How I Quickly Capture Ideas using Obsidian MD and Fleeting Notes

to remember the valuable ideas that randomly come to mind you must have an effective system to capture them that's where fleeting notes come into play in the zettlecauston method fleeting notes are simple reminders that we can process in the future to remember our past thoughts when i'm on my late night walks i need an easy way to capture all the insights i come across when listening to podcasts as well as spontaneous thoughts like video ideas sure i could directly put these in my obsidian notes but due to me having over 4 000 of them it'll

take a few minutes and 300 megabytes of data i could also just record them in my google keep but that requires me to manually transfer these ideas into my vault which adds unnecessary friction in this video i'll share the app i use to take fleeting notes called well pleading notes it's a free app available on all devices and it's also made with obsidian in mind as it supports linking and automatic syncing with your vault i use it because i'm a co-founder of the app i mean i mean because it matches three important criteria for a

solid quick capture workflow a good app should be accessible anywhere easy to use and have easy sync into your second brain first i'll go over how i capture these notes in the first place let's say i'm listening to videos on the way to work and come across an epic idea i can share it to the fleeting notes app and from there it will create a note with a link automatically generated if you're on browser it will also add on the timestamp from there i can start using my keyboard's voice to text feature to vomit out

the idea then add a title let's say later down the road literally i watched another video with ideas related to my last note i can share the video once again then create a link to the old note aside from links you can also set the source to files or images next let's look at another scenario where i'm on my computer and see an interesting quote i want to keep like this one i can highlight it then using the chrome extension i can save it into a fleeting note as you can see i have the link

here as well and i can start adding stuff under i can also add a title to it like the difficulty of being authentic but let's say you didn't highlight something and you just wanted to quickly record something on chrome you can click on the fleeting notes icon up here and you can start typing away so right now i'm just writing about what makes a person respectable and trustworthy and one of the points i wanted to make was authenticity which is related to the highlight we just made so if i wanted to i can also link

that note into this note just with the square brackets like you normally do in obsidian and i can click on here and open up that note as well if you'd like to separate each idea into its own fleeting note then these links can help you organize your information and remember your thought process in the future if you want to take notes side by side while reading something you can also open a persistent window using the chrome extension and just split screen like this and then if you were to highlight something else add something to it

it should show up here so now that we or at least i have a bunch of fleeting notes it's time to sync them with obsidian so in obsidian we can head to settings community plugins look through search up fleeting notes and then install and enable it so now we can just head back to settings and look at the fleeting note sync settings page so just make sure to include your login information in here or else you won't get the syncing capabilities and now if we look down here there's different sync headings you can change to

better complement your personal workflow you can change what folder they're in which default is just fleeting notes app you can enable or disable automatic sync you can change the syncing type so you can have one-way sync just from fleeting notes to obsidian you can have it delete the notes from fleeting notes which i personally do just to keep my fleeting notes app clean and there's also two-way sync if you decide to also have fleeting notes as some form of knowledge base and then down here which is what i really like is the fact that you

can customize your templates for importing your notes right now i have it modeled after the default note template i have in my vault with my different statuses tags and links and then from there i use the different variables provided by fleeting notes to populate this note then i have a clickable link to the source i add the created date and i have a tag here so it can be so it gets registered in my vault as a seedling note you can also just use the default template which looks like this this stuff is necessary for

sync to work this pretty much consists of all the current variables so far so just feel free to use them to your liking if you want there's also a setting to copy all the links in your obsidian vault to import into fleeting notes so when you create links in fleeting notes you can autocomplete it to ones that are already existing in your vault so now just open up command palette and run the command fleeting note sync sync notes with fleeting notes as you can see the new notes got added here so to process our notes

there's two commands you can run to get a list of all your fleeting notes the first one is to just insert all unprocessed notes which will take all of them like so for the notes to show up when using this command you must have the id tag these notes over here don't have it so that's why they don't show up so now you can open the notes and move them wherever you need to do whatever you need to do with them and once you're done you can check one off so that if i were to

run the command again it no longer shows up to the second command is to insert all notes containing specific text whether it be in front matter metadata or in the actual node itself in the content so in this case two of the notes had my name in it because it was from my newsletter so if i put in john and press submit it'll embed both notes so now you can just extract the content into your vault or you can turn them into permanent notes by renaming them if i go back to settings in my own

workflow i like to already have the template as the default note template in my obsidian vault and i have this seedling tag up here so if i head to my greenhouse note it'll show all the unprocessed notes i have sorted by created time so yeah if i'm content with the content of a note like this one right here i can put it into its proper kind of note so i'm going to copy this and then open up command palette search up input and then paste in the title name and from there it'll create a new

input note with my preset template on it and start filling it out there's a video so i'll put that and since i'm done consuming it i'll just set it to yellow and i'll also link it to things like motivation and productivity i can also put in the link by copy pasting this here and i can transfer all these notes into my notes here and i can fill all this out as well but i won't do that for the sake of the video so now i can delete this note but if it's something more personal like

a thought like the fact that i don't really use deadlines anymore when working on my projects i can copy the title and then create a thought note and and since i copied it it'll automatically set it as a title and now i can better flesh out this idea using my thought note and it'll be better organized in my vault as i know it's a thought reflections and put my thoughts over here and i can also delete this note but if i don't want to transfer it into a different template i can just open the note

i'm going to fix up this title a bit remove the status tag remove this since there was no link connect it to relevant ideas like copywriting and then run a command to move it out of the fleeting notes folder if you want to learn about all these kinds of notes you can check out my building a second brain video i usually try to do this at the end of the day and for sure at the end of the week to help with brainstorming for writing inputs like my newsletter video which i also have a video

on if you're interested i also like this workflow because it acts as a filter since not all ideas should be captured so by having the second run around where i review the idea i can see whether it's worth adding into my vault feel free to check out the website for more information or the discord to chat with me or matthew the original founder of the app we want to make the best quick capture app possible and your feedback and support will help tremendously if you found this video to be helpful consider liking and subscribing for

more content like this this has been john maverick stay mindful