hello my name is morgan and i am a fifth year phd candidate in theater and performance studies and when i started my phd program i quickly realized that the way i was taking notes in undergrad just wasn't going to cut it for this new program so i started looking into different methods of note-taking that might help me out in my phd and specifically what i needed was a way to store huge amounts of information so that it was easily accessible at a later date when i needed it to write a paper and preferably all of that information would be fully interconnected with all of my other knowledge so that i can make surprising connections between my thoughts and turn them into creative and critical thinking within my papers and especially within my dissertation but that is kind of a big ask for a note-taking method to do and what i was doing in my undergrad was just highlighting quotes in books and writing in the margins and i would take notes on notebooks and yes i would organize those notes kind of with a table of contents marking where each thing was in each book but then when i actually went to write a paper i would have like a stack of five notebooks i would have to be flipping through to see if i had written down the thought that i wanted to use for that paper but i couldn't even fully remember when and where i learned that thought and the only organizational method was when and where i learned that thought because you know it was organized by the courses i was taking not by logically where that information belongs in my brain so i i had a bit of a problem and whenever i went onto youtube say to look for a tutorial on how to take better notes it wouldn't be a holistic system of how to like store and organize those notes and i now realize the piece that i was missing was a knowledge management system and i am so happy to tell you that i have found a method that works for me and i hope it will work for you too because it is the method i'm going to be sharing in this video the system i'm going to be teaching you today and then walking you through how i use it is called the zettelkasten method and this was originally used by nicholas lumen in the 1960s and we are at an even greater advantage than lumen was because we have computers and there are so many softwares online that you can download to your computer and do all of the work of connecting your thought for you personally the software i use is called obsidian but there's many other choices out there so find one that works for you i think that the settle casting makes taking and storing notes and learning things actually like fun and efficient and almost easy dare i say it yes it still takes work but the effectiveness of this system just makes it so much fun to keep using the system because like you can feel the productivity oozing out of you before i show you the way that i use this system for myself though i want to give you some core principles to think about when you're taking notes because this system is totally malleable to suit your needs so your system is not going to look exactly like my system but there are four core principles that you should keep in mind and aim to adhere to when you are setting up your settle casting system so the first principle is write all the time whenever you can write in your own words that's how notes are going to be stored in this system is paragraph form writing in your own words you can take those notes any way you want you can even audio record those notes if you want but the point is if you don't write it down or speak it into a microphone or something then you're going to lose that knowledge in the recesses of your brain the second core principle you should remember is that everything is knowledge it's not just what is in your school books and what your teacher says that is valuable information it's everything you encounter like your experiences or your memories or your shower thoughts etc the zettlecaston system is a non-hierarchical way of organizing your knowledge so it doesn't think one bit of information is more valuable or inherently better than any other piece of information and you should make your brain operate the same way the third core principle is that thought is the basic unit of knowledge in this system so when you do take a note you should think about how to make it as irreducible as possible and yet still one complete thought that's going to make more sense later but that principle is there so that you can adhere to the fourth principle which is your knowledge is interconnected every time you store a note you should be asking yourself how does this connect to something that is already in my subtle casten system and what do i already know that connects back to this your knowledge is just a network of interconnected thoughts the power of this system comes in the quantity and quality of the connections between your thoughts so now that you've got those core principles in your head i am going to walk you through how i use my zettlecaston system in the obsidian software to take notes and capture my knowledge and connect between all of the thought in my brain and also how to use that to create new thought and then create writing products based on that thought the very first step that i take is to make fleeting notes and this is just how you capture bits of knowledge and information and ideas and thought that occurs to you over the course of your day this can be anything it can be a thought that popped into your head while you're taking a walk and so you write it down on a little notepad or take an audio memo or it can be your notes from lecture in my case for this video i am going to show you how i take notes on a book specifically alfie cone's book punished by rewards while i am reading a book i actually don't physically write out notes in my own words because i want to be immersed in the ideas of the book i don't want that disrupting my reading experience so instead i tab up the book with little sticky notes that are highlighting moments i want to remember from this book because i think i'm going to turn it into a note later and then if there's something that just highlighting it wouldn't suffice for the thought that was going through my brain i will put a larger sticky note on that page and i will write down the thought that i was having at that moment really the important thing when reading a book and taking notes is to remember the thought you were having and why you wanted to maybe save that idea but also to note down where you found that idea so that you can cite it and find it later so for me that's easy because i've literally put sticky notes on the page and location where i found it but if you're taking notes off of the book then you'll want to write down the page number so the second step is to take permanent notes based on your fleeting notes this is when you actually write down the ideas in your own words in paragraph form and make that idea as irreducible as possible so once i've tabbed up a book or just a chapter of a book i will go through each sticky note and i'll ask myself is this an important enough thing that i want to write a note about it and if it is then i'll write the note and i'll take the sticky note out that's especially good for library books because i have to return this to the library so i can't be writing in the margins you can always write out all your notes and then divide them up into bite-sized thought bits later and writing the note can be done on paper and then transcribed into obsidian or you can type it directly into obsidian if you'd like it's all totally up to you you don't even have to use a computer ever if you don't want to in fact nicholas lumens subtle casting system was in a series of slip boxes so he would write out his note on a little cue card and he would give it a unique identifier and then he would slot it in his box after a corresponding note and then he would literally write out connections to other little pieces of paper that were in his boxes with their unique identifiers so he knew where to look that seems awfully laborious to me in an age where we do have computers but it's up to you let's head into my obsidian now to check out what my subtle casting looks like so welcome to my desktop and welcome to my obsidian folder this is a folder that is just housed on my computer and inside of the folder are markdown files which is like just a basic text file so at any point in time i can grab any of my notes and print them or print my entire note system if i want to i also have a backup of this folder in my google drive so that i never lose my subtle cast in system and i will include a link in the description where you can download obsidian for yourself so how do i turn my fleeting notes that i took while reading alfie cone's book punished by rewards and turn them into permanent notes when you enter obsidian you can see on the left hand side these are all of the notes that i've taken and on the right hand side this is where all of the backlinks will be because obsidian helps you connect between your notes and creates little links so you can just like click between all of the thoughts that you have the first thing i do when i want to put a source like a book into my obsidian is i create a note for the book i title all of my bibliographic notes after the last name of the author and the date when the book was published and then i put my mla citation right at the top there personally because i know what i'm going to be using these notes for it's going to be to write papers or blog posts or etc in the future and then i put my first link in here and i want to link this book to another note called bibliography and if i control click into that note it's just a blank note but you can see here on the right hand side are all of the sources that i have referenced within my obsidian subtle casting system so let's go back where's the case to this book that we're talking about today now i go about opening my book and turning to the first sticky that i have in here and the first sticky was for this quote so i write the quote in there but of course this quote is not in my own words and what's the first principle of this system it's writing in your own words is the only thing that matters so i'm gonna go and turn this into my own words there it is i now have a note my note says while university should be a place where students discover who they are and what they are interested in oftentimes they are instead performing for their professors to get the grade so they turn into the people they think their professors want them to be instead of creative critical thinkers in their own right in this way and then i link i'm going to link the book because this is actually going to be its own separate note from the bibliographic note so i'm i'm actually linking to this book so that i know where it came from directly so cohn 1993 writes grades reduce a student's sense of control over his own fate and can induce a blind conformity to others wishes and then i put the page number so that i know where i got this from and i don't even have to reference the book again the next time i want to use this in a piece of writing so that's my entire note and then i ask myself what is this note about because it needs a name i'm going to create a new note the way in obsidian you create new notes is you go double square bracket and then you put the name of the note in there so what is this note about i think the thesis of this note is something like grades inhibit students from becoming independent thinkers i'm going to write that down the reason this is kind of grayed out right now is because i haven't actually turned it into a note so i'm going to take my writing there get it out of the bibliographic note and put it into this note and there we go there's my note it's written in my own words it's really small it expresses a single idea and i've actually named the note after that single idea you don't have to name it after the idea that's just what i do you can use like a time date stamp as long as all of the names of your notes are unique identifiers so you're not pointing to multiple places at once and then if we look at the right hand side you can see that there's one other note that has reference to this note and it's just the bibliographic note but that's not enough that's not a good enough connection just the book it came from that's not connecting to my other knowledge so i'm gonna think to myself what other ideas might this be related to and i actually took a note the other day about how students are actors in the world in their own right and that's kind of related to this let's find that note uh students students are actors in the world there it is i think the direct connection that i want to make is that it is important that students make their own choices in school because students are actors in the world so if they're just making decisions based on what they think their professors want then that's the professor getting to act in the world through the student that students are real people and what they do in school matters in the real world so now i have a direct connection to this other idea from a different book let's click on it students are actors in the world okay this is actually an idea that i found in a book by eternity mardis that was published in 2020 and it was an idea found on page 25. she also points out that students get absolved of faults because university isn't the real world so i can see there's also a direct connection to these other ideas and then on the right hand side i can see oh my goodness there are even more notes that connect to this idea that students are actors in the real world so maybe i'm writing a paper about this idea and i need i need more things like um how there are consequences to dismissing the ideas of students as not real because it's part of school so i'm gonna click into that note because it's clearly relevant and that's related to this other text that i haven't made a link to yet but i should oh it's connected the idea that student youth aren't taken seriously etc etc let's go back to our main note that we're working with personally within my bibliographic note i keep all of the notes that are connected to it i will go through the entire book looking at every single sticky that i stuck in there and turning it into notes within this document sometimes i will stick all of my quotes and notes into this document and then slowly turn them into their separate notes and then go to the process of connecting those things or you can do it one by one like i just showed you now sometimes i will spend entire sessions in my zettlecaston system just making connections between notes that haven't been connected yet the last thing that i'll show you in obsidian which is just kind of a cool thing i think is the graph view you can see there's so many connections that i'm making between so much thought it's all interconnected and it looks like a mess when you look at this network and these nodes in this graph view and it is a bit of a mess and that's what makes it so hard to write things and remember things without a system like zettelkasten helping you out because all of the connections between everything that i know are already made so when i go to write an essay on anything i've already written down that thought and i've already connected that thought to 20 other thoughts and i can just pull those notes out of my subtle casting they're written in my own words already and i can plop them into an essay and just put them in an order that makes sense to me then all i have to do is the work of connecting those thoughts and making the paper flow but the writing's already been done the writing's been happening throughout all of my classes and all of my readings all of the time i think the only thing i want to leave you with now is one last fifth principle that i'm going to tack on here at the end and that is to trust the system if you just take one note in your zettle castan nothing magical will happen it is in the number and quality of connections that your settle cast in is going to work for you and that's one of the big draws for me for zettelkasten as opposed to notebooks because the more notes you take in a notebook the more chaotic everything becomes and the less useful because the more notebooks you have to shuffle through to find your thoughts but in settle castin the more notes you take and the more connections you make between those notes the more valuable your zettlecaston gets and the easier it is to come up with ideas for writing projects and actually start writing the projects so i hope this video has been useful to you i'm sure that i will be making more videos on this topic if there's anything you specifically want to ask or want me to make a video about let me know and i will make it happen i will also be putting links in the description box below to where you can download obsidian as well as external information from other people that i think have done a good job explaining how to use the settle casting as always you can give me a comment to let me know what you are thinking about ask any questions tell me how you currently take notes whether you think that you want to switch to the zettlecaston system thank you for watching everybody i hope that you took some fleeting notes during this video that you are now going to turn into permanent notes in your own zettlecaston system and connect them to all of your other knowledges if you want more content like this i mostly talk about books that i'm reading but i am also going to start doing more teaching and learning and knowledge management style videos so if you're interested in that content then feel free to subscribe to my channel and i'll see you in another video soon