Focused - 159: The Art of Note-Taking

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

David & Mike consider note-taking and its role in the creative process.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. I am excited to talk about note-taking. How about you? Yeah, you know, I like this topic because, you know, so often the focus of our show, you see how I did that, is to help find focus. And today we're going to talk about something you should do with that newly found focus. And that is upping your game with

note-taking. Yeah. And the genesis for this podcast episode was actually somebody who had reached out to me on Twitter and said, can you do an episode about note-taking or the whole second brain idea? And I realized that we had talked to Tiago and we had read the book, Building a Second Brain. But I think that given some time from reading that, we've kind of implemented it in our own way. But obviously, note-taking is a huge piece of that. So today I thought it might be fun to talk about how we take notes, what we do with those notes, how they serve us in the future, and maybe reflect on some of the ways that our note-taking practices have changed over the last several years. Sound good? Yeah, it does.

And I feel like when we were prepping for today's show, I was just thinking, you know, it's funny. The whole idea of note-taking for some people may seem foreign. Like, you know, the day you walked out of school and you finished your education, you felt like, okay, well that I don't need to do anymore. Now I'm just going to go out into the world and do my thing. Actually, note-taking can be very helpful when you're done with your education as well. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. And I never thought about it that way, but I know that there are people in the forum who have kind of expressed that,

or they have a certain view of note-taking specifically anchored in that academia. So either I think it's very common to have the approach of this is just the way that it's going to be. I'm going to take notes according to this style for the rest of my life because I'm a professor or something like that. Or you graduate, like you said, and you feel, ah, freedom. I don't need to do that anymore. Yeah. And I'd say to that,

that like historically you took notes maybe to pass tests. Now you're taking notes to improve your life. That's what, that's kind of notes we want to talk about today. And this is something if you're not doing, you should consider it. And if you are doing it, you should bring some mindfulness to the way in which you do it, because I think that you can definitely get more return on your investment if you're mindful about the way you take notes. For me, you know, I did not get to stop taking notes when I left school. You know, I spent almost 30 years as a lawyer and we take lots of notes as lawyers. That's kind of the thing you do.

When you have a case, you've got to figure out the facts and the law and all kinds of things you can't carry in your head. And having a good note-taking system is critical. And I think there's a lot of careers for which note-taking is helpful. And I think there's a lot of careers for which note-taking doesn't seem obvious, but could be equally useful. Sure. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about the types of notes that you were taking in the legal career? Well, I mean, when I started out, the way people did it in 1993, when started was they have these yellow legal pads. I mean, they're called legal pads for a reason. And every file had, and they were physical files back then. You had a yellow

pad and if the client told you something, you wrote it down. You had a tool hole punch in your desk drawer, you punched it two holes and you stuck it on top and you just kept adding notes. And if you learn something about a fact, or if you did some research and figure out some law, you just collected all these notes. Now over time that evolved into something way more sophisticated, you know, over time I, because I'm a nerd, I figured out how to make relational databases and I stopped writing notes down on yellow pads a long time ago, but it all kind of gets back to the same thing. If you've got 50 different cases great as long-term ram you know long-term storage it's it's a it's a cpu not a hard drive you know and um so you start putting the stuff in these note systems and then you can quickly access it you want to know what day was that contract signed you can look at your

notes and find out very quickly but that but there were really two different pieces of this i i know i'm kind of um rambling here but you know you got to track facts but you also have to figure out what the law is and that's a whole different note-taking system as you read case law and statutes and do research and try to figure out, how do these facts apply to the law? Right. Yeah. I had a similar approach to note taking initially when I was managing a software development project for the family business. That's really when I first started caring about productivity in general. And I was taking meeting notes inside of Evernote. And I was basically documenting, like you said, the things that the team said that they were going to do. And over the years of engaging with this company that we had contracted with in order to do the development,

we had several different project managers, people who were assigned to our account. And it was kind of frustrating over the four or five years that we worked with them because initially we had started working with the company because they had a rep who was local to us and nearby in Wisconsin. So we actually got to meet them and then he got reassigned and then we got somebody else and we got somebody else. Then we got somebody else. And it seemed like every six months or so we had somebody else who took over the account. And every time that they took over the account, I would have to have this argument about what the previous team had said that they would do. And I had the documentation for all of the meeting notes. And so that came in handy more than once. But that was my view of note-taking for a very long time. And just to be fair,

to Evernote specifically, it's great for that kind of thing. If you want to be able to go back and reference what was said on a specific day, if you're taking meeting notes in there or a client told you something and you wrote it down, Evernote would be a great solution for that because you could just go find it later when you need it. But the way that I take notes now is a little bit different. I'm not looking to cover my butt with business projects. I am looking to collect things that are going to help me create new things. And so my approach to note-taking has changed a little bit over the years. I really think mine has evolved as well. I mean, it was interesting for me that as Max Barkey started to kind of emerge over the last 15 or so years, how I just took the

note-taking systems I developed as a lawyer and kind of brought that into Max Barkey's stuff. I mean, I wrote those books for Wiley Press. Each one was about 100,000 words. I used the same tricks there. And, you know, a lot of the stuff I do for Max Barkey has notes as their basis. What has evolved for me as well is, interestingly, I've got much more into reading and learning unrelated to my career. You know, I've been reading a lot of books lately. You got me kind of on that track. Also, I kind of went back to the stuff I used to like to read, the philosophy and things. And note systems have evolved for that as well. So it's, you know, I've got a lot of notes going on here. that you read not for your job.

Although I would argue that's probably not entirely true because all of the philosophy type books and things like that, that's going to become expressed through content, specifically podcasts like this one, where it's shaping how you think about things. But I think I understand your larger point. The way that some people are forced to take notes is they just need to have a record of all of these things. And maybe it's a record of information. Maybe it is an academic

paper that they need to be able to go back and reference. But yeah, that's not exactly how I take notes either. But I do think that is the thing that makes it work for me now, is that everything that I try to take notes on, I'm believing that it is going to change my perspective. And even if it's not specifically in a particular domain, I know that these ideas that I'm collecting are going to cross-pollinate. And so I may take a note on some obscure topic, but that will come over to the productivity domain and even the day job stuff. It occurs to me that it is really hard, and maybe this is just my problem, to figure out where I should draw the lines between these things. It just kind of all bleeds together, which is kind of what makes this difficult. It really is an evolution, right?

And I do think the use of the material does change the way you take notes. But we are taking a lot of notes, and I think we should talk about today how we go about doing that. Yeah, before we get there, you did have a thing on here about note-taking as you try to grow yourself as a human. I can think of a couple of examples of this, but would you be willing to share some just so people have some context maybe? Yeah, and I'll talk about this more as we get into the mechanics of it all. But when I was in college, I was an aerospace engineering major turned political scientist. But I'm not that interested in politics, if that makes sense. I'm not

like into, you know, elections and all that stuff. I'm much more interested in the philosophy behind political science, how people choose to live their lives. And my university had a political philosophy kind of emphasis to political science, if you wanted, which I went all the way down the rabbit hole on. So I spent most of my time in college reading St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and Plato and all these great guys. And so I got hung up in what I thought of as the big questions. You know, I liked those questions because they were a problem that people couldn't solve 3,000 years ago and they're problems people are still trying to struggle with.

So I was interested in that and just, you know, I kind of lost the thread on that as I got out of law school and got started with a career and being a family and everything. And suddenly, I don't know, two or three years ago, I started reading that stuff again and I'm really enjoying it. And it kind of started with me reading productivity books. You know, there's so many, we talk about a lot of them on the show, but what is more interesting to me than, than productivity books is just kind of the ancients and, and modern philosophers talking about these types of questions as humans. And so I've kind of developed a note-taking system around that. Is that a wishy-washy enough for you? No, I love it.

So the argument of the modern bestsellers versus the classics is a whole other can of worms. But the larger thing that I want to key in on is the fact that you said people are trying to solve these questions or answer these questions. And that kind of relates to me to a core motivation for why I take notes. And I think you would probably agree with this, but I had a friend tell me one time when it came to selecting books that they were going to read because there are so many available. They had trouble finding motivation to go through these ones that their friend or colleague said, this is really good. You should really read it. Start reading it. It doesn't resonate with you and just feels like a slog, but you feel like, oh, I got to go through it

because I said I would. And they basically said they stopped doing that. And instead, their approach to reading is selecting books that they feel are going to solve a problem that they are actively facing. So it's the goal of reading this particular material, whether it is a brand new productivity book or one of the classics that you were mentioning, is the belief that I'm going to find something here which is going to alleviate a pain point in my life. And that maybe to some people that seems obvious, maybe to some people like past me, that's completely a revelation. Because when you approach it that way, if I'm going to read something, I just need to get one key idea from it. If there's one thing in there which is going to

make my life easier or better, then that was a worthwhile read. And by engaging with it, believing that there's something in there to be mined, then I have more motivation to consume the material. But then ultimately, if I just read it, nothing happens. I have to take notes on it in some way, shape, or form, which that has also changed for me over the years. But I recognize that that's the genesis of this collection of ideas for me has been the process that I use for taking notes on books that I'm reading. I also think, you know, there's just a relationship with note-taking and journaling. I mean, isn't journaling a form of personal note-taking? You know, rather than taking notes on the book, you're taking notes on what's going through your brain at the time, you know?

Yeah, and that's a whole other topic which we could devote entire episode to but yeah it's worth calling out here that that that is a form of of note-taking and so when you broaden your definition of what is a note and what is note-taking you can start to see how there are lots of different scenarios where it's worth intentionally developing this practice. And then the challenging part is figuring out, okay, so I'm taking notes on books over here and I'm journaling over here. These are all different forms of notes. And like I shared, the thing for me is that

these are not going to be of most value while they sit in these separate silos. So how do I get these to connect in some way, shape, or form? This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. The thing about running your own business is that every single hire counts. And no hiring partner understands that like Indeed does. Indeed is a hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for

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dot com slash focused. Indeed dot com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Cost per application pricing not available for everyone. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to All right, so let's go back to Tiago Forte's building a second brain. He actually has a system for note-taking. Yes, and we talked a little bit about this in the episode, but I thought this would be great to kind of talk through the different parts of this and see what of this we do. The inspiration for this was a conversation that I was having with a friend of mine who they listened to the episode and they said, so do you do any of that building a second brain stuff? And at first I was like, no, not really. And then I started unpacking what actually was

in there and realized that I was applying different pieces of it different ways. So you can get caught up on some of these definitions sometimes, but I think the actual pieces, the building blocks that Tiago outlined here are pretty good. So just to review real quickly, the system that he explains in Building a Second Brain is CODE. C stands for capture, O stands for organize, D stands for distill, and E stands for express. And I don't really want to get into all of the specifics with each of these different steps. But I think there are certain things in here that are worth talking about. And then also, I think if we were to have Tiago here, he would say that if you are intentionally thinking about the way that you are changing

the system, you are still in the spirit of the law instead of the letter, you are still in the spirit of the law instead of the letter. You are still implementing a second brain. So what do you think? Should we just start at the top and work our way down? Yeah, let's do that. I'll say that in general, I feel like a lot of this has been the way people have been doing notes for a long time. But he has put emphasis in places that I think need emphasis, and it's a great job to call them out.

But let's start with Capture. Okay. Yeah, Capture is probably the easy one for the people who are familiar with you and I and what we do online, because it's at the heart of everything. And the technology tools that we have in order to capture now make this incredibly easy. Going all the way back to the original idea of a short pencil is better

than a long memory. You got to write something down, otherwise it doesn't exist. So if you get an idea for something or a task that you need to do, you need to capture it somewhere so that you don't forget about it. For me, this is primarily my fancy notebook, although I will also use drafts on my phone and specifically Apple Watch when I'm out for a run. That's one of my favorite ways to capture ideas. And then one of the things that Tiago was talking about with this step is not just capturing all these things. And this is where I realized that my old Evernote approach, which served me well with the family business, was not serving me as an online creator because I would capture all these things. I put them in this big bucket and I could always go back and I

could dig them up if I had the thought. But I had to remember the thing first and then I could go find it. And as a creator, I was kind of thinking, well, wouldn't it be great if some of this stuff could serendipitously bubble up at different points? And I could come across these things again, sort of like a spaced repetition sort of idea. And so one of the big things that has helped with that is an additional step for me, which I call curate. Tiago kind of bundles this right into the capture phase where you have all these things, but then you're not going to keep them all. You're going to discard a bunch of them. And that's scary at first because when you cut something, you feel like, well, maybe this was important. I don't really know. Can I really just cut this loose? And the way I've reconciled that in my brain is that if

something is really important, it's going to come back. And by the time it comes back three times, the three times rule, this is obviously important, even if I don't see the connection here yet. And it's worth keeping and transferring to something else. Yeah. I want to talk mechanics with capture though just like how are you doing it like you talked about capturing ideas but today we're really talking about notes for me uh it depends on the medium but i have definite thoughts on this and um we've talked on the show over the recent years about my love affair with this readwise service i just got my i think it was 80 bill for it. And I paid it

again. That's a lot of money every year to pay for a service, but it is like the ultimate capture tool. I decided a while ago that I was going to just read books on Kindle, you know, because there's so much available there. They've got a lot of devices. I can also read on my iPad or my iPhone and ReadWise connects to it and ReadWise connects to other services too. But Kindle's like, you know, the first one they connected to. And so when I go through a book, I highlight a ton. You know, my first pass that capture pass is highlighting. I haven't ever got the message from Kindle saying that you've highlighted too much, because I think there's a limit on how much you can export out with the ReadWise automation, not necessarily the stories and examples. And then that gets automatically dumped into Readwise. So that is the first capture for me when reading a book. With videos, it's different. There's a lot of great learning content on YouTube.

And with that, I'll open an Obsidian note and I'll put an iframe in there, which you can do very easily. And that, that embeds the YouTube video on the obsidian page. And then I'll just take timestamp notes, you know, I'll just write down, you know, you know, 12 colon 30 for 12 minutes and 30 seconds. And something that I thought was relevant that was said at that time. So it requires me to actively watch it. It's not something you can do while you're folding your socks, you know? And, um, so I find, I try to find broad capture mechanisms for all the different types of media that I would take notes on. How do you do it? That's a good approach. Um, and to be honest, uh, I want to address specifically something that you said about figuring out the way to capture for all the different medias that you, with. I kind of gave up on that because I recognized that when I'm listening to an audiobook or a

podcast in particular, that I typically don't want to stop what I'm doing in order to capture something there because it's something that I'm listening to while I am at the gym or it's playing in my car while I'm driving. If somebody says something profound, I'm not going to pull over or pull out my phone and try to capture something, even with Audible's addition of the clips and things like that. That's just something I've decided. I'm not even going to go there. But I do think that that approach is good for all of the different medias that you're going to consume, that you're going to take the approach, I want to initiate a note from this. You should figure out how you are going to do that. And so the primary collection of dots for me, the primary

medium for how I capture the ideas that are going to be expressed in what I create are the physical books that I read. And I capture those while I'm reading them in a mind map format using MindNote on my iPhone. And I've got a whole process that goes along with that after the fact, but that's how I am capturing notes from books that I'm reading. When it's something that pops up in my day-to-day, like when we were chatting before we hit record, had an idea for a future episode, right? So I have an analog note card on my desk with a pen and I jotted down the idea for that particular episode. Now that's not going to go necessarily into its own note in Obsidian. It's also probably not going to show

up at least initially as a calendar event in Fantastical. But I'll probably add that to, we've got a Google Drive document where we kind of do some of our show planning. So it'll end up there. And really, it's just depending on the information that I have captured, where it ends up is going to be very different. But when I'm talking about things that I'm collecting personally, all of those basically are going to end up inside of Obsidian in some way, shape or form. Remember, I'm reading books a lot of times to solve a problem that I'm facing. So my approach in Obsidian is to create a map of content, a term that I picked up from Nick Milo, and that's just like my workbench for figuring out what I think about these different ideas. I'm reading a book right now on mind mapping. So I have an MOC in Obsidian on mind maps, and I'm dumping in some of the quotes and the key ideas here.

And I'm forcing myself to write my opinion notes and decide what do I think about these things that I have captured here. But that's kind of jumping ahead a little bit. Yeah. But you got to tell us what's the book called. It's Mind Map Mastery by Tony Buzan, which he's kind of the, the internet, at least if you do an internet search, the father of mind mapping, uh, it's, uh, an interesting book. And there's a lot of stuff in there that I have heard before. Uh, you're from, you've practiced mind mapping for a long time. So there's at the little things in there that are, if you look at

it on the surface and the structure, you're probably like, oh, there's not a whole lot new in here. But I'm finding a lot of insights in just the additional little quotes and the research studies that he's citing. And those are kind of helping me fill in the blanks of my knowledge gaps with this whole idea of mind mapping, which, again, I've been doing for a really long time. a really long time. But this is what I love about collecting all these ideas, though, and recognizing that they have value across these different domains is that you could look at that like, well, I don't need to read a book on mind mapping. I understand that already. But I'm reading it and it's helping me understand it deeper because I'm taking the time to synthesize it and not just say like, oh, well, I understand this, the basic concepts already. And I'm looking for those, those key things that are going to be a value to me personally. All right. So we've done the rough capture. And interestingly, I think your

initial capture is more efficient than mine because I'm picking up a lot in my first pass. And I didn't mention earlier, readwise connects with obsidian so all the stuff automatically gets dumped into obsidian but when i look at my notes after my initial highlight notes after i read a book there's a lot there i mean it's not just an efficient little mind map like you have and um but then that leads kind of to the next question of tiago system is to organize how do you organize them and know, I want to kind of distinguish because we keep jumping between the concept of, you know, book or I, you know, book notes or content notes and ideas, because I feel like they're separate. And for me, for example,

each book I read will get a note in Obsidian and it'll have those combined highlights. Now, I may read a highlight and it may refer to some idea that I'm interested in and something I want to track and develop. And I will link it in Obsidian to the big idea, but the actual quote itself stays on the page for the book. And then through the joy of backlinks, I can always go back and see them again. But yeah, so I organized by media, by item, but they do link to items, to ideas. Yeah. And this is the thing that I think I've, I disagree with Tiago the most on because Tiago would say that the best way to organize all the different things that you take notes on is by goals, not by subject, which is the basis of his PARA method projects, areas of responsibilities, resources, and then archives. But the problem for me is that the ideas that I

capture are no longer associated with a single project. That was easy when it was tied to a development project that the family business was working on. But now I read some of these books and I get these ideas and there's no direct connection to something that I'm working on. But the seed's been planted and I just let it percolate long enough and it comes back up and I see it in a new way. And I'm like, oh, this makes so much sense. And I see how there is now a new project that is being initiated because of this idea. to organize these things for myself. I'm still trying to figure this out for myself.

But I will say that the book notes, I do end up with a note inside of Obsidian for the different books that I've read. And the way that it ends up is not just a mind map. That's kind of the raw material. And I also should say that when it comes to the mind map itself, I'm not trying to recreate the entire structure of the book. I used to take book notes that way, and I would feel burdened not to miss anything that was important. And I kind of shifted my approach to reading these books and only jotting down the things that are standing out to me, that are inspiring me, that are stirring a question inside of me. It's like, hmm, that seems important. I don't exactly know why, but I'm going to jot that down. And then I'm going to dump it all in later. This kind of gets into the organizing part and see how it all fits together. Because I've read

enough of these productivity books now that I've heard a lot of the same stories, different places. And each time I hear it, I get a few new details. And so that's like the prime opportunity for the book notes that I have on this particular book where they mentioned this story. I'm going to take that story now and I'm going to rip it out as its own individual note. And I'm going to develop that story with all of the different details that I have collected on that particular story. But it's not just stories that provide those links between the different notes. It's also the ideas.

Things like Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If you're playing a drinking game with productivity books, that's the one where you take a shot because they mention it all the time. Well, what's the connection between all these different books that mention this idea? So figuring out where that stuff is, and then more importantly, what does that mean to me? And this kind of all comes back to a book that I didn't even really like when I first read it, but How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. And he talks about syntopical reading, which is the highest level of reading. When you're reading a book, you're engaging in a conversation with the

author. Your job is to understand their arguments and then decide whether you agree or disagree with them. So I kind of try to take that approach with my note-taking. But then syntopical is, okay, so you just read this book on habits, by Atomic Habits, by James Clear. Well, that's one book. There are lots of other books that talk about habits. There are lots of other people who have different ideas about habits. I've read a lot of those other books. So the truth for me is somewhere between the connection of all the dots between that and tiny habits and the power of habit. the connection of all the dots between that and tiny habits and the power of habit and i have to sort through all that and figure out what does this really mean to me it's great that james has this revelation and it's provided this value in

his life but if i just read that don't do anything with it you know then i'm missing out on the value that is there yeah and so there's a lot to unpack there. The first is we talked earlier about, you know, being a cog in the wheel of the education system versus reading for your own benefit. And you are absolutely doing it right by not mind mapping a representation of the entire book. You're only taking notes on what's important to you. And that same thing goes for me, even though I'm very liberal with highlights, there'll be entire chapters that have no highlights in them because I don't find it resonates with me or it's anything I care about. And I'm just looking for the gold

for me, but I find that the easier way to get it for me is to start with a broad stroke on the relevant stuff. I don't try and say, well, this is good, but is it good enough to keep? the relevant stuff. I don't try and say, well, this is good, but is it good enough to keep? I don't do that. I just say, this is good. I'll highlight this. And I just sweep it all in through Readwise and then into Obsidian. Now, I think you and I both are kind of on this idea of how does this notes and how do these materials relate to bigger ideas? And I have a folder in Obsidian called ideas, open per in for now, close per in, you know, and I put the for now in there to remind myself that these are not ideas that are being cast in stone. These are ideas that I have for now and that they evolve over time as I add more inputs. So everything I read, and maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves here,

but everything I read as I go through the distilling process, once I get all those notes, I don't just stop there. Then I actually use Obsidian to highlight the highlights. Now I'm asking, okay, I've got all this stuff. What is the real gems in here? And then the next step for me after that would be to summarize it. And stop me if I'm getting too ahead. But the idea is you start distilling it down further and further. And then at the end, you're like, well, how does this relate to my ideas for now? And

that's the final step of note-taking on a book for me. Yeah, that is getting a little bit ahead, but I think that's fine. I think we can go there because the bottom line is that when it comes to organization, you just kind of have to group things together on how they make sense for you. And I don't go all in with the folders and the projects areas, resources, and archives. I think that's okay. I also think with the technologies that we have, there are different ways to group things, which is kind of cool. You can use folders and physical files. That's one way to group things. You can use tags. It's another way to group things. But also bidirectional links are another way to group things. And that doesn't mean that one of

those is better than the other. But when you have these different ways and you can combine them, you can start to see some new ways on how these things connect, which is the exciting part for me. Now, when it comes to Distill and Express, which is really what you were talking about there with the stuff that's from Readwise, I'm glad that you went there because I jotted that down. Like highlighting the things in the Kindle and dumping them into Obsidian via Readwise, that's a great way to get things in there.

But then you got to do something with that stuff. And I do something with the MindNode files that I dump in there as well. And that's where the distill part comes in. Now, this is the place where I got the revelation that actually I was kind of doing this already because Tiago talks about this idea of progressive summarization in the distill

section. He talks about layer one being the original captured note. Layer two are the bolded passages. So after you've captured the original note, then you go in and you highlight or you bold specific passages. Then you go through and you look at those bolded passages and you highlight certain ones. And then layer four is the executive summary. Well, I basically do that with the books that I read because the first thing I do is I buy the actual book. So in terms of progressive summarization, that's really like capturing an article into your read it later service, or in your case, the Kindle book. Okay, so then like that's layer one. Layer two is the things that you are highlighting.

Well, for me, layer two is the mind map that I'm creating. But in the mind map itself, I have another layer, which is kind of like the highlighted passages. I've created this emoji key. So if something is like, aha, I didn't realize that before, I'll use a light bulb emoji for a node. Or if something is, remember aha, I didn't realize that before, I'll use a light bulb emoji for a node. Or if something is, remember how to read a book, you're trying to figure out what the

arguments of the author is presenting you. If I think this is a key argument that they're trying to make, I'll use a key emoji. If it's something, and then I've got others that I use, like if it's something that, if this is a book I'm reading for Bookworm and I want to add this to the outline, I'll use a talking head emoji. If it's something that is like a statistic that I'd never heard before and just completely blew my mind, I'll use a mind blown emoji. I've got a quote emoji for things that I want to capture for the quote book along with the pages that they're from. So that's kind of my layer three. And then when I put it inside of Obsidian, I've got at the top the metadata of the book itself. So for example, four disciplines of execution, author Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Hewling,

those are all separate links. And then the Bookworm episode where we covered this. Below that, I have the three-sentence summary. So I have the mind map below that. I've reviewed that mind map when I bring it into Obsidian, and I condense it all down into what does this book mean in three simple sentences. And then below the mind map, since I can do this with another click, I can export everything as markdown formatted text. I also have the text version of that MindNode file as well. And that's where I'll go through and if there's something that should be its own note, I'll highlight that, I'll rip it out, make it its own note. And that allows me to kind of connect

the ideas between the different books. It all makes sense. And honestly, I think Tiago's done a great service with this book and I think it's helped a lot of people. But this is not a new discovery. And I think he'd probably agree with me if he was here. I mean, going through and summarizing your notes and stating them in your own words has been going on for a long time. time uh but you know giving people a system to do it and i think is is good um the way i do it is you know i get the the super broad highlights from read wise then uh there is a mechanism in obsidian to highlight via text and i use that and then i interlineate like if there's a concept and i have thoughts on it maybe i disagree with it or i agree with parts of it or i think this is something important i actually just open up the the outline and write my own thoughts right there. But I do link them to ideas.

I mean, the key for it really is, for me, the ultimate goal is when I consume one of these books or one of this media, how does it affect my view of the world? And that's where I get to ideas for now. And if it doesn't, then, you know, it really didn't do that much for me, you know, and, um, and ideas for the world for me can be something like, you know, you know, justice or whatever, but it could also be something like task management. I mean, there's, I have sacred and profane in my ideas for now. And I, and I, and I link to them as I learn things. And then I can see if I go into those ideas, you know, what is the historical record of how I got to how I think about it. I can actually see the backlinks. It's really great. You know, this is why so many of us lose our minds over

Obsidian because it simplifies this process. The thing that's exciting about Obsidian for me, and it's not just Obsidian, is this whole term building a second brain. I've liked that idea. I think that part of the reason that is so popular is that Tiago did a great job branding that. What I want is something external that I can look at and be like, oh, that's how my brain

works. And I feel like the bidirectional linking in that graph view that you get, that's another layer that you can use to kind of understand how your brain would have connected these things. But then also once you understand how your brain connects these things, you can set it up so that it can connect those things even better. That's the whole idea behind the invention of mind mapping was that when you use color, when you use branches, when you use images, when you use keywords, this stuff just clicks for you in a way that it doesn't when you just have a giant wall

of text that you're reading. One of the statistics that Tony Buzan shared in that book was one of the studies that they did found that if someone looked at a thousand photographs, they could recall 90, not like top of mind, but if they saw it again, they would be able to identify, oh, I've seen this before 98% of the time, which is insane. When you think about the study, they showed them a thousand different photographs and they're able to say, oh yeah, that one I saw before. You can't do that with a wall of text. It's just not the way your brain works. And so that stuff just kind of fascinates me how that all works together. But one important thing that I want to unpack here in this section is the last part is the express. And I feel like this is the thing that a lot of people miss when it comes to note-taking.

I know I missed this for a very long time. And when you are doing anything creative, and I would argue a lot of knowledge work is in fact creative, there has to be an output. is in fact creative, there has to be an output. You have to be able to not just collect all these things that seem important to build your own library, but you need to be able to say, what does all of this mean? In the words of Mortimer Adler, I've got all this stuff, so what of it? And that's the part where by forcing myself to create something, whether it is a podcast episode like this, I mean, this is great. When I know we're going to talk about a topic, I have to force myself to sit down and codify my thoughts on things in an outline before I sit down and talk into a microphone or I'll sound like an idiot, right? Or a blog post

or a video, same sort of thing. But it doesn't have to be something that you publish publicly for other people to see. There's that saying, thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips. Well, in my case, an obsidian also through clicky keyboards. When I interject an opinion note and decide this is what I think about this, then that kind of settles it in the back of my head. And it's another data point, another seed that I'll be able to connect and get a bigger picture later. Yeah. And I really think that, you know, kind of giving back to this idea of summarization and connecting it to the ideas and writing them down is important. And you've really given me food for thought here about,

do I need to add a visual methodology to the ideas for now page? Does that need to become a diagram or does that need to become a mind map or something? I don't know. I'm going to think about that because you've given me food for thought. But either way, the process of writing the words down and the ideas is where i kind of codify my thoughts on it like i'll know that i have certain thoughts on some concept right but until i actually codify them until i put them down on a note it's like they're very they're like smoke they're very hard to get your arms around but once you you codify them you put them into writing then suddenly they're there for you to see for you to to examine, for you to change. And then this whole process of tying them to your notes from the things you've read and consumed gives you a real kind of foundational understanding of what is affecting your thinking.

thinking. Exactly. The genius of the progressive summarization, like I said, I got my own version of this, but really the same principle. When you take something that is thousands of words and you force yourself to distill it down into a couple of sentences, it's not until you are able to do that consistently that you really understand a topic. I've got five kids at home and they are always asking why. And if I don't take the time to think about things and formulate the answers ahead of time, they can catch me off guard and they can tell dad doesn't have the answer. I don't want to profess that I always have the answers, but sometimes they'll ask me something and it's been something that I've practiced for a really long time and I'm kind of convicted like, I should have an answer for this. Why don't I have an answer for this?

I practice this, but I can't explain it to my eight-year-old. So I got to go think about it and I got to make it simpler. And then once I do that, then I can explain it to them and then they get it. But I realized that once I take the time and figure that out for myself, that's really where the value is. It's not in the fact that I can explain it to my eight-year-old, just the fact that I think I might have to explain it to my eight-year-old. That does something in me and helps me understand it at a different level. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Ethos, life insurance that fits your budget. Go to ethoslife.com slash focus and check it out.

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California as Ethos Life Insurance Services. It's not available in all states and prices are subject to underwriting and certain health questions. And our thanks to Ethos for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Mike, let's talk about the payoff you know we've shared the system that we're using of collecting nodes and connecting them to ideas and thoughts where do you see this in your day-to-day life i mean where does where do you use it i use it pretty much all the time because i am living out of obsidian with the day job we do have tasks and things that we're tracking against projects and that is all happening inside of ClickUp. But a lot of the ideas that I collect

from the books that I read, those actually impact the stuff that I do in the business world as well. My job specifically is kind of like a COO type of position, a team of people is to understand what is the best thing to do as an organization and then cast vision and get people on board with moving in a specific direction and practicing things that get us in alignment so we can do better work. And so I've kind of been not surprised but impressed by the amount of overlap between the books that I read for myself and the translation of those principles over to the day job. But I also recognize with note-taking specifically for work,

I have a remarkable that I have been using for those notes and I like it a lot. Sure. Just the other day I went to a workshop down in Milwaukee and brought the remarkable and there were 20 people there and there were probably six remarkables. And it was the kind of scenario where you're attending these meetings and you're talking about things and they kind of encourage you not to be distracted by the stuff that's going on back at the office. And so it's the perfect sort of device for that. And I'm realizing that when it comes to the Evernote style notes that I was taking, I just want to have a record for these things. The Remarkable is actually a great tool for that. I don't know exactly what that's going

to look like in terms of the expression and the creating. It probably doesn't have a whole lot of creative benefit, those meeting notes, but I am basically exporting those as PDFs and putting those inside of Obsidian. Other than that, most of the stuff that's in there,

the curating piece is I'm being judgmental about the things that I collect. If I don't see something that's being important, I'm going to cut it and trust that it's going to come back later if it really is important. So I'm constantly collecting these ideas and constantly getting new ideas. And I'm formulating those things and bringing those to weekly meetings and trying to create different processes and things that we could improve or specific pieces of content that I want to create, whether those are podcast topics like this or YouTube videos,

just trying to figure out what are the places where all of this connects and then have an expression of that, whether it is written words, audio, or video. Yeah, I find it really useful as well. The idea of the external brain, man, kudos to Tiago Forte for coming up with that branding, because it is so perfect. And I was just looking through my ideas for now. I've got a note in here under the philosophy and religion about Greco-Roman philosophy. And then under that, I've got multiple notes because there wasn't just one philosophy. And it's like, yeah, what do I really think about stoicism versus, you know, whatever.

And it's just like, it's here. I've thought about it. And it's evolving as I read additional books. And I really like this resource. In fact, so much so that I'm actually, I'm doing something bad, Mike. I'm taking data out of Obsidian. I'm starting to make Obsidian more of this second brain

than the collection of all PKM knowledge of all sorts. And because I just like, I like to see the graph and the cleanliness of having these ideas here. Yeah, I think there's a huge payoff for this and it carries over into your life. If you've sat to sit down and think about concepts that are important to you and as you face challenges in your life and you know what you think about the underlying criteria for a decision, you know, when you're faced with a decision that involves, you know involves some general principle or value,

and you know what your feelings are on that, it makes it really easy to prioritize and make a decision consistent with your values. And yeah, I find this stuff extraordinarily useful. And it doesn't have to be built overnight. Mine is evolving. I'm sure yours is too. I'd be very curious to see what my ideas for now list looks like in 10 or is evolving. I'm sure yours is too. I'd be very curious to see what my ideas for now list looks like in 10 or 20 years. I bet it'll look a lot different than it does today. I love that ideas for now list. It's basically the MOCs that I've got, but I think that's part of the beauty of this is like you figure out what system works for you. You mentioned you're taking things out of Obsidian, and that brings up a point that

I'd love to unpack a little bit. And that is that you have to find the sweet spot of the number of things in Obsidian in this case, but I guess you could say building your second brain in general, where they're going to provide value for you. And this is something that I don't know that there is a simple answer for this, because there are people who do need to have records of all these things and be able to search them. And they have the archive and the straight up building a second brain methodology that works great for them. But for me with creating, I've recognized that I have to do the same thing. I have to eliminate things in order to get some inertia between the connection of the ideas that are in there. And kind of that I've always got an expression of an

output. I'm reminded of a quote that, nothing is so dangerous as a single idea when it's the only one that you have because you attach so much pressure and value on that one idea and you think, I have to make this work and I want to have enough in my collection where I don't have to pin all my hopes on a single idea. If I start developing that one and it's just not doing it for me, I'd be willing to say, you know what? I was wrong about this. It's not really as valuable as I thought it was going to be, but that's okay because I know I'm still reading books and I'm still capturing things and there's a constant inflow of these other ideas. And one of those I'm going to be able to turn into an output. But that is kind of scary until you prove it to yourself that yes, you can consistently

create and develop ideas in a way that you can express them so that they are valuable. What's the quote? I'm not sure. I think I heard it attributed to Steve Jobs, but I think it probably predates him that ideas should be strongly held but easily abandoned or something. Do you know that quote? Yeah, strong convictions weakly held. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah, strong convictions weakly held. Yeah, I like that. I like that. That's the basic idea.

In that case, believing that your approach, you're believing that this is the right approach, but you're being willing to change your mind if someone has new information. And you're being willing to chuck your association with that if there really is a better way. We can get so connected to our ideas and we can create this dogma around them. It's basically a religion at that point. And we just continue to feed the echo chamber with things that are consistent with that because we don't want to be proven that we're wrong. I look to prove myself wrong. I want to find the contrary ideas, have the contrary dialogue and conversations because those are the people that I can learn from. Those are the people who are going to point out the holes in my theories and where I can either go back to the drawing board and say, okay, well, how am I going to respond to this argument? Or, hmm, you know what? Maybe they got a point. Well, I mean, there's also, I think that's a big benefit of going through this and trying

this is that there's a stagnation to an unwillingness to change your mind on things, right? And even worse is unwillingness to change your mind on things you haven't even really thought through that you've adopted because somebody told you to think it. I feel like this process, you know, and for me, the real awakening has been the last few years as I've got more into going back to those books from college. And, you know, and it's not just the agents. I mean, I'm reading, you know, existentialists and other folks too. And I just find this engagement with ideas and it's almost like, it's like, so eyeopening and it's like an engagement with life. It's this dynamicism, like what will life show me today and how will I evolve? And it's just such a wonderful feeling. And I think there's

really something to this. If you're feeling like you're stuck, engage with ideas, think about them, argue with yourself, argue with your books, argue with your friends in a fun way. Not, you know, the way too much political discourse is done today, but just, you know, engage the ideas and then come to your own conclusions and see where it leads you. One of the most helpful perspectives just I've had when it comes to this was reading the book, Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray that our friend Ernie recommended to us, because it doesn't matter who you are or how learned you are. You don't know as much as you think you know. And there's a very powerful visual in that book about how all of our understanding is built on this tiny little sliver, this record needle of what is actually knowable. And then once we come to our conclusions,

we tend to surround ourselves with others who think the same way in our bubble of belief. And that kind of rocked my world because I previously maybe thought that I know a lot. I've learned a lot after reading that. I realized it doesn't matter how many books I read on a topic, how many articles I have read, even how many articles and books I have written. I'm thinking of Nicholas Lumens, the whole Zettelkasten guy. The thing that draws people to that idea is how prolific he was.

Well, even with how prolific he was. Well, even with how prolific he was in terms of the academic output, I think even he would say that I don't know diddly squat. There's so much more. And it's just that insatiable love of learning that keeps you coming back and trying to figure out what you don't know. And I think previously the pressure might have been to achieve a certain level of mastery around a particular topic. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad goal, but my goal now is not to know enough to debate somebody and win. My goal is simply to engage in a conversation, to hold my ideas lightly, and to be willing to change my mind about things when someone shows me new information, new ideas, even if it's contrary to something that

I've believed for a really long time. Being willing to chuck that stuff and move in a direction that's better going forward. It reminds me of the conversation we had about Theseus' ship, right? You're not the same David you were seven years ago. So why would you continue to hold on to beliefs and perspectives if they're no longer serving you? Really, the only thing you can do is look forward and ask what's best right now. Yeah. That guy seven years ago is gone. Yep. Which is kind of scary to think about, right? is gone. Yep. Which is kind of scary to think about, right? I see just the opposite. I find it invigorating. I mean, like, is the point of life to be stuck where you are until you die? Or is it to engage the world? You know? Yes. I want to be challenging these things right up until the last

breath. I agree with you. And you're the person to encourage people with that because you literally just went through the transition where you chucked it and did something new, right? You can get attached to that sunk cost. I spent so much of my life doing things a certain way. I spent so much of my life getting this degree to be a lawyer, to be certified. And I've spent so much time practicing this. I'm really good at this. But being willing to say, this is not right for me anymore and move in a different direction, that does take a lot of courage. There's a lot of fear that needs to be overcome with that. But you are in a better position to make those sorts of decisions when you embrace that attitude daily with your thinking. If you engage with your

ideas that way, it doesn't seem so extreme when you have to make a choice like that. Yeah, it didn't to me. Yeah, because you practiced it for a while. Although it did to some other people in my life, but you know, there you go. Yep. What's the relationship between these notes and your creativity? Yep. What's the relationship between these notes and your creativity?

Well, for me, the creativity is the reason for the notes, although I wouldn't have framed it that way at the beginning. I am thankful that I have the podcast that I do that forced me to create on a schedule. I learned a lot by having to do that. But I also am pretty happy with my current situation of being a working stiff, as you referred to me a couple episodes ago. I don't mind that term at all. Having the day job and then having the art on the side because the art can be the art.

And that's my goal with creating is my goal with note-taking. What are the ideas that are going to make the best art? The thing that I am most proud of. Without having any sort of pressure to have this thing be monetized. I feel like the minute that you have to sell something because it has to pay the bills, it changes the engagement with the work. to pay the bills, it changes the engagement with the work. It's not necessarily always in a bad way, but I think there's definitely the potential for it to taint it that way. And so for me, it is just having a consistent outflow of what I think about these different ideas.

And then learning over time that because I'm going to talk about these in the podcast, and I'm going to write these articles, and I'm going to talk about these in the podcast and I'm going to write these articles and I'm going to make these videos, that in order to have things to talk about, I need to make sure that I am collecting enough dots on the front end. Yeah. Well, I think that it's all kind of one of a thing. It starts with a notes process, but I think it unlocks so much. And once you start to get a better idea of what your ideas are, then it does impact what not only your subjects of creativity, but what you create with it. So it's a very virtuous cycle.

In fact, I think at one point you had mentioned in the outline, although we haven't talked about it today, that you think of this whole thing kind of as a flywheel and i i couldn't agree more yeah that's a another topic for a another day probably but i did frame this as a flywheel i gave this presentation initially to the suite setup community i presented it at max stock i've got a google or i'm got a Twitter thread that I've shared about it, and the response has been pretty strong with this. Prior to sharing that, if you were to ask me what's my greatest contribution, I would say it's probably somewhere in the world of personal productivity, faith-based productivity, things like that. But

because I have been practicing what I'm preaching here with note-taking and creating, I've kind of discovered over the last couple months that one of my greatest contributions is for people who consider themselves to be reluctant creatives. They want to create, they feel the pressure like they should be creating, but they don't know how to get started. And they maybe feel like they're just not creative. And so I've basically taken the building a second brain idea and repackaged it in my own format with capture, curate, cultivate, connect, and create. I'll put a link to the Twitter thread in the show notes for people, but there's obviously a whole lot to unpack there with each of those ideas. Yeah, we'll get there in a future episode. Let's just say that. Sure. One other thing is I feel like we've built quite a structure here

for some folks. They're going to be overwhelmed. Like, wait, you want me to highlight? Then you want me to summarize? Then you want me to, you know, write it in my own words and you want me to link it to ideas. What I will tell you is in terms of time investment, it is a trivial amount of time to do those last steps. And those are the steps where you get the most payoff. And we talked about this when Tiago was on the show, but you think that, you know, oh man, I went through the whole book. I read it. I did some highlighting. That's enough. I want to go to the next one. What I would say is you're going to get way more bang for your buck if you just put one more hour into it at the end. And it will actually have the ability to make changes in your life if you do that. So that is, it's like running a football down to the two yard line, setting it on the

ground and walking off the field. Just get it into the end zone. It's just another two yards. It's really that simple. Yeah. I like that analogy. I was going to share that one if you didn't. Although I would say if you don't have an hour at the end, if you are going through the effort of reading the book anyways, just simply answer the question, what does this mean to me? I've read this book or watched this YouTube video, heard all these ideas, listen to this podcast even maybe, what does this mean to me? And you can fill in your own blank for the definition of meaning there. It doesn't have to be something that somebody else has said or shared somewhere else. But what's the takeaway of this for you? The minute that you define that,

you've gotten significantly more value from going through the exercise than you would have otherwise. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. All right. So we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm

slash focused. I want to thank our sponsors today, Indeed and Ethos. And today on Deep Focus, we're going to be talking about Mike's continuing task manager struggle. He's on a new app gang, and I'm going to give him no end of trouble about it. So stick around for that if you are a Deep Focus subscriber. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.