How to achieve more while studying less - Obsidian & Conceptual Notes transcript

when you're first taught how to take notes you're told something along the lines of write down the important stuff but if you're like a younger me then you just interpret basically everything the teacher was saying as being important why else would they be telling it to you but if you sit down and think about it which is what we're doing here today then you'll realize that there's a much better way of doing this that lets you spend more of your life living and less of it studying when we take notes it's not the actual notes that we care about nobody takes notes just to have them what we're really after is the information if you've ever thought of a cool invention or an awesome idea for a song but then realized that you didn't know how to do those things or you had gaps in your knowledge for certain steps along the way then you've run into an information problem like a painter who left all her colors in the supply room these constant interruptions to reach for information can ruin your creativity and absolutely demolish your productivity there's no flow no deep work imagine what you could create if you just had all the colors right at your fingertips ultimately we want to pursue our passions and in order to do that and here's the underlying thesis of this video we need quick access to lots of relevant information that's the problem we're trying to solve we're not here to solve the problem of how best to take notes because we don't care about the notes we care about the information we want the quickest access to the most relevant information possible and the quickest access will always come from keeping something in our brain so task one for today is figuring out how we can help ourselves remember stuff better we tend to remember stuff that we a think about often and b can view from many different perspectives that is things which are linked to lots of other things this is why it's easy to navigate around your town from memory you've been to all those places often and linked them together but gotta be honest with yourself can't remember everything and even if you could certainly can't do it all at once so you'll need a place to keep this stuff in the meantime while you're loading it into your brain so task two is to find a way to organize the information outside of your brain so that it can be accessed as quickly as possible so now that we're all on the same page let's turn to the next one in the days of yore i would sit in class and copy down basically everything the teacher wrote on the board and then add little annotations and colored pens for things that needed emphasis i'd get a new notebook for each course and would just continue through the notebook line by line page by page until the course was done if i was feeling adventurous i might scan those into google drive so i could look at them later but that was just about as much fun as performing home dentistry with pool cleaning equipment so i pushed it off as much as i could but now let's talk about this magically superior way that i've been hinting at and in lieu of word vomit trying to introduce it to you i think it's best to just show you so let's reenact a little snippet of a lecture and i'll compare the way that i used to take notes with my shiny new strategy in a lecture the teacher is giving you a story but what you should really be looking for are concepts in this lecture you can see that i basically wrote down everything the professor said on the left hand side in my new strategy on the right i would instead sit back and listen to what he was saying actively trying to put this stuff in my memory what this means is that i'm constantly evaluating whether the information is used that is unimportant self-explanatory or easy enough to memorize on the spot all the stuff that he was saying fell into one of those categories until he got to the point where he said more carbon equals more brittle and less carbon equals less brittle that seemed like an important concept that i might forget in the future so on my computer i've made a note called steel and put that information in there you don't need to stress about running through these three criteria every time the professor says something if you just feel like you don't need to write it down then you're probably right trust yourself then the professor started talking about the two different kinds of stress i already had a note for stress with that equation in it so i would just go in there and add these two categorizations next the professor drew this diagram which i also would have drawn on my drawing tablet i'd create a note called stress strain curve and put that picture in there and then in real time write down these labels that he was explaining each of these points of interest on the graph are concepts in themselves so i'd make a separate note for each of them which would go into more detail this is especially relevant for the third page of my old notes where the details get more well detailed and lastly i would not write down the examples instead i would sit back and try and predict what the professor will do next at each step in the problem when we deviate from each other i make a note of that and place it in the relevant note because that step that he took was obviously unintuitive to me this way i highlight the stuff that's likely to trip me up in the future without recording everything i already know how to do and that's it sit back and listen make notes for new concepts go back and add to notes for old concepts and link related ideas together avoid the temptation to bunch all the information together make it as atomic as possible instead of writing your notes sequentially write them conceptually you might be sitting there going so what i mean i guess it's fine but seems like kind of an erratic way to take notes don't you think let me show you how this supports our overarching goal that we had at the beginning first off this new system saves you time from studying later instead of sitting there copying everything down and not really thinking about what you're writing you're instead actively trying to fit this information in with what you already know this both helps you remember the old stuff since you're thinking about it more often and it provides a foothold for the new stuff and we tend to remember highly linked concepts you're already sitting there in class may as well make the most of it by doing this you'll have to study less if at all later since you already learned the stuff during class plus questions on the material will come up in real time rather than later on when it's too late to ask so then you might say okay i guess that's cool you don't have to waste as much time studying at home but why don't i just be more sparing with what i write down in my notebook well let me up the ante a little bit your old notes are really powerful since they can provide a framework that makes learning new stuff easier for example if you learn how to drive in some particular car and then you get into a different car you still remember the basics of operating a vehicle you just have to adapt your knowledge to the new button layout and how hard you have to press the brake pedal the old knowledge is doing most of the heavy lifting since the cars are similar enough if you forgot all the lower level stuff then it would be a nightmare every time you switch cars but apply this to school and it doesn't sound so weird because people take notes sequentially and jettison all the stuff they learn from high school this nightmare plays out all the time when people take classes they don't lean on old concepts for support since they forgot them so they put in way more effort than they would otherwise have to when learning the new stuff by keeping all your notes new and old together you can link back to them and use them to help you learn new stuff instead of writing down a whole new procedure just say hey there's new thing's like that old thing so just follow that procedure but make these little changes instead of your old notes decaying in a box under your bed as you throw away all that time you spent learning stuff in high school your old notes will grow in time if you take them conceptually this also makes it easier to engage with what is on the brink of becoming the next hot buzzword first principles thinking if you haven't heard of this just google it it's a really powerful way of solving problems but it relies on a strong knowledge of the fundamentals sequential note taking strongly erases your knowledge of the fundamentals and as cool as all this might seem so far we haven't even gotten to the grand finale there are no such things as disciplines in the world there is no biology chemistry physics economics or history it's all just the universe it's just a bunch of concepts ideas floating around and highly linked together within and across the traditional quote-unquote disciplines in school we tend to learn these things in the context of their little silos and sure charlamagne is mostly a history topic and inertia is mostly a physics topic but you have to be careful not to treat it only as a physics topic the idea of inertia can help explain things in economics and social behavior and so much more you have to be careful not to arbitrarily limit your thinking by applying these categories to things and if you take your notes on inertia in a notebook labeled physics 1 well you're really not making it easy for yourself to draw those extra connections creativity is just making something new but oftentimes that happens by making a connection between concepts that nobody's ever thought of before there are millions of concepts floating around out there all you gotta do is make a unique connection and that could be a million dollar idea if you only focus on the connections that everybody already knows about then you'll never create anything new you're living your own unique life with your own unique set of interests sequential note-taking just takes all the links that the teacher is giving you and copy-pastes them into your mind but you might want to look at it differently who's to say that the professor's figured out the best way to link it maybe you can think of a better way and lastly it's hard to know how to organize your notes in a way that makes sense to your individual brain before you've gained an exposure to all the ideas it's like trying to pack a car for a trip one item at a time the order of the items matters with a random order you'll end up with gaps and awkward spaces in between the suitcases and coolers that waste space it's better to lay everything out first and slot things into the places they can fit wasting no space same goes for a lecture ideally you could have all the ideas right in front of you and then organize them in a way that makes sense to you problem is that in a lecture these ideas are just streaming past you and you gotta catch and record them somehow before they're gone it's way too much work to go back and rewrite or edit your paper notes so you end up just writing the information down the way the teacher's presenting it to you in hopes that that's the right way this is why people take sequential notes but maybe that isn't the right way for you sometimes all it takes is a slight change in perspective for things to click for you and you can do that easily if you break your notes into concepts someday down the road you might realize that you were wrong with something you wrote or that these two ideas are actually the same thing and they should be merged conceptual note taking on your computer will allow you to do this easily your knowledge is constantly changing but your sequential notes will always stay the same and that's basically it stick with it and your notes will eventually start to look something like this a network of interrelated ideas now i know your first question is going to be how do you possibly find anything in this mess of nodes there's a very simple way and i'll get to that but first i want to wrap up this thought all right i walked to the top of this hill here to tell you this last part because i think that's what you're supposed to do on youtube for those of you keeping score at home our ultimate goal here was to get the quickest access to the most information possible and task one of that was figuring out how we can help ourselves remember stuff better and as i've mentioned we tend to remember concepts that we think about often and which are linked to lots of other concepts conceptual note-taking encourages this by promoting active learning during a lecture making use of your old notes and linking things in a way that makes sense to you not which necessarily makes sense to the professor with sequential notes you're wasting time copying down information when you could be learning it you're forcing your mind to adapt to the way the teacher presents the information and you're focusing on the same connections as everybody else in the world which is the fastest way to never have an original thought and by not keeping your old notes relevant you're throwing away years of your life that you spent learning the fundamentals you're making it harder to learn new stuff and you're building a skyscraper of knowledge on a foundation of toothpicks which is the polar opposite of first principles thinking and you got to retake notes on the ideal gas law every single time because nobody can remember that thing all right maybe that's just me but remember we want to remember things so that we can pursue our passions as effectively as possible recall the painting analogy i started the video with when you store information in your head do you store things in eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper which arbitrarily cut off sentences at the margins or do you have a concept of da vinci a concept of shear stress a concept of supply and demand and a concept of mitochondria each of which are linked to lots of other concepts stories are fleeting concepts are what stick but for the stuff you can't remember or at least can't memorize right now making atomic notes on your computer provides all the information you've ever learned in an easy to understand format that is literally just a search away it doesn't get much faster than that for your second brain in life the goal is not to learn as much as possible the goal is to do as much as possible instead of siloing things into the context in which you originally learned them if you generalize your knowledge into concepts then the rate at which you can learn to do things takes off much faster than the rate at which you can come to know things it's more doing for less studying so go forth take the world in one concept at a time i guarantee you'll start to see connections that you never would have before and who knows maybe you'll come up with something completely new maybe you'll be the next da vinci and people will be taking notes on you that's the end of my sales pitch so assuming you're on board i'd like to provide some more concrete tips for what is known in the industry as your personal knowledge management or pkm system okay so first off i'm using a program called obsidian it's a note-taking app that follows this concept-based note structure and really quickly allows you to add links between things i'll list all the themes and plugins i'm using in the description but i'd like to highlight the sliding panes plugin as i think it's game changing in terms of ease of use there are lots of reasons to like obsidian and there are lots of videos that will explain those to you but in the end i don't care if you use obsidian or not as long as what you use helps you take conceptual notes and is a good home for your second brain that's what matters okay now how do i find anything in here well what we're looking at right now is called the graph view which is great for seeing how things connect to each other but this isn't how i find things for that i go to the search bar where i can search for anything that appears anywhere other than that navigation primarily happens through link jumping more on that in a moment though key to figuring out how to remember things is figuring out what you don't have to remember the internet is a big help here because you can get instant access to small facts or quick explanations you don't have to memorize the height of the empire state building or the atomic mass of gadolinium because those are just variables when you're coming up with something that involves those numbers you can just take the concept of those numbers and look them up when you need to googling something will usually be faster than your personal database you also don't need to remember dates appointment times and to do's these are a sync on your mental bandwidth get a calendaring program buy a moleskin planning notebook and live your life with the expectation that you'll forget all that stuff the key to not stressing about forgetting these things is to not even to try to remember them in the first place your technology is more than capable of handling all that for you of course you shouldn't go out of your way to try to not memorize things some stuff will just stick naturally but it's probably not worth your time to try memorizing it if something is already in your memory and you don't think you'll ever forget it like that song about south american capitals from 7th grade spanish class then don't write it down it's already in your primary database so it would be a waste of your time to write it in your secondary one also your notes don't have to make sense to anybody except yourself make them reflect your personality because that'll make them more memorable to you use emojis contractions improper grammar and write in a conversational tone in the end wikipedia already exists you might be tempted to treat your personal knowledge management system as a project in itself but it's not the goal is to help you remember things and help draw new connections you're not here to hoard data you're here to help pursue whatever it is you want to do with your life this is all up to you and i know that even among people who currently take their notes conceptually there's debate over how to do this but here's my suggestion when you start taking notes try to impose as little structure on them as possible you can see that all of my thousands of notes are located in the same folder even things like packing lists or general notes where i just want to write about an idea that i have the only way they're organized together is through the connections that i make while typing them i like this because as i like to say there are no disciplines in the universe only concepts the best structure comes about naturally after all your brain doesn't have folders either does it i will note that i do use maps of content or mocs to organize thoughts for projects like this very video you're watching but there are lots of options and you can learn more about those in the link in the description the beauty is that since your notes are atomic you can change your organizational structure easily in the future after you've had time to figure out what you want you're never going to get it right the first time it's an evolving system just get started think of some concept pocket lint the peloponnesian war the periodic table mulch and make a note for it keep doing this for every other concept that you find interesting and have things to say about in the course of writing other notes if you're referencing a note that you've already made link it over time your connections will grow you can do this however you want i'm just providing some ideas but you'll never know how you want to do it until you try if you want to learn more about this i highly recommend linking your thinking it's a youtube channel and in this video i mostly talked about taking notes in the context of remembering things but that channel talks more about using obsidian as a tool for coming up with new ideas i've also got a few more thoughts myself so if there's interest maybe i'll make a follow-up video thanks for watching