that I think will be useful in other notes as well I will create separate notes out of but basically any activity where I'm consuming content or learning something uh is accompanied by taking notes and um yeah I I I I talked about thoughts and feelings so this means that I I keep a Daily Journal and a daily note and weekly notes and such like I'll go into that here in the the reflection part but it also means that whenever I have an interesting idea I will just dump it in my my system and very often I will find that these random notes somehow pop up somewhere else and then they even though they're not useful at the time when I make them then they will become useful later so that's the whole point right so capturing things and then somehow you through Serendipity you you come across the notes again and then they are of U some value to you at that point and how I do it is uh yeah mostly digitally like I said in my University years I did everything on most most things on paper and I have also kept a written personal journal for years and years I actually have a pretty nice handwriting and I thought it was a very nice mindful activity to sort of try to write neatly and slowly and there are many studies about how handwriting has benefits in remembering things um that being said having notebooks has a big disadvantage in the sense that you can't look up information quickly so it's nice to sort of read through a paper notebook and see what you were up to in that year but if I have 20 notebooks and somewhere there is a note about a s certain Concept in GoPro programming it takes me a lot of time to reach that note right if I don't have some sort of system to help me do that and that's the whole it's a huge advantage of taking digital notes is that you're able to search them and that you that they're also stored safely so if my apartment somehow caught fire all of the notebooks that are behind me they they will be gone I do have a project in mind to sort of scan everything and and and store everything digitally I should really get get going on that but for now if if I if a fire breaks out it's it's gone right and my digital stuff if you are meticulous about your backup strategy it will be stored forever it's there forever and the main advantage is that you can can search it so I think that's everything on the not taking part in general and then I would like to go into the tools that I use to take notes and my system is unique in the sense that I use both both neovim and obsidian there are many many many tools out there and many many strategies but um these are the ones that I use consistently and I have I found that I can't use them I can't exclude any of either of them I need both and that's probably going to stay like that for for forever but I I started using notion when I started my personal Knowledge Management journey I started using notion and it's a great tool it's accessible in the browser you can create relational databases with your stuff and it's super useful and it was a great start on my personal Knowledge Management Journey but the main disadvantage to me is that it's stored with an external part that can have access to your notes and I I'm not that concerned that anybody is going to snoop through my daily thoughts but it is something that I I that was bugging me and secondly you don't have your text files the your notes live in the cloud but you are not able to manipulate these files and that is why I completely fell in love with obsidian when I discovered it so I obsidian I if you watching this video I assume you already know what obsidian is but very very quickly obsidian is the is the tool that I use now here it's I'm actually using excal draw in obsidian I'll get into that later but obsidian basically has this concept of a vault which is a set of folders on your local hard drive and in each folder there are markdown files in which you keep your notes and that is why that is how I how I got really got into markdown and and and and um obsidian as a tool because the thing is that I can have my my notes on my drive but I can run scripts on those notes I can do other interesting things with those files if I want to I can manipulate them exactly the way I want they are mine I can store them wherever I want I can copy them I can back back them up the way I like so that is the main selling point for uh obsidian for me that it uses local markdown files and I love markdown I completely fallen in love with that way of writing and I'm never going going back so I started an ocean then went to obsidian and then I used obsidian for a long time uh I still I still do but in my daily work as a devops engineer this is where I where I spend my time right in the terminal so let me I forgot to start my screen keys here so let me start casting my keys for those who like to see what I'm doing and I'm also going to run the script that will increase the font size a bit so it's easier for you to see but this is where I work most of my time I do coding I am uh let's see I I I am I can go and log into my kubernetes cluster here so I'm now logging into my kubernetes cluster that's at home and I'll be working and write and checking out the logs and checking out how things are going here and then in here I need to access my notes right so all of my coding all of my work let's let's bring up some code everything that I do happens in neovim so what you see me doing here is neovim this is a text editor and the editor is runs in the terminal here and this is also why I like it so much but this is a an editor that runs in the terminal where you use your mainly use your keyboard for navigation you don't use the mouse and and I did when I got into devops and changed my my career to it I started out in Linux Administration current these days I work mostly with kubernetes and Cloud native technology Microsoft Azure but then I learned about vim and the power of editing files in the terminal right there because you can log into servers and Vim is usually always installed everywhere so you can edit text files locally on those servers so I got the advice to learn Vim learn it well and I fell completely in love with it and that is what I use for my coding for working with for working with other files that are related to my work so then it made a lot of sense to also start using um Vim on my markdown files right so obsidian has this like I'm now in my second brain directory and if I just open Vim here here you will see the directory structure that I have here and this is created by obsidian right this is what I created initially with obsidian but I found well I can also just query my notes in neovim or from the terminal so let's say I want to find all of the files related to kubernetes I do FD cuber and then here I see kubernetes ch chenge devops automation project kubernetes Network debugging so here I see all of the notes that have the word kuber in the in the file name or if I would go and grab for function here I see all of the function that all of the files that have the word function in them so it's very powerful for me to have these files local on my on my PC so I can work with them from the terminal and VI is my tool of choice there so I'll will come back to obsidian and how I use it but let's go into the the pros of Vim so yeah like I said I'm a terminal Focus devops engineer and to sort of prove my point like say I am debugging something in a kubernetes cluster right and then I I am writing some code in this window and then I I think oh I should write a uh go program for this kind of thing so let me review my notes on go functions so I'm I'm in this directory here I will create a new directory let's say call it go test here and I'm in this directory then I switch to a new window I open Vim search my files and do go and then here I see oh go Loops that was what I needed or maybe I want go functions and here I have my notes on vartic functions in go so I'm reading through this note and then let's see is there any code example here yeah here's a here's a code example here I yank it I switch back to my file here I add a new file test. go and I paste it in Tada so this is why it's so powerful to have these notes I don't have to bring my hand to my mouse and switch window open up obsidian and sort of start clicking around and so some like that so let's say I am uh now finished with this file and then I'm going to go into another directory and create a bicep test directory I'm just improvising here but let's say I want to create a bicep file and I remember oh I had this bicep course the other day and then I go to my Vim I do bicep and here I have advanced bicep and here I see a Target scope subscription a SN nippet that I like I go back to my file and I open the file bicep do uh test and here I open it and paste and boom I have my code in here so this is why it's so powerful and I didn't lift my hands I was doing everything from the from the keyboard here and that is why I need Vim in my not taking system it is so incredibly efficient to learn this well to be able to learn this well and to access your information quickly being able to do this from the command line like this switching between Windows copying and pasting and without any lag let's say I'm debugging these logs I see these logs I want to uh copy this and now I'll just use the mouse to select this and then I go back to my notes and then I can write um uh noticed these mistakes in the log logs and then here I paste them in and you see how how how useful this is I can or if I'm noting or writing something here and I open up my K9s again I can have my thing here and then I can describe describe my pod and then I can write about what I see here like the IP IP is this and that the the labels labels are configured this way and having this information so easily accessible without having to use the mouse is just incredibly useful and it has increased my productivity a thousandfold so uh enough about that I think I think I brought the point across how efficient it is to learn how to do this well so and here I also got into the t-o thing that I was um I already showed that so this what I was doing switching between these windows and if you are interested in this look up the video about my workflow on Mac OS but I can switch between Windows I can create new windows I can have information available in several windows I can split this one and uh this is why this is all done by t-mo so tmox is a way a terminal multiplexer which helps me to create screens or p uh windows or panes that I can switch between and copy information between if I need to next I have a telescope so what you saw me doing in Vim here I have a shortcut I do space FF and now I'm able to search the file names for things so I have I have some file name conventions but usually my files are are my file names are representative of the the uh contents so let's say I have I want to do something about running well I here I have a note about running my first 10K I have so notes about running form and this is why telescope is so powerful because I can see these notes first of all it's a fuzzy finder so if I do Ry then it will find running see if I do fun function then it without the u it will still search functions so it is a uh fuzzy finder so let's go back to the running example well now I'm scrolling through these and I have this preview window on the right so here I have a longer uh longer note and I can um scroll the the the preview here as well by pressing control D and control U so this is so incredibly powerful to quickly look up information because this is based on file names but you can also ba base it on the contents of the node which uses grap so space SG and now I can start looking for function and here I see function I see all of the notes that are that contain the word function in it or let's do another search for um base training right so here I have all the all the notes that have the word Bas training in it and I if I find this note I can scroll up and down in it so this is why it's so incredibly incredibly useful to have telescope in my workflow because searching in obsidian is fine so let's say what it would look like if I'm in obsidian here I can search based on on file names so that would work right that's also a fuzzy finder but you can also search based on the contents so base training this also works well but I I have to use my mouse right I'm clicking around it's this very small screen it's not very efficient I have to sort of look into move my head and even though it would get the job done it is much much much much more efficient to do it this way just opening up running and then checking this out and scrolling up and down so it's incredibly incred it's like magnitudes of it's an order of magnitudes that it's um efficient more efficient so I I that's why I use Vim basically in and specifically teles scope um another thing that Vim that I can use in Vim is UNIX filters and scripts so a Unix filter is a command that that takes input and outputs something so one example that I have is Let's uh let's do a um temp video test. markdown here I am writing a new markdown file hello world and let's say I have written some stuff here and now I want to uh have a title so this is going to be a very long title I can type it like this I can do bang bang and pipe it to the program title and it converts it to title case so the title command if I do which title is a by go program that I wrote a very simple go program can I can I find that very quickly uh can I just uh uh go no GitHub [Music] Misha yeah here we go so title. go here is a very very simple go program it's called has a function it takes a string and then it takes the string and does the title built-in function on that string and then it prints it out again so this is very very useful to sort of basically be able to pipe what's called you take the the words that are on this line and then with the Vim command this you can pipe it to the title command and then it will it will return the the the the values that you want so you can write all these programs and they can act as Standalone programs as you're working on the terminal but you can also use them from within Vim another thing that I have is the space d command that inserts the the the date in a certain format now obsidian has 10 pler and it has all sorts of hot keys that you can do those things with but here I can just use things like go and Bash and things that I do that I use for work I have this dot files uh repo with tons of scripts in them these are all scripts that I regularly use and these scripts I can either like run them here from the command line or I can call them from within Vim to help me with my text editing so that's another very useful functionality that you can use with vim and yeah finally something that I didn't put here which I maybe should uh or scripts maybe scripts should be its own text um field here scripts because I'll show you I spoke about that I keep daily not not well when you open I have obsidian configured that when I open obsidian it will open up the daily note so if I but I also have a hotkey that's command T where it opens up the daily note so this is the place where I will be writing down today I had a pretty good day at work so this is how how a typical obsidian user would use daily notes and it works fine however sometimes I am working in the command line and I just want want to quickly write something down so then I have a script that's called day and here we have the same file opened up in Vim right today I had a pretty good day at work you see that's what I just wrote so let's add some text and gone and I can go back to my work so sometimes I will have a thought that I want to do or like remember to take out the laundry and then later when I sit down to write my diary then I will see that file again I think oh yeah wait I noted down I need to take out the take out the laundry so this this day command that you see me using that's actually just a script in my scripts Library it looks like this and here I format the A and it just opens a file with a sort of template that I created and it opens the file in Vim so it's ready for me to edit if it's not there it will create a new one but this is how you can sort of extend your not taking system and build custom commands and make it do things the way you want I have this other command that's called blog Z and then it enters a file name test for video and here it creates a markdown file in my blog repo and now it's ready for me to write a blog po post so let's see a test title for my blog post and then I can pipe this to title because I want it as a title right so that's what I showed you here tags hello and then this is my blog post then I can write it down I do blog reset and it will build my new blog and it will show it here as Local Host and here you can see the the block that I just wrote right so you can build these scripts for yourself and build a workflow around your notetaking system this is how I'm sort of merging those two together and this is something that I think you can most efficiently do when you first of all know the command line and and know these kinds of things know bash scripting but also if you're used to editing text files with Vim because I I maybe it's possible but to write a bash script that creates a file somewhere and has you ready to edit it at the right as quickly as I did and then have it open in obsidian I don't know if it can be done and if it can be done I I don't think it will be as efficient as this so I think that's enough of why Vim is um hugely efficient in my note taking now let's uh go go back to obsidian here and let's talk about why I still use obsidian because if my Vim system is so damn efficient like what do why do I need obsidian for right well obsidian has so has some functionality which is so incredibly useful and Powerful that I I will probably never never leave obsidian ever again even so I I that's the the thing about my notes system I keep keep them compatible with each other I want to always make sure I can use them but I want also want to make sure that my system is always compatible with obsidian and the main reason for that is the visual aspect of obsidian so one thing I cannot do in my Vim notes so if I'm editing my daily note oh oops here if I'm editing my daily note I cannot just paste in an image here image this is this is the terminal you can't work with images here that's just that's just simple as that however if I am going back to my daily note and I'm writing something here and let's say I come across a very interesting thing on the internet or a nice picture and I want to save this I can just take a screenshot here go back to obsidian and paste it in like that's not ever going to work in in vim and now this image is here but if I go back to vim and open my daily note I won't see the image I see the reference to the image but I won't see the image so obsidian has the ability to be able to render images like this but also just to paste them in which is really handy if you are creating if you're writing notes on something and you want to capture visual information from tutorials and things like that then you can just paste them in right there another um let's see another very important part of the visual side of things in obsidian is the graph so here you have the graph view the every dot on this graph represents a note in my not taking system and I think it's very powerful to see that sometimes you get this sort of cluster of notes right like I some of them I intentionally color yellow by using a tag but because I know that it's an important thing but sometimes I'm in my my thing in my view here and then I see well what is this here this is a something that doesn't have the color but apparently it's something that I am uh connecting a lot of notes to right so here is the one called writing well because it shows shows up as a thicker dot here it means that I'm creating a lot of links to these notes and these notes apparently writing is a very important thing in my life and yes it is um well let's check out the connections to writing well it is connected to these big dots here here's a note on my iy guy and flow I'm not going to open that because it contains um a few very personal things that's the danger of making videos on your second brain or your your uh not taking system but here's another one like coding right this is a very important part of my notetaking system which contains all sorts of notes then when I open the coding I can do uh open local graph and here I see all of the notes that are related to my coding right so I have a note on Lua learn go functions bicep SDK and if I go to bicep then bicep is linked to all sorts of other notes I can go bicep random strings so here's an article that I wrote about bicep strings I go back to coding and I see oh function oh oh wait here's that note on go reading standing from Reading from a standard input output right so this graph view is very useful in the sense of discovering new links show and and it's just just so cool to see your your your whole collection of notes living like a uh visual representation like this it also shows me notes that are orphans that don't have links yet so sometimes I'll go through and just check out oh this way this this note that doesn't have any links maybe I should link it to something here's another one about pod disruption budget well maybe this note should have a link to kubernetes because it's a related to kubernetes right and now it won't show up as an orphan anymore so it's a very nice thing to sort of interact with your with your nodes like this and and your Vault so that's the other um oh let's see where is the drawing here back to the drawing so that's another very important thing of the visual part and there's exol draw so that's what I'm using right now here it's so powerful that this is now integrated into obsidian because like I'm doing here you can create notes uh you can create links to the notes and they live in the drawing like this I can embed notes so I have this uh let's embed do I have something about settle cast no I don't have any topic notes on that uh writing well let's do let's embed this writing Noe here right so here we see I I have this other note living in My Vault somewhere but now I've embedded it here in in excal draw so excal draw itself is a separate tool but now it's integrated into obsidian it I'm able to sort of combine things and represent them in a visual way and that is something I'm exploring more and more recently and it's uh yeah this this whole mind map is a is a an example of this right I a few years ago I came across the book by Tony buan buzan buzan about uh mind mapping and how coloring and and drawing things is very um beneficial to thinking processes and then I also learned how to draw I'm a horrible horrible drawer as you see here but it still helps with the creative process right so I work through this book um drawing with the left on the left side of the brain it goes into how drawing lights up certain parts of your brain how they are uh helpful in the thinking process and even when I prepared this video I just start with this concept and I add pretty colors and you sort of organically start to create these things that help they really help me to think so I'm um I'm I'm going to be exploring this more in my in my not taking setup and uh as I'm also becoming more established as a Creator I'm thinking this can be a very useful tool for me to create new things and to help me in my thinking process uh obsidian also has a lot of plugins so what one of the plugins that I use a lot is the Kindle plugin the K obsidian Kindle you can just add your my clippings file and now I have all of my uh let's do Sumo here now I have all of the highlights that I made in my Kindle book about this is a book aan Sumo it's a Budd Buddhist teacher it book is called direct realization and at some point I made the highlight letting go is therefore being able to bear with something unpleasant and not be caught up in anger and aversion this passion is not depression it's a very beautiful quote and the power of having this in my second brain is that if I'm searching for things so here is depression so say this might be a very risky thing to search for but if I search for depression then here I get all of the notes that are are depression but also the highlights that I made in the books you see here you see the directory name it's called the Kindle highlights and here you have the all of the highlights that I made about depression so you see how this all starts come to come together to have all of the information in one place well that's the that's why I used the Kindle uh plugin to sync in all of the highlights from my Kindle another one is Anki Anki is a a uh program to create flashcards and to do um what's it called space repetition for when I'm studying for exams and certifications and things like that but then from here I'm I'm able to create flashcards from my notes I think if I can quickly uh is there an example here um is there a quick example 104 networking uh yeah here the these are this um notation Nic double quote double quote network interface controller this means the front of the flash card is NI and the back is network interface controller so this creates flashcards from text and it's very useful because you just run the plugin and then it creates flashcards which you can use in uny and then use space repetition for study so that's a very useful thing and yeah the thing with obsidian is it basically has infinite possibilities with all the the plugins that you can can make some people have created these hugely intricate things with data View and i' I used that a little bit myself too but yeah there's just so much extensibility to obsidian so much things you can do and that's a very big Plus in obsidian one other reason that I I I always uh will keep using obsidian probably is the mobile AIS so it's great that I can work very efficiently from the terminal like this but in order to do that I need to be sitting behind the computer that is able to pull in these files and to uh run run a terminal like this I don't have that when I'm in the mountains and walking around and I want to create a note or I want to share something that I meet then here we always carry these things around these days I can open up obsidian on my phone and uh it's loading now but it I open up obsidian and I have my entire note collection available to me from my phone if I'm sitting on the bus and I want to look up something as I'm writing in a journal or something then I can I have it all here I can write notes I can continue working on a document that I'm writing I can all I have my entire collection sitting in my pocket at all times and that's incredibly powerful and that's something that's not very easily achieved if you only use Vim or not use a tool like obsidian and in order to achieve that I use iCloud sync so I'm very heavily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem and I I use a Macbook I have an pad I have a iPhone and before I was running most mostly on Linux and windows and I that's one of the problems that I had that it was become becoming quite difficult to share my my entire not taking system in between systems I have since discovered the plugin obsidian git so I my entire system is synchronized to a gate repository it is currently in GitHub but that's something that I am not very happy with like I trust Microsoft but in a way it's not not a very nice feeling to know that everything is there so I'm now considering having my own selfhosted git instance in my home lab and then create compressed encrypted files that I will then back up to git or somewhere else but uh obsidian git is is a way of synchronizing your not taking system in between operating systems if you don't want to use iCloud sync but with iCloud sync I'm able to do that and of course there is the obsidian sync service which costs money and I had that for about a year mostly because I I was using Linux and windows and had to sync across these things but also because I wanted to support the obsidian project because it just uh adds so much value to my life this is isn't it amazing that this tool is just entirely free so yeah obsidian sync it works great it's all encrypted end to endend so give that a shot if you uh are not into the Apple ecosystem so talked about visual right the thing is uh I I recently bought an iPad and it comes with this pencil and then you can draw so I have this open sometimes and then I will draw or write and I'm I'm just having a lot of fun with it these days so I just had had this little funny drawing where I'm sort of create trying to symbolize a guy thinking very hard and the gears are running uh moving around right I drew this by hand and then I do a bit of writing and it it it makes everything become very alive and and it it activates other parts of the brain and I think this is helping me to think um in in in new cre creative ways so um on the bottom side of my mind map here is zcast and reflection well reflection is basically um the function one of the functions of my not taking system so yes I take a lot of technical notes and and and Technical topics when I'm learning something I will create a note but also there is um this part reflection journaling like I showed you on the daily notes but also periodic notes I have a template of weekly notes here and here there are goals and I will set intentions for the week and then when the week is over then I will go through and how how did it go with my intentions uh what are the most significant things that happened in my week and then I will uh note things things down how am I going with my goals are there any tasks lingering did I make any purchases that I regret so this is a very useful tool for reflection and I have done this very consistently for about a year and there was this point where I I started seeing notes from last year in my searches and that was a very powerful uh thing to see these notes from a year ago and what I was doing then now recently I've had a period where I wasn't doing it and filling out these weekly notes started to feel like a chore um so then I had a break from it but then I started noticing no I kind of want this again I I it's a very nice way of checking in with yourself same for daily journaling I I had a phase recently of about a couple of months where I wasn't doing it and I started really missing it so now I'm I'm really back in the habit and I'm doing it a lot and that's the great thing about it right a not taking system is something that evolves with you as a person and your needs and you can try things out and then you'll think well I don't actually maybe I did this and I found out that I don't really need that in my life anymore but in my case I found out well I I do need it and I I I like to do it so that is uh a fun that's a uh thing of reflection that I that I have in my notes taking system and there is project management so I'll get into it in the next section um that will go into the I've talked a lot about the tools and the why and and how I take notes well what I take notes on but now let's go into how I organize my notes and how I organize the my my note taking system so like many of you in this space I I have read the book um how to take smart notes by sunka Ain which introduced me to the zcast method and that is that changed my life basically reading about him is such was such an experience about Nicholas Lumen and I wrote an article about my neovim zelc here it's on my website which will go into more depth into yeah why I take notes what I take notes on but how I've implemented this um specifically with all the tech you can read about it too so I will paste that in my thing here as well and then it should be on the on the drawing as I export it later but this um a zcas is just a place where you collect the notes and then you link them with unique identifiers so I I have currently have this uh approach to my notes as well I have this one large let's show it in obsidian I have a few folders I I do have a few folders still but most of my notes live like here you see how often I use obsidian in in the graphical sense which is not very often here here here I have this zcast um folder or directory and that contains the majority of my notes Here on the left so you you I yes if you don't know what a zel Casten is look into it it's a system of collecting notes and linking them and the main thing is that you don't have a lot of folder structures where you keep these notes they they just live in this one big thing and then you bring them together as you need them and the the structure that I have chosen for my not taking system apart from the zcast is the the para structure by Thiago Forte and this he Advocates a well let's open it up in Vim because I think that will be a bit easier to see so here I have my second brain open and Thiago Forte has this para p a a structure so projects areas resources and archive and I adopted this structure and even though I have a zel Casten that contains most of my notes I still find quite a bit of value in this directory structure so my my system is basically a mixture between obsidian and Vim and then mixing zel Casten with the para method so the projects contain projects that I'm doing so now I I have a project of revising my personal knowledge system I'll get into that later but I have a project of the home lab which contains all of the notes that were related to my home lab and then when I am finished with a project then I will either move it somewhere else and or move it to the archive so most of my notes are being put into the zle Casten but I find it quite useful to have them like when I'm doing a project to put my notes in a separate project folder areas are the things that you are responsible for in the long on the long term so here I have a few areas of interest and responsibility like my tech blog and my YouTube channel f ort is my current customer so I'll keep all of the notes that are for my customer there uh food is a large interest that I and health so here are all the notes related to my health and yeah let's it's just Rings reps and hypertrophy notes on sugar uh vegan protein right I just uh like when I'm when I am categorizing my notes then sometimes I think it's useful to put it in here even though I I most I hardly ever sort of go into the heal folder and and look and what what notes do I have in my health folder but I think somehow it will help someday to have them collected like this and there's just this mental thing of having it having it in a folder like that next there's resources these are just you know areas of interest that you just put in notes like that and collect them this way and the archive contains the archive of all of your notes so when I'm done with a project I generally will move it to resources or uh the archive or now my home lab is actually turning into a long-term responsibility ability so that will very likely be moved to areas I also have the inbox uh folder and that is a very useful thing so when I I have this command that's called zet then it will ask me for a file name and then I'll do video demo hello and it creates this note and it will be located if I do PWD I am now in my users Misha second brain inbox directory so it will create a note in the Inbox and then hello for the video video hello world so you have this this note here now and if I then open a new window and go to my inbox there will be a video demo hello and here is the VD the note here so as I'm going along in during the today I will make a lot of these zet entries so every time I have an interesting thought or an interesting thing that I want to capture I'll just do Z my random thought and then random thought and today I was thinking that it will will be very nice to get go out camping in the spring again I don't know I won't generally capture thoughts like this but I might you know so I I capture them like this and they are all collected in the inbox folder uh here there will be here my random thought and then in obsidian usually once a week I will go through my inbox folder like this and I have a few uh keyboard commands using a plugin so command Y and then I open the Inbox and then I will go Untitled or this can be deleted so I will do delete file then I open the Inbox again and go to uh video demo hello and I think okay this is a one for my YouTube channel folder so then I'll move it in there and that's that's a nice process because it go I go through the inbox like that and then when I do I sort of have to look at my notes and evaluate if I still want to keep them in my system so sometimes I keep some notes and then I I I write them on the Fly and then I think well I don't really need that in my in my system at all anymore there's this very good quote well let's do a demonstration of my do I have a curator here we go um this is another Showcase of how effective my system is right I I knew there was a quote that contained the word curator I do a quick search and here I have the the quote we need to adopt the perspective of a curator stepping back from the Raging River and starting to make intentional decisions about information we want to fill our minds well this is not exactly the one that I want but here is um like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab our goal should be to capture only the ideas and insights we think are truly not worthy so not surprisingly this is from the book building a second brain by Thiago Forte but this was actually a really nice example of why my system is so efficient and that I can quickly search up things if I want to um but the point I wanted to make is that I have this inbox I once a week I go through it and then it forces me to think about these notes like do I really want them in there or not and then I will either usually they go to straight to the zelc and directory and now it's moved I press contrl m z and it's in my zcas directory or I will delete the file by typing it and now it's gone so there is this uh that's the uh element of my um folder structure with the inbox the zel cast that contains most of the notes and then there are a few folders that are still helping me to have some sort of structure I am now revising this I am I don't really want to use para anymore but I do think that this projects folder is going to stay because it really helps me um not to take on too many projects at the same time I I should pray be I should usually limit myself to three projects at the most and if I have certainly six uh folders in my projects folder then I know that I'm getting a bit too ambitious and maybe I should few put a few things on hold so it does help me reflect in that way and I like the fact to have sort of separate things where I can store things that are related to my interests um that are longer term even though I don't usually go in and and look at the notes in that folder it does help me somehow to yeah have an organized feeling about things [Music] um I have talked about the directory structure para Atomic notes so I I was into this a little bit briefly I I take small notes on with that contain topics sometimes I take longer notes like this bicep Advan this is like a course that I did which is a sort of longer notes that will contain all of the things that are based from that module but if there is a an interesting Concept in here that is useful that I think I will use in other notes or that can be useful to be linked to other notes then I will create a more Atomic notes for example um what did I did one on persistent volume persistent storage here uh PVC here here I created a note that has some thoughts about persistent volumes and reclaim policies and I think this can be useful to embed somewhere for example or to when I'm writing a an article about kubernetes storage then I I can link this to that storage and then it will come up as I'm right and in a creative process so mostly I try to create small notes like on sugar or on vegan protein and I there are smaller notes that I can link together but sometimes I have bigger notes as well so I'm not a zcast and purist in that sense that I I do keep longer notes as well and as I went into a bit earlier a large part of my zcast is actually published as a Blog um here you have this directory I have my Z Casten directory with my my personal zelc but in the zcast there is a zet directory and that is actually the part that is published on my website as a um uh public zcast but the great thing is that here we have this note news Bo in Zen mode for example this is a note or yeah a note on my public slecting but if I am in my daily note and I want to link to my news boat in Zen mode it I can still link to that right I can even embed it uh if I want to and now my note is embedded in my daily note if I somehow wanted that so this is stuff that is published on my blog but I can still reference it in my personal zle cast as well [Music] um all right we're getting close to the end now I have spoken about blog Atomic notes and yeah one last thing the the zel Casten has this very um the original method has this way of of identifying noes and with unique identifiers I do use unique identifiers because if we look here you will have this link section that has this number so every node is that I create has automatic generated this um this identifier which I can use to link somehow reference it later if I want to but my main identifiers are my file names and if you look at the for example the zel Casten of rwx Rob you will see that all of his file names are actually numbers and then if he want if he references other zedal then he will reference that that number well I think it's much easier to much more user friendly to have my file names my files with an actual file name that I can recognize the only thing is that it has to be unique but I find that it's actually very easy to just come up with unique file names and I rarely run into file names that are duplicates if not I will just add a number or another word and it's not a problem for me to sort of have unique file names all the time so I I I I I use file names as identifiers in my current setup and I don't use tags uh in my my zelc I I do use them on my blog so here on my blog I have tags and if I go to celium then if you go to the Post here then you will see tag celium and actually because I do that and because this is embedded in my zle Casten then in my obsidian repo then in My Vault uh if I go here and I will actually see the celium tag here yeah here here it shows up as celium right so here I will see all the notes that are related to the celium tag so even though I don't actively use them I do use them on my website and I did use them in the beginning a bit but I in terms of retrieving information or linking information I don't currently use tags in my uh in my workflow but that might be subject to change and that is about it on on the zle cast um part of things so that means we have gone through the entire mind map now I've spoken about why I take notes and what I take notes on I've spoken about the pros of obsidian the pros of vim and how I use those and what I use my notes taking system for and um it is not a coincidence that I'm making this video now um I'm about to start make taking more visual notes in obsidian like I was talking about and this mind map is also a testimony to that and I want to uh I wanted to with this video capture way I've been doing things so far so the way I have uh I've been doing it like this for I would say well over a year that I started implementing par and and use that as a methodology for my my not taking system Thiago for's method is extremely useful it has really helped me to uh think about my note taking system more intentionally Al and having this directory structure still helps me so I might not get rid of it at all we'll see what happens but I am at this point where it's starting to itch and that I'm uh um discovering new things I I'm now using excal brain more I discovered Z's vers personal Knowledge Management Channel on YouTube he has this amazing content about visual note taking and and implementing more visual things in your in your not taking and I feel that I'm at a point of change in my my note taking system so that's why I wanted to capture it here because I had been wanting to make this video for a very long time and now that I have my good audio setup here I feel that the time had come and that I felt ready to do it and yeah my conclusion is uh I will probably always keep using both vim and obsidian each has their strength strengths and they both have great functionality and they are uh both super super important to me I interact with them with for hours hours a day every single day and I I don't think I will use any other tools than vim and obsidian but you never know but I do as uh even though my workflow has been mostly text based for up until now most mostly just markdown files and and noting things down in text form I'm now going to explore um having more visual things and also the the excal brain plugin if I open my kubernetes note here and then there is this excal brain excal brain here and here you will see all of these um relations in excal brain and and then you can start you can start giving names to these links and yeah check out Z's personal Knowledge Management Channel because it's he he has gone really deep into it he's actually developer of this plug-in and the the exol dra plugin so I'm very excited to enter this new era of my not taking system and employing or uh or utilizing visual not taking more in my system as well and and um yeah I'm curious to see what that is going to bring me so to finish off let's uh take a look at some stats down in the bottom right corner which you cannot now you could maybe see it uh it says here my my entire system is 167 megabytes large it contains 1860 notes and 347 attachments 2,27 files and 3,833 links and in total 563,000 words so with those stats I think I uh will close this video thank you so much for watching I hope this was uh useful to you maybe it will inspire you to set up your own notetaking system if you have any questions about how I did anything please just ask them in the comment I tend to reply to any comments on my on my Tech related content and um it's nice for me to interact and to see interest in my system if anybody wants to know more about it and um yeah if you are looking into this just start don't try to don't watch thousands of videos and then get going download obsidian create a folder and start taking notes that's the most important thing and then the organization will come later as it did for me and remember remember that this is a continuously evolving process it it it will always um like me I I'm now revising things again and it will always be subject to change but um get going as soon as possible because my not taking system is one of the most important assets that I have in my both my professional but also my personal life all right thank you so much for watching have a good day and uh see you in the next video

Channel: Mischa van den Burg

Views: 58,940

Keywords: command line, linux, macos, terminal, alacritty, productivity, focus, distraction-free, workflow, terminal workflow, coder, hacker, efficiency, second brain, devops engineer, bash, scripts, unix, unix philosophy, vim, neovim, automation, automate everything, coding, programming, hugo, blog, content creation, writing, share your work, zettelkasten, writer, markdown, git, github, telescope, pkm, obsidian, personal knowledge management, visual thinking, linking your thinking, notetaking, note taking, study, learning

Id: zIGJ8NTHF4k

Length: 72min 25sec (4345 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024