How to Take Notes That ACTUALLY Help you Think and Write

Hello and welcome to my channel! My name is Morgan and I am an academic. The best notes that I ever take in school have three specific qualities, they are: 1) Atomic, 2) deeply interconnected and 3) they're written in my own words. So what do I mean by those things and how can you take

the most effective notes as possible whether you are learning something new or researching and trying to come up with new knowledge. In this video, I'm going to tell you about those three qualities of really excellent notes and even better I'm going to show you examples from my own note Vault. I use the zettelkasten method for note taking and I use that in a software called

obsidian predominantly. I have lots of videos on both of those things if you want to learn more.

obsidian predominantly. I have lots of videos on both of those things if you want to learn more.

This video was inspired by a comment from Mexico 4868 here on YouTube on one of my previous videos, so thank you so much for this idea. And this video is sponsored by Skillshare so more on them a little bit later. Let's start with the first quality of really great notes, they are Atomic.

This means that they cannot be reduced. Each note captures a single whole thought or idea and this is very different from how I took notes during school. During school I would sit down in my seat at lecture and I would take notes on everything the lecturer was saying that I could remember and that I found interesting and they would all live in a single notebook or binder. And that meant

that each note was like three pages long because it was just everything I was capturing during that lecture and after lecture I wouldn't do anything with those notes they would just live in that binder or whatever and then I might reread them later in the year when I had to take an exam or write a paper. But later in the year when I went to study for that exam, it was really hard to find

the ideas that I had during the course because they were all intermingled with each other and what's more they were organized based on how the professor thought they should be organized not how they were fitting into my brain. So because I took these notes linearly and in the order the professor thought they should go, it's really hard for me to move those notes around and put them

into new contexts that are not the specific course that I learned the idea in. So because those notes are contextually dependent on the lecture in which I took them, it's really hard for me to access them today. So what I do now is I still take notes however makes most sense for me during the lecture, but then I go through and ask myself what are the distinct ideas that I can break these

notes down into, and then I separate out those ideas into what I call Atomic notes, and people that practice the zettelkasten method call Atomic notes. And this makes all of these ideas so much easier to access because they're not dependent on specific other ideas. They're modular, they can be pulled into whatever project I'm working on at any given time. So let me give you an example of

one that I have found particularly useful over the past little while. This is a note called academic humility and if you're wondering why I put dashes in between the words of my notes I have a whole video on that topic that you can check out after this one. And this note says "academic humility is an idea that comes from Umberto Eco in how to write a thesis. It is that we must humble

ourselves to accepting any potential source of knowledge in our academic research because we can learn something from everyone and everything therefore Eco says if I wanted to do research as a matter of principle I should not exclude any source." So this note encapsulates one single idea which is the idea of academic humility and what that is which I got from one particular text

Umberto Eco's how to write a thesis and this is a note I come back to again and again because it is so simple and concise this is like an idea that I want to pull into lots of different projects that I'm working on in many different contexts. So what makes this note Atomic and particularly useful

for me? I get asked a lot um how I know if a note is atomic, how I know if a note is small enough,

for me? I get asked a lot um how I know if a note is atomic, how I know if a note is small enough, reduced enough, how I know if it's a single thought or idea. And I think that there are four good indicators, although there's no, like, right answer. Ultimately it's your system and, you know, a thought for you is going to be different than a thought for me. But here are the four indicators

that I've come up with for myself first of all a note could probably be reduced further if it's really hard to name the note I name all of my notes after the core idea that they express if it's hard to boil down that note into just a few words so that you can name it really concisely then it might be more than one idea second a note might not be Atomic if it's hard to understand it

at a glance so at a glance an atomic note should tell you what it's about if you're spending time trying to parse out what the goal of this note is then it might be a couple ideas that are being misconstrued as a single idea third a note might not be Atomic if it's really long now some ideas do require a lot of length in order to express this single idea but more often than

not a single idea can often be expressed in quite few words and if it's too wordy if it's too long that probably means you can break it down a little further and take some of those words and turn them into another note and just link them in this note instead of saying it all for instance if in this

note you offer any examples of what the idea is you might want to turn those examples into a note of their own and take them out of this main note because examples case studies might be able to be used in multiple different contexts along inside multiple different ideas so you want them again to

be modular so that you can discuss them in many places and fourthly I know a note is atomic if when I go through that note actively searching for ways to reduce it I can't so if I can find ways to reduce it obviously I should and it's not Atomic yet I need to keep breaking it down for instance

this note on academic humility used to include the example of how a zettelkasten does this well but when I went looking for things to cut it was just as easy to turn that into its own note and if this example of the zettelkasten was only listed in the body of this parent note about academic humility I

wouldn't be able to find that information when I need it for an entirely different project so that's why it's so important for me to make my notes Atomic people are always wondering how I find my ideas when I have like a thousand notes that are all just seemingly cluttered they're just organized alphabetically it's because my ideas are Atomic and so everything I need to find has

a name and is linked with other with other things and then also in this note on academic humility it would be tempting to discuss the idea that academic knowledge can come from any Source inside the note on academic humility because that is what academic humility means but as you can see from my

Note on this topic I didn't even reference echo in it so clearly even though academic humility never comes without the idea that academic knowledge can come from any Source this idea that academic knowledge can come from any source is sometimes found outside of conversations about academic humility so I want to make sure it has its own place something I want to mention here in order

to exercise some academic humility myself is that not everybody learns the best through the written language in fact I've seen some people create subtle cast and notes are these Atomic notes using sketch noting and visual note taking where they literally draw out the idea on a small note card so that it's a a single idea but it's an image instead of text because different

people's brains work differently and if that's the case for you if your brain works differently than mine and you're looking for some more inspiration for how to take notes better I highly recommend this video's sponsor Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of online classes including some on sketch noting like this one from Ink Factory Studio Skillshare takes

a learn by doing approach to to teaching where each member can create and share a project after completing a class for instance here is the visual note I took for the academic humility note that I just shared with you Skillshare also offers career focused classes in freelancing entrepreneurship marketing social media UI and ux productivity and so much more so whether you're looking for

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completely free and when you do remember to take notes on what you learned now let's move on to the second thing that all my best notes have in common and that is that they are deeply interconnected the more dense the connections to a note the more useful that note is going to be to you and the best note taking softwares have the opportunity to link between notes in two ways first of all links

where while you're taking the note you are linking to other notes and back links which is those other notes have a backlink to the note that you linked them to that way you can see everything going on within your notes both directly and indirectly and then if you're using a software like obsidian like I do then you can see all the connections around the note that you're in in a graph VI if we think

back to my school notes from the first example they were only connected to each other through this one physical notebook and the context of one University class so all of the connections made were within that class and other things talked about in that class so all of the history class notes were with the history class notes and all of the theater class notes were with the theater

class notes but what happens when all of a sudden I am interested in Theater history now I have to go and relearn learn a lot of stuff in a new context because at the time I didn't build those connections into my knowledge and the great thing about making Atomic notes is that you can connect

those ideas across Fields because most knowledge is interdisciplinary and the more diverse connections you make to other knowledge that you have the more deeply you are going to learn and remember this information which is going to make it easier to use in creative and productive ways when you're doing research or whatever it is so now whenever I take a note on theater

I connect it to any relevant notes on history let me show you an example this is a note called care in Academia means allowing space to be touched and it's got three little paragraphs each doing something different so the first paragraph says traditional scientific academic research is based on observation AKA site so we observe something that's a visual thing but site as a metaphor for

knowing suggests separation of self from object of knowledge and that is a note within my system that's how specific the ideas get instead Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 2017 so I've actually linked The Source where this idea originally came from suggests that and we've got another note here touch may be a better metaphor than sight for knowing so I haven't made the note yet this is

all just Preamble that is contextualizing um the note so it's other stuff that's in my system that is getting me ready to read this note and this is going to be really useful for instance I've linked academic research and that note is full of back links to many things that have to do with academic research so if I'm having trouble finding care in Academia means allowing space to be touched I

know that has something to do with Academia I can just go to my note on academic research and search through the back links to see if I can refresh my memory about this note that I took okay let's move on to the second paragraph now I've written to use touch as a metaphor if something is touching it means that we feel something towards it so to be touch touched doesn't necessarily mean physically

touched but also emotionally touched it means that we don't create an emotional distance between ourselves and our research objects so there's the idea itself about um allowing space to be touched and then I've written this is important because and I've just listed reasons why this is important based on notes that are already in my system knowledge is situated knowledge changes

the knower academic knowledge can come from any Source even emotions and measure measurement must be included in reality and emotions are a part of our measurement so now I've linked all the ideas that are connected to this idea all the reasons why this idea is an important one within my system and then I actually offered a quote from the book that I found this idea in so now whenever I'm in

any of those notes that have been linked to I can see this note in their back links and find it again you can do this in obsidian the software I use but you can also just do it with a simple paper and pen and I have a ton of videos about how to do that as well and my connection action

building within notes is never over I would call this note a permanent note because it is a solid idea that's not going to change and the idea itself is probably not going to grow however the connections will grow so as I develop a larger and larger notes Library I might come back to this note and add in some more connections some more examples some more reasons why this thought is

important and of course the back links are going to be growing as well also you'll see that I like to make my connections to other notes directly in the text text so that I have this like seamless flow of information but if I can't find a way to link a note within the text itself then I will add a line at the bottom and just like list all the other things that are relevant with commas

in between and the final thing that all of my best notes consist of are my own words and my own ideas when you're reading a book or watching a documentary or having a conversation with your friend it's so easy to just sort of copy and paste Verbatim what was said without add adding anything to that or rearticulating it in your own words but to really learn that information you just

tried to consume and definitely if you want to use it later we need to know why we saved that quote and how it connects to our other knowledge we also need to be able to describe the idea in our own words because if we can't describe it in our own words it probably means we don't really know that information if you don't at some point turn the ideas you've found into your own words

or even even your own ideas then you're never going to be able to produce something from the ideas that you've discovered from other sources so you either need to find your own words or your own ideas and that's going to require some thinking and for me thinking usually requires some writing and writing or drawing or audio recording or whatever is also going to be how you document

that idea that you've had or you've articulated so that you can find it later and I'm not saying that you should never use quotes in your notes as you've already seen I use quotes all the time in fact I think that's a really good practice to actually document somebody's words exactly so that you can cite them accurately later if you're drawing from their their ideas but every time you

do include a quote you should also rearticulate it in your own words as well I also highly recommend articulating why you saved that particular quote and if you can extending from that quote or idea into a new idea that you're now having because of it obviously not everyone needs to do this I'm an

academic so my whole reason for being is like you know creating new knowledge original thought from the stuff that I'm finding but for you it might just be good enough to rearticulate that thought in your own words so I have two examples for you one with a quote in it and one without let's take a quick look at the one with a quote First in this um it's not immediately obvious where the

quote is but if you look about halfway down I've written as write out Nicholas 2006 stage fright writes and then I give you the quote but everything before that point was me explaining what that quote means and why it's important to other things in my zettelkasten and then

afterwards again I I summarize um what that quote means to me in fact I say juggling isn't theater's failure but rather theater itself and juggling is not something that Nicholas Ridout talked about in this book that's something something that I'm specifically interested in so I've extended from what he's talking about into my own domains of knowledge and then my other example is called

the audience should never be physically at risk and this is just something that I was thinking about one day so I wanted to document it it's not very interconnected yet but it's an idea I had um that might be useful later within the contexts of risk circus and theater so it's there when I need it if I need it and I'll let you pause the video If if you are particularly interested in this

random thought that I had one day to summarize if you are trying to learn new information deeply so that you'll remember it and you're able to access it again or if you're trying to do research and discover new knowledge then I highly recommend you try out a note-taking system in which the notes are one Atomic two interconnected and three written in your own words I use the

slecting system in obsidian and both of those things allow for bi-directional link those back links and links with every note and I also have a ton of videos and medium articles about both of those things you can check out if you're looking for things to take notes about then you can try Skillshare using the link in my description box for 30 days free trial and get your first 40%

off your first year of Skillshare membership and that is possible using the link below they have a ton of classes so if you're not sure whether they have the thing that you're looking to learn then just get that 30-day free trial and check it out see what they do have and if it's worth it for you that's all I have for you today I hope you thought of some ways that you can make

your notes more effective for your purposes and I will see you in another video soon! Bye everybody!