What do you do after taking notes?

Hi friends, my name is Tris and this is no boilerplate where I focus on fast technical videos. I was tempted to start this whole video at the end because most other guides start at note-taking and then trail off and handwave the most important part, the process. And if you just take notes but don't do anything with them, they won't get you to where you need to be.

The biggest unanswered question in nearly every book, article, and video on note-taking I have seen is what do you do after you have taken notes? Who cares if you've got a beautifully filed and linked web of notes organized by tags and folders and themes and dewy decimal or whatever? How does that help you write and learn?

Where do you even start? Well, to misquote the great Carl Sean, before you can write an essay from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I dedicate my video scripts to the public domain.

Everything you see here, script links and images are part of a markdown document available freely on GitHub and my website namau. com. We are going to forge our work, essays, exam revision, books, or even video scripts from atomic notes.

You may have heard of this concept before perhaps as smart or main or permanent notes. The core unit of the Tetasten system, an interlin web of knowledge with the information digested, deconstructed, and rebuilt in your own words, in your own image. Many books on note-taking talk about what make these kinds of notes good.

But I think all qualities are downstream of these two principal features of atomic notes. The notes work well together. They are highly composable and cohesive and each note doesn't require reading lots of other notes to understand.

They are loosely coupled to each other. Atomic notes are the compiler artifacts of our learning before they have been linked together into their final form. When I was at university, they taught us that good software modules are well written if they have high cohesion and low coupling.

That is the parts work well together but are flexible enough to be reused in multiple programs. If a computer program is a composition of modules, the outputs of our system, like an essay, will be a composition of atomic notes. I have taken this part of the flap system directly from the Tetlecaster note-taking method from the best book on the subject, a system for writing by Bob Doto.

These small self-contained notes hold our best understanding of a topic written in our own words as simply as possible, but no simpler. One of the off-claimed benefits of a mature note system like Zettlecasten is that you never need to start from scratch. The notes are already written in your words, so you can simply stack them up in a reasonable order, write the glue, and you've got a first draft.

Though the graph is a good illustration here, dayto-day it doesn't actually scale. By the time you've got 30 or 40 notes, it's all too crowded to read the names. What does scale is the original metaphor that settle casten system was originally a way of organizing notes on paper inside a linear card file like this small demonstration here by fellow YouTuber Morgan who [clears throat] makes really great videos on using her zetecasten to write her PhD.

By the way, notice how on paper there is no graph to browse though and paper notes do include numerical references to others in the box creating a logical graph. The primary browsing and retrieval is done by thumbming through the cards, flicking through the titles, and jumping to clumps of related knowledge. Here you can see the visualization of the tree inside my Obsidian using the Vert folder plugin, a recent addition to my system.

This is better than a graph because I don't have any buttons for navigating graphs on my computer, but I do have a scroll wheel on my mouse. Okay, let's zoom in on one of these atomic nodes. This is a mature example of one of my atomic notes.

I will highlight a few key features and we will deep dive later on in the video. The file name is written with enough detail to remind you next week when you scroll past it, but the body has enough detail to remind you in a year after you've forgotten the specifics. The uplink is set to slot this note next to a closely related note, storing trains of related thought close to each other.

The atomic tag allows for easy searching and filtering. A see also section contains links to related atomic notes and there are references to other literature notes either in my vault or links out onto the internet. I use uplinks for structure, where do my notes live, tags for the type of note, atomic or project and so on.

File names for identity, not IDs, not date stamps, human readable summaries that can jog your memory of the learning contained in the note without having to open it. As I explained in the previous video, my system has three parts. Capture.

Take notes on lectures, literature, and your own fleeting thoughts. Two, process. Use these to write an interlin network of atomic notes in your own words.

Three, write. Compose clusters of atomic notes into essay outlines, exam revision, or all kinds of writing and thinking with a lightweight project management system that I can scale from one to 1,000 ongoing projects. In Obsidian, I use no folders and only four tags.

Fleeting notes tagged fleeting, highlights tagged literature, atomic notes tagged atomic, and projects tagged project. In the part one video, I focused on the inputs to this system, capturing your thoughts into fleeting notes and other people's thoughts as literature notes. Today, we're going to focus on processing those raw notes into atomic notes.

I'm delighted to say that this video is sponsored by friend of the channel, Let's Get Rusty. In addition to being a fellow Rust YouTuber, Bogdan runs Rust training, both corporate and personal, with a new cohort starting each month. Visit let's getrusty.

com/startwithris, link in the pinned comment, to find out more about the training. And thanks so much to Let's Get Rusty for sponsoring this video. The process that I aim to teach you today revolves around building a daily practice of distilling atomic notes, which will over time become a single trusted system.

I will demo what this looks like practically using Obsidian towards the end of the video. The wording single trusted system is something I've borrowed from David Allen's legendary book from 2001, Getting Things Done. There are two vital components to your fleeting note system.

One, your notes must only be stored in a single place. And two, you must process them reliably, never missing anything. If you have multiple places where you can store fleeting notes such as Apple notes and messages to yourself, then you can never be certain you have checked everything as perhaps the other place might have some new information for you.

Our eyes can only read one thing at a time and our brains know this. Multiple places to check has us running around the hamster cage mimicking the sad state of social media where there are five apps with screenshots of the other four on. No.

To process your notes, you must make a single trusted system. Here's mine. Like the mason, we have dragged all the stone we need into our workshop.

But the real challenge begins now. During this process, our literature and fleeting notes are the raw materials we will hone into a useful form. Atomic notes.

There are two main parts of this process. Fleeting notes get rewritten to atomic notes, keeping the original wording of thought as a reference, then attached atomic. Unfiled literature notes are linked to from new atomic notes, then retagged literature for long-term reference.

You must do this process daily. This is especially important for fleeting notes as they could contain urgent tasks. They're urgent because the you of yesterday is counting on the you of today to fulfill the temporal contract.

Yesterday's self had the easy job. Throw some random words into a note and tag it fleeting or make some highlights while reading. But now you must process them.

And processing every little thought that comes to us and every highlight from books we read, podcasts we listen to, and videos we watch can quickly become overwhelming. And here I propose an unusual solution. There will naturally be fleeting notes that you can't quite understand why you wrote down or highlights that don't seem very relevant now in the cold light of day.

Settle is all about following your interests. So what do you do when they change? You could refile those snoozed fleeting ideas or thoughts or highlights into a different list or tag or what have you.

But this list will soon spiral out of control in due course and then you'll be back to an overflowing list of impossible to face thoughts and ideas and you may bounce off the system entirely. I have a better method based on misusing spaced repetition. I'm sure you know about spaced repetition.

It's the effect whereby each time you revise something, you increase the amount of time you retain it, eventually flattening the forgetting curve to nearly horizontal. You've moved the information from short-term to long-term memory. It's a marvelous technique and the only one I have found that works for me.

You should certainly become familiar with Steven Wangi's excellent Obsidian plug-in, Space Repition, to aid in your studies. However, I also use it for managing my fleeting note backlog. I'll show you how to use it, but if you want to get started immediately, I have compiled all of this into an Obsidian vault you can download and use straight away, available for anyone who supports me on my Patreon.

It's just me running this channel. And I'm so grateful to everyone for supporting me on this wild adventure. If you'd like to see and give feedback on my videos up to a week early, as well as get private Discord access and even your name in the credits, it would be very kind of you to check my Patreon.

I'm also offering a limited number of mentoring slots. If you'd like one-to-one tuition on Obsidian, personal organization, web programming, creative production, or anything that I talk about in my videos, do sign up and let's chat. Part two, finally, what does this all look like?

I've been a bit abstract so far, but an example will make it clear. Join me in my daily processing. In the morning, I open my notes for review using this command from the spaced repetition plugin.

Then I select fleeting. I'm not revising my atomic notes just yet. And the first due fleeting note is opened by the plug-in, which in this case is ask mom when she is free for a catch-up chat.

Very important. The first time you run the note review, you'll of course have to go through and review every note tagged fleeting. The sooner you do this, the better.

But as you review each note as good, medium, hard, which in our world means snooze for a while, a short time, or tomorrow, you'll find that on each subsequent day, you are only reviewing the fleeting notes that you thought were the most important to process, not the whole damn list. Back to this fleeting note, ask mom when she is free for a catch-up chat. My job now is to decide quickly what to do with this fleeting note that past Tris wrote for me.

This one is simple. If the fleety note is a task that will take less than 2 minutes, do it there and then. So for this, I'll send mom a quick message.

Then the task is done. I delete this fleety note and rerun the space repetition command to get the next one. Okay.

By oat milk, if the task belongs to a different project, like here, a shopping list, I copy and paste it into the other note and delete this fleeting note and rerun the space repetition command as before. Huh. Sometimes, like here, it's difficult to figure out what to do with a fleeting note.

We're not the same person we were yesterday. I suppose in this case, don't stress about it. Just snooze it.

Future me can figure this one out, I'm sure. To snooze this fleeting note, I review it using the space repetition plugin as easy or as I've renamed it in the plug-in settings to later. It's all the same.

Whatever space repetition you use, you could even use Anki if you want. This note will be scheduled to be reviewed in the future. and hopefully I will have figured it out by then.

After I run this review command, the note is changed. Look at the new properties added to the top of this note. We can see that I won't see it in my morning note review sessions for four more days at time of recording.

Not only is the due date set, but so are two other numbers which allow the plug-in to keep track of the cumulative difficulty or in our case urgency of the note. Don't worry about the exact properties that the plug-in sets. Rest assured that it will snooze notes reliably and without you having to worry about exact dates.

After a few days of doing this, you'll have a much shorter list only featuring the things you have consistently ranked as hard, i. e. urgent.

Now is the time to slow down and actually do these tasks or perhaps file or research them. Deleting is a great option, too, if they can't be done or don't make sense anymore. The reason I process my fleeting notes like this, not just reading the list, is I need something that scales.

If you are to trust that your system will work in the long run, then you need a scalable system, too. Moving on, some tasks must be done later on and should be added to an existing project or like here, captured in another note. The solution was to cut and paste the fleeting thought into the appropriate note.

More advanced project management with due dates and start dates. I'll go into detail in the last video in this series, but it's in the Patreon vault already if you'd like to give it a go. Now, capturing what other people have said is as important to the student as it is for the teacher or office worker or someone who just wants to help out a friend.

Lectures, talks, interviews, YouTube videos, podcasts, these kinds of notes are scattered and informal. They have to be. When you were writing them, your attention was on the other person speaking where it should have been.

But now, when their words are still fresh in your mind, is the time to go through your notes and expand them into atomic notes or tasks that are themselves either further fleeting notes or added to a specific project as before. And finally, we have an example of a fleeting thought that is perfect to expand into an atomic note. Writer's block is caused by reader block.

Interesting. The method is simple. Here I've taken this idea and expanded it in my own words, cross referencing to other notes as I find them and keeping the original capture as reference.

I have also changed the tag from fleeting to atomic. However, what makes the settle casten method so useful is that we now find a place to file this note. Not in a folder bunched together with other files, nor drifting aimlessly in a sea of notes only loosely connected by the links between them.

We place this new atomic note behind exactly one other note like this. In a physical card box, you would put the note cards behind each other. And this is very very useful.

We are using the up property under the tag here to model this. This single organization technique allows us to build a tree of related links that can be explored and visualized in a much more understandable way than a graph. Like here using the vert folder plugin.

Another category of fleeting notes is knowledge, not tasks to be done or lessons to be captured in atomic notes. These are things like names, addresses, code blocks, or facts that only need to be stored verbatim. You shouldn't waste valuable time and brain space for these facts.

When your fleeting review session presents you with one of these, make a new note with the info in. Give it some sensible tags, and it's now filed safely away for later retrieval. You'll know where to find it when you need it.

And finally, highlights. Some highlights are written up into their own atomic notes. Others are referenced in existing atomics.

And yet more are just snoozed for later. For example, here we have a highlight that I made while reading how to take smart notes by sens quoted Nicholas Lumen, the legendary author whose prolific settlecast and card file contained over 90,000 notes. Reading this quote resonated with me at the time.

And because I am processing it soon after highlighting, I have remembered the insight and conform it into a new atomic note like so. I have made a new note with the fully developed learning as the file name and have referenced the lumen quote. While thinking about this, I also browsed through my other atomic notes scrolling using the tree on the left, refreshing my memory about similar topics and have added two more linked concepts as references.

Finally, and most importantly for the tetlecasten system, I have slotted this new atomic note behind a related thought in the tree. I have done this just by linking to it in the up property of this note. These are the only two organizational features I need in my atomic notes.

Related notes linked using normal links, but an anchor parent note linked in the up property. The very final step if you're using my Read Wise template or any highlights importer that allows you to format highlights as markdown checkboxes is to check off the highlight to indicate that it is processed. And you can now move on to the next one.

We're 2/3 of the way through the system. Once you've built the habit of daily processing and you're making loosely coupled but highly cohesive atomic notes out of your fleeting thoughts and other people's highlights, you will have everything that you need to build novel work of your own. These timeboxed projects are the subject of the final video in this series.

Completing the unfortunately named flap system. Thank you. If you would like to support my channel and get early ad free and tracking free videos, your name in the credits or one-to-one mentoring, head to my Patreon or Kofi.

If you're interested in transhumanism and hope punk, please check out my weekly sci-fi audio fiction podcast, Lost Terminal. I just finished season 3 of the Phosphine catalog. If you like mysteries and art, check it out.

Transcripts and compile check markdown source code available on namar. com and GitHub. Links in the description and corrections are in the pinned erata comment.

Thank you so much for watching. Talk to you on Discord.