Hi everyone, this one will be a quick and easy one. Not much a heavy conceptual work, but something extremely practical: how is it possible to produce notes (note: “produce” is different from “take”, since not only I can re-elaborate, but I can also add some link to something I already know or that I want to deepen in a quick look to a dictionary or in a 2-hours long rabbithole).
Prerequisites
Like in every well-written receipt, here are the ingredients:
- desire to learn things (it’s impossible you don’t have really any interests at all, so pick a topic of your choice, it could be anything you like);
- capacity to understand (don’t worry: it’s something we can train and improve by learning and by doing);
- a tool for writing, from pen and paper to more or less powerful software (and that you hopefully will master with time);
- time, commitment and patience – quantity: to taste (planned or ad libitum, depends on you and on the purpose of your study activity).
In the case here, I’ll use one my favourite platform to learn stuff (from both universities and companies): Coursera (I wrote about it in my post MOOC: the cheap (or even free!) yet powerful and stimulating way to learn). I am really interested in almost almost every kind of topic and I also picked up short lists of courses I really recommend, see here: What I can suggest after 100+ certifications from Coursera and EdX (you can also find courses I recommend to think and learn better).
Since this is an easy example to follow, I just enrolled in a basic course (I thought it could have been harder to follow steps if I choosed an advanced course on physics, for example). The course is “Mountains 101” by University of Alberta, Canada. From the description: “This 12-lesson course covers an interdisciplinary field of study focusing on the physical, biological, and human dimensions of mountain places […]”. Total time estimated for those 12 “weeks”: 18 hours. As always, to earn a certificate, you must pass (usually minimum score 80%, but it may vary) quizzes and sometimes peer-reviews assignments (e.g.: essays or technical analysis, but I also performed some technical assignment like recording piano and guitar in the course of Jazz Improvisation by the world-famous Berklee College of Music, a nice way to spend some time during last pandemic period).
Even if you follow the course as an auditor, the most important thing remains understanding and hopefully remember mainb concepts but also interesting notes and details you find interesting. That’s why we can build and maintain a knowledge base or, as Tiago Forte would say, a “Second brain” (click that link if you want to discover a new world to organize your knowledge, familizarizing with acronyms like CODE, PARA and so on). It doesn’t matter if you want to realize a physical Zettelkasten in your living room or you want to create your personal Wikipedia with a colorful software full of animations and sounds, the main concept is: our brain is really good in doing a lot of things, like understanding and generating ideas and connections, but at the same time it’s really bad in keeping track of them, that’s why it’s absolutely necessary to jot down notes, to be read, organized and visualized in the future. Our memory doesn’t work like a physical archive, it’s much more complex than put and take files, you can have an idea of the current models/hypothesis reading my post (Understand our) Memory (based on the book written by Alan Baddeley). So, dump everything from your mind, as David Allen (the creator of the GTD method) would sugges to reach and maintain a “mind like water“. If you want to learn more about taking notes, you can read my post on another book: “How to take smart notes” (Sönke Ahrens).
I personally use a tool called Obsidian, a software that can run on Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS (but I recommend to use it on a PC, not on mobile). I will not write here features, you’ll find communities of enthusiasts that post tutorials and answer to anything if you are curios or need help (but please remember to respect people time: before asking, search and read the f***ing manual or watch tutorials). Don’t worry, the fact that I’ve been working in IT for decades doesn’t mean it’s a complicated computer program, on the contrary: when I stop working, I reach out to the simplest tool ever to fit my need, I don’t like neither to overcomplicate things nor to face a steep learning curve, I promise it’s a tool really easy to learn and to use.
Now that we’ve got all the ingredients, let’s get started!
How to create a note from zero
Templates
This part is optional and I started using it quite recently: templates. (If you’re not interested, please jump on the “End of the optional part”, it’s written down here at the end of the chapter, in bold characters). I use templates basically for metadata, so information on the note itself, useful to add some quick info in case I want to remember/search for example when I started the course or the names of the teachers or every kind of information that it’s not strictly part of the course content. To do that: I create a special kind of note called “template”, that will be created only once and used as a structure everytime a create a new note (I usually use one note for one course, but you can choose differently, for example when a course is really too big maybe you want to split it in multiple notes). So, I created a folder with templates in it to be used (remember: you need to perform this optional operation only once, not every time you follow a new course).
Please, understand that this is not a step-by-step tutorial on the tool (Obsidian) itself, you’ll find dozens of tutorials (videos and blogs) on how to create and use templates with metadata, but in a few words: name will be automatically filled with the title of the note, while “start date” will automatically take the date of the creation of the note; all the other fields will be manually typed by me. This is for example the note I created, based on the previous template, to write notes while following the course I mentioned before:
You can add any fields you like, to keep track of any info related to the course or to your learning activity associated to the course or even personal considerations (like rating).
End of the optional part.
Hierarchical structure, links and more
Obsidian manages (mainly) MD files, that are simple text files written with MD markup language that you can also read with the simplest readers ever, like Notepad. MD is a simple language to learn to use hierarchical structures, link internal/external resources, simple text formatting, lists, tables, code, formulas and a lot more, as you can see in this simple tutorial. I think it’s not needed to stress out that this software is just a tool, you can obtain a similar result (according to your taste and habits) with anything you like: a folder on your PC with MS Word documents, a folder on the cloud with Google docs, pieces of paper in binders on a bookshelf… experiment and choose your favourite implementation, the main concepts remain (except that for the physical Zettelkasten method you can’t “click on links”, but rather follow the reference number or the label you put to find the related resource).
Structure using headers is also extremely useful to visualize, at a glance, all the content in a mind map (using one of the many Obsidian plugins), where I create a “branch” for each chapter, in this way:
Note that you are not necessarily required to follow the same groups the author(s) show in the course: in this case, I followed the same structure of the 12 lessons, but there are cases in which I group a few small topics into a bigger one or, on the contrary, split one big topic in two or more.
Going on with the lesson, you’ll end up adding branches in each chapter, like that:
Don’t waste more time, the first thing to do is just to get started! I strongly suggest to start experimenting while reading books and tutorials and obviously taking note of those info! 🙂
