034: Organizing Research and Ideas — Notion Walkthrough #1

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello friends. Exciting news here at Jenny Blake Enterprises hq. We sent the files to print for free time on Tuesday. After many months and then very intense weeks of final final effort to catch every last single typo and glitch and possible mistake, we have sent the files to the printer. That means that we are on Track to have FreeTime Media advanced copies out in early December and to launch on March 22, 2022. Woohoo. If you want to follow the journey and even help be part of the launch team, just get early updates on that by signing up for the time well spent newsletter and community. That's@itsfreetime.com join.

In honor of submitting the files and closing the book on the actual manuscript, writing and editing and finalizing process. I want to do this multi part series on some of the most helpful tools and systems for organizing this process. Even if you are not writing a book nor do you plan to write a book, you may still have big ideas and big projects that you want to harness your thinking around, organize and ship. So whether you're creating a course, a book, some other kind of project, I hope that these ideas are helpful to you. I used two primary apps the entire time of while working on FreeTime Notion and Google Docs. As I share in the workshop, your book and Big Idea and I'll link to that in the show Notes There are many different stages to writing a book and part of the reason that people get writer's block is that they sit down in front of the computer, in front of the blank screen and expect to do all of their research, thinking, synthesizing and writing all in that same moment. But what actually is more helpful toward writing A book is that by the time you sit down at your computer, you're really assembling. So the stages of harvesting, you know, looking around for ideas, becoming an idea magnet for a certain topic, harvesting, researching, collecting your own stories and anecdotes, organizing those ideas, synthesizing them, starting to make sense of them. All of that for me happens in a nonlinear way. And I've used Notion this past book project in this past year to seamlessly collect and systematize all of that data. So that by the time I was ready to put it in the outline and put it in the book in Google Docs, I had it all there. Even when I'm writing in Google Docs, I don't. I've never liked to write in a linear fashion. So there are ways, if you use headings in Google Docs, you can also jump around through your doc. I never understood how people do it, where they just sit down with a word file and expect to go from the intro to chapter one to two to three. That has never worked for me because I don't know about you, but my energy is different on different days for different topics. And something like the introduction, which technically comes at the start of the book, is often one of the hardest parts to nail down and one that you have to keep returning to and editing and scrapping, revising, condensing, etc. So I love to organize, not just my research and my thinking, in a nonlinear way, hyperlinked, almost nodal, like rhizomic, like the airline maps, where you have connections to all these nodes and dots and they all interweave. So I like to think and write in a hyperlinked, almost mirroring the Internet sort of way. Even though the final output is a linear document in Google Docs, it still doesn't mean you have to write in that order. So with free time, there's 27 chapters. There ended up to be across three parts. So in free time there's three parts. Align, design, assign. There's three sections within each part and then there's three chapters per section. I like the harmony of that. That organizational structure came to me a little later in the process, but the very first stage and the topic of this podcast walkthrough video. I'll tell you how to get access to the video if you want to see the visuals. Today I'm just going to talk about how I collect and organize ideas, personal anecdotes and research. So I am going to talk you through my specific part of my notion dashboard around idea gathering for writing Again, regardless of what you're working on, if you are a voracious reader, podcast listener, researcher, thinker like me and many people I know in the free time community, then this should be helpful for you. Even if you don't want to write a book. If you want to see what I'm doing because I'm actually recording this with screen capture and audio, sign up for the free Author Toolkit. It's totally free. You can go to itsfreetime.com authors and just put in your name and email. You'll get full access to the toolkit. That is where I'm going to be uploading the video version of this today's episode. And don't worry if you're here listening on audio and you don't want to sign up for the Author Toolkit. I'm still going to describe everything to you, but I figure for those of you that want to really are more visual learners and you want to see it, you want to see Notion in action, just head to itsfreetime.com authors.

I'm also going to be mentioning a couple books that have been totally instrumental to me in this process.

So we'll start. I have a hub in Notion. And by the way, let me just tell you what Notion is. If you're unfamiliar, I learned about it through Tara McMullen. She has a great podcast called what Works and she interviewed Marie Poulain who created a course called Notion Mastery, which is where I learned everything I know. And Marie has a great free series called Notion Office Hours that you can look up on YouTube if you want to get some really solid deep dives. Notion is incredible in its freedom and flexibility to organize everything, everything you can imagine. And what I love about it is that it completely replaced Google Docs, sheets, Airtable forms.

Evernote. Every single tool that we were Frankenstringing together in my business ends up that we were able to consolidate all of it into Notion, which means we never have to leave Notion to get information because Notion is so customizable and so interlinkable. It's really the first tool that I've experienced that has allowed me to create an intranet for my mind, for my personal life and for my business.

I used to use Evernote. So I used to collect ideas. Let's talk about the harvesting phase of any big project. I used to collect all my ideas and articles in Evernote, and I still do prefer Evernote's web Clipper to clip articles into different Evernote folders that I'm using. So I have a folder called Curiosity, that I clipped articles into for four or five years before I wrote four Free Time. And then a couple years into that, I started to hone in on this idea, How We Work. So I created an Evernote notebook called How We Work. And I didn't know what that would become. I knew it was kind of general, but it was more specific than just the pure category of curiosity. So I still clip articles into Evernote folders or landing pages that I see that I like. Evernote's great for that. But everything else in my business has moved over to Notion.

So today, this session in particular is on organizing that harvesting, researching, reading, thinking process. And then in a future one, I'm going to talk to you about how I started ideating for the book in a very, very nonlinear way. So all of this is nonlinear, meaning there's no specific order you have to follow. This is about letting your mind play and run free and have synapses firing in every direction and a tricky technology and system that can absorb all of that in an easy way without creating more confusion. And by the way, I'm not a Notion affiliate. I have no, I have nothing in this to try to sell you on Notion. It's just so magical and powerful that I want to just share how I'm using it and walk you through. Okay, so on my personal home dashboard within Notion, I have a section called Writing. And let me just give you a high level. And by the way, I'm still experimenting with how many different subcategories of capture that I need. I may combine some of these in the future, but for now I have Storyworthy, synthesis, inbox, reading, record references, non books, quotes, podcast notes, and then a writing exercise that I did. So I'm going to walk you through all of those in this session. The first one, Storyworthy. This comes from a fantastic book book called Storyworthy by Matthew Dix. It is so good. And he. He assigns homework for life, which is that every single day capture at least one story snippet. Matthew says that a story really boils down to five seconds, five seconds of transformation. So five, five second small moments. He says when something fundamentally changes forever, you must start out as one version of yourself and something new. You must tell your own story and not the stories of others. Tell your side. This requires hard truth, authenticity and vulnerability.

So once I read Storyworthy, at the very beginning of September, I started trying to capture every day a story, something in my experience. And it's cool because he says that just by doing this homework for life, you actually Start to see, synthesize your life a little more. And it's hard, I will tell you. It's really hard to try to think back on the day and go, how did I shift or change today? What was my 5 second moment of transformation? So it really does help one become more observant and even more grateful. Here's. Let me zoom in on one of my stories that I captured. So one is called Reclining Liberty. At the park where I take Ryder in the morning, there is an art installation called Reclining Liberty. And it's a.

It'S. Well, it's obviously not. The Statue of Liberty is kind of like a recreation and she's laying on her side and the artist statement said that she's laying on her side almost like the Buddha, the reclining or relaxing Buddha, but also to speak to the fatigue and weariness that many of us are feeling. So instead of her, the statue standing upright and striving, she's laying down, she's tired. And what would it look like if America wasn't just about striving and ambition and that we could relax a little bit? So I just love all these themes. I get so happy seeing, seeing this statue in the park and it's just so, it's so big, it's massive and I love it. So this is one of the stories that I captured. And so in notion, not only can I include some photos of Reclining Liberty, but I can also, in my storyworthy capture I also have some fields so the date that it was created, topics which are I've renamed. So in notion they're called tags. So I've tagged this one what I call topics New York City walks and creativity. Then I have a field called Snippet where I just say what this means to me and what I was reading about. And then resource is a link that I might want to link to. And then I have a notes and related field so I can, I can now reference other story worthy moments. The great thing about capturing these little stories every day, trying to capture one a day is that when it comes time to give a speech or speak on stage or be interviewed on a podcast, it's so good to have these little synthesized moments already captured because these are the kinds of moments that we, we don't necessarily remember for the long term unless we've captured them in the comments field. Sometimes I'll come back to a story I've captured and I'll write comments to myself. So in this case, five days later, after I created the Reclining Liberty, little Story nugget I wrote. I'm as happy to see it as the other one standing majestically in the middle of the Hudson River. They both bring me so much joy. This September marked my 10 year anniversary of living in New York City. And every time I see the other Statue of Liberty off in the distance distance I'm just delighted. But same with this one even though it's not the og I love seeing this one reclining every single morning when I take Ryder to the park.

So that's storyworthy. Highly, highly recommend the book. And then he also has a TED talk TEDxBerks that will give you a great overview of his method and this 5 minute homework for life.

Let's skip so the next area that I'm going to tell you about is reading record books. That's AKA a record of every book I read and then references non books. I used to record this by hand. I used to just always. I always just write down what book I finish and what month in the back of my journal. I've kept journals and five star notebooks for oh gosh, so long, 10 years. I've kept journals since seventh grade but these five star notebooks have been building, building, building for 10 years and I always would just write down the books that I've read. I also try to keep up with marking them in Goodreads, although not every book I sometimes forget.

This year specifically, just in the last month after turning in free time, I decided to digitize my reading record so that I could link to these books from other notes. So if I capture a story that relates to a book or if I want to capture, you'll see when I get to the synthesis section it's going to be really easy for me to reference the actual books that I've read. So for example, here is the storyworthy that was the first one I logged because I just started this system in September of 2021 and the fields that when I capture this book I have the author. So the title of the note is storyworthy. I have the author Matthew Dix. I have the date that it was created. I have the date that I finished tags so tags you can have multiple so I have writing and thinking Amazon link citation. There's this cool tool I'll tell you what it is in a second where you can just insert the full citation. I wish I had known about this. This would have saved us so much time for doing the free time and notes and then notes and related. That's where I can make a few notes and those by the way, these are just the metadata of this note. There's also a whole blank space in the note itself when I click into it that I could, I could write as much as I wanted so I could take notes, copy and paste my Kindle highlights into the body of this note. Let's say.

That'S the page that's really Good. Quick bibliography. Zbib.org OMG. So that will give you the fully properly formatted Chicago style footnote or endnote. Oh gosh. Like I said, that would have saved us so much time. Another book I read that inspired me to up my game around creating this. These, you know, linked databases is a book called how to take Smart Notes. So let me just walk you through another one just to give you an example. The author, Sanke Ahrens date. I mean the dates are a little wonky here because I was just getting going. This book is tagged, Thinking, writing, organizing and nonlinear. And then the citation from Zbib.

Here'S the reading record. And then I decided that I wanted an in notion. These are called databases. So I can view this database as a list. I could also view it as a Kanban style board. I use Notion for podcast production. We can view it by what stage each podcast episode is in the process you can view by calendar. There's all kinds of functionality with the views. And so once you've created a database in Notion, you can view it many different ways. So I could view my reading record as a list. I could view it chronologically or I could view it by tags. I could say, what are all the books I've read this year on writing? For example?

This is a little different than my references on non books. You can see I have not created this one yet. If you're here watching the video, if you're listening to the podcast, it's just blank. So I need to still build this out because. And I'm not sure that I will right now, like I said, I still use the web Clipper in Google Chrome and just save articles into Evernote. So I may or may not go to the trouble. But what I like is if there's really key articles that I know for sure are going to be part of a future book or project, I could log them here. And again, the whole point of doing that is everything is linkable within Notion, so I never have to leave this environment.

Let's talk now about synthesis. So I have renamed this this. Gosh. I followed a really fun rabbit hole of podcast interviews and authors I admire. So Cal Newport and Srini Rao were talking about this named as the Zettelkasten, and that is German for slipbox. In the book how to Take Smart Notes, he describes this German professor who really had this epic slip box of I think it was 90,000 notes by this time he started to the time that he died. And Niklas Luhmann, so Sanke Arends, in his book how to Take Smart Notes, outlines the slip box method. And again, slip box in German is called Zettelkasten. That's kind of a mouthful. There's also something called the Commonplace Book. And this, if you've heard Ryan Holiday talk about, he learned this technique from Robert Greene. It originated. John Locke was the first one in 1685 to write about the Commonplace Book. And this idea of capturing notes in a nonlinear way. So it, it dates back to the 17th century. I mean, probably even before that.

And then Elizabeth Gilbert even uses a shoebox. So Ryan Holiday, his method, unless he's since digitized it, he uses an actual box that he puts index cards in. And you can write the category in the upper left. You can write you know, or the source in the upper right. You can write a page number in the bottom right. And these index cards can go in a shoebox organized by category so that you can move notes around. I don't know if I'm just paranoid that something will happen to this box, but I'm somebody that I have so many ideas when I'm on the go, when I'm on a dog walk, when I'm commuting, when I'm on the subway, when I'm out to coffee with a friend, when I'm traveling, that I just didn't want to be limited to a physical slip box.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I've always, always Collected ideas and things in Evernote and various cloud based ways, but notion just takes it to a whole new level. So I got really curious and you can tell if you read Liz Gilbert's signature of all things, the knowledge, the depth of and the richness is. It's so rich you can really truly see. And also her book Big Magic, you can get a felt sense as a reader that she has a slip box. I know that sounds kind of crazy or what is called a commonplace book because there's so many quotes woven together with examples and personal stories and funny anecdotes. And when you see that kind of tapestry of ideas come together really succinctly, it kind of lets you know this person was really drawing from a well organized well. Same thing with Ryan Holiday. I just reread his book, perennial seller, and it's just clear, just the wealth of examples and how many data points support any one chapter idea. You can just kind of see it and feel it and experience this in action. I decided to name mine Synthesis rather than Zettelkasten, which is kind of a mouthful, or Slipbox, because technically this is cloud based and it's not a box and commonplace book. It just didn't do it for me either. What I came to learn from all these people who are practicing this is that the slip box or commonplace book is really about synthesis. It's not, it's not the place like the reading record where you just wrote down what you read or you copy and paste quotes. It is the place for thinking. It is the place where original ideas or commentary on books that you've read or questions you have. It's, it's, it's really the place for synthesis. So I named mind Synthesis just to reinforce that this is where I need to now flex some thinking muscle. And I learned that in the book how to Take Smart Notes that really reinforced, hey, listen, this isn't just a knowledge dump. And that book even says.

Just highlighting a book and writing in the marginalia. That's not synthesis, that's note taking. But synthesis is when you review all your notes and you come away with a few key takeaways or key questions or something. And then in the synthesis in each note, to actually write it in an almost like as if it was going to be written in a final product in a book or a speech. So it's not even writing it in shorthand, it's actually forming a thought. And it does take time. And this is the step that I think has the biggest sort of hurdle here, because it takes work. And I'm still learning. Honestly, I'm still. I'm used to kind of sloppy, sloppy harvesting of ideas and research. And I don't, I don't synthesize in the moment, but I could, or even in a weekly review or monthly review. But I can see how doing this would make any future project much, much faster.

So let me show you an example of.

One of my cards here in synthesis. Okay. Well, I just interviewed Jeffrey Davis for the Pivot podcast on his book Tracking Wonder. So from that, I pulled out an exercise that he mentioned in our interview called It's a wonder Intervention called Pause, Gaze, Praise. And I just love that. And I feel like I don't know where this is going to come in handy. And that's the whole thing about a slipbox. Like, you have no clue what you're doing. It's almost like Brene Brown does grounded theory, where she collects data first and then looks at what themes emerge. This is similar. You're sort of collecting what's interesting to your mind first, and then later the themes emerge. So when I look at this note within my synthesis box or folder.

Pause, gaze, praise. And by the way, I love how in notion you can add little emojis. So sometimes I, I just have fun with this. I love adding emojis because it makes me.

Associate a little visual. You know, hieroglyphics were in place long before emojis, and now we're almost returning to this hieroglyphic method of thinking, but it actually does create an association. And for me, it makes going back through and finding notes a little bit easier. So I'm gonna have to find my wonder emoji later.

I have the date the note was created, and that allows me to sort notes by date created. By the way, I have topics that it relates to. So this one is curiosity. And it's also really an exercise, but I'll add that later. So I have topics like animals, awareness, change, communication, bad creativity, curiosity, customer service, mise en place, neuroses, nonlinear New York City, order from chaos, like, and the list goes on. These are. These are topics or tags that tend to come up for me frequently.

I've given it a chronological number. This is thanks to the books that I've read on how to do this. I don't really need this. I could have just sorted by date created. But just in case, for now, I'm going above and beyond because if I pull these notes out, the chronological number just lets me know in a numerical way when it. So I do year 21 month 09 date 22 and then the time 12:15pm and it's all one number. Then I have a field for the Zettle. They call it like. And so this is, this is the most complicated piece of the Zettelkasten method.

Is basically that you give every note a number but as you start to have follow up or related notes you then number it.

You can add letters. It's like so complicated to explain. You should probably just read the book how to take Smart Notes. But basically the Zettelkast number allows you to number notes, number and letter in a way that related notes can stick together even if they're not chronologically captured. So again it'd be so hard to try to really explain this but you can see that. Let's look at note 0007. You probably don't need six digits but I don't know why I just decided to start there. So it is something on neuroses. This is a quote that Michael found in one of his books called Under Saturn's Shadow. And the quote is Neuroses, the split between soul and society that each of us suffers. I loved this definition of neuroses, like just loved it. The split between soul and society that each of us suffers. Here you can see my source. I have Under Saturn's Shadow by James Hollis. So if I had actually read this book I would have just linked to my reading record. But I didn't. So I just, I just wrote, typed it out here. It's not a link. And then I even have a picture of the book cover and a picture of the context that the quote came from. Just so that sometimes when you're capturing things later you just want to make sure you understand the full context and it's hard to find later. So now in case I can't find this book, I know exactly where it is. So on this topic of neuroses, even though my idea or my interview with Jeffrey and about wonder came many days later, I just thought, you know what? So when you're in neuroses, the split between soul and society, well there's a wonder intervention. Pause, gaze, praise. So I've numbered this 10007A so that it. When I view my synthesis area by Zettelkasten number similar topics get grouped together. Now you wonder, well couldn't you also view this whole area by topic? Yes you can. So I could create a view in notion that is what's called board view. And I could say by topic. And we haven't even, haven't even Told you all the different fields that I capture, but now I can even move notes around from animals. So I saw the horses in Central Park. They all have those blinkers, the blinders, and just makes me so sad that these horses, very controversial people have tried to get rid of them, and yet they're so sentimental and tourists love them. You know, how fun is it? Get a carriage ride through Central park and. But nonetheless, makes me sad. Those horsies, they just like, they're working so hard, and in the summer it's hot, and they have these blinkers on, these blinders so that they, they can't see the cars and the people and get scared. And I just thought to myself, you know what? This might come in handy as a metaphor down the road for something that has to do with society.

So I wrote to myself in my little synthesis in the snippet I wrote, don't the blinders themselves indicate a problem? What are the blinders we have on? It's like, doesn't the fact that these horses need to have these blinders on? Isn't that already saying they're in an environment that is not great for them?

So when I organize all of these cards, these, these would be the equivalent. Each card is the equivalent of an index card. I can move them around to different topics.

Within the card itself. What other data am I capturing? So I have the snippet. Like in this case, I Googled, what are these blinders called? I thought they were called blinders, but they're also called blinkers. And the snippet I wrote, Central park blinkers prevent peripheral vision. Merriam Webster says both blinker and blinder are also used metaphorically to refer to people with an overlay, overly narrow focus or inability to see the larger picture. The term can be seen as implying a limitation or obstruction to sight or discernment. And then I have my two questions. That's the synthesis is my Jenny Blake thinking around, doesn't having these at all indicate a problem? I can indicate if they relate to a JB project. So these aren't technically related to free time. And I also, for now, because I'm so early in this process, there's the author toolkit. That again, if you want to see the video version of this, go to itsfreetime.com authors and you'll get free access to the toolkit. But let's say I, at some point, I do start working on the next book. Well, I could create a project tag or category and assign it to that. So one thing that's important to know about notion is that you can have categories. You can. Basically what notion calls it is select and multi select. Select means you only get to choose one. So when I want to create a select for month, like a podcast is only going to come out one month, pick one. It can't come out in September and October. So select means you only choose one value that you get to assign. Multi select is really the function of tags, so you can assign more than one. Then I have the source oh, note type. So I decided it would be helpful for me to know what type of note this is. So the multi select that I've created, I created all these labels of. It could be a quote, a question, a contradiction, an idea, a concept, a factor, statistic, an innovator, a myth, term, jennyism, observation, metaphor, manifesto, meme, mantra, method, sketch, practice. I talk about these different segments of ideas in your book and big idea. But basically I. I do think that when you're writing, if you're doing something like a book or a course, people learn in different ways, and our brains remember different types of information. So facts are good, quotes are good, memes are great, make people laugh, mantras are helpful. Creating a method. It's all good. It's all good. It's like making a. A big yummy soup. So I like to indicate, well, this particular card, what is it? So my horse blinkers is a metaphor, it's an observation, and it's also a question or an inquiry. Then source, source type, is it a book? Is it an article? Is a podcast, resource link? And then notes are related. So here in the notes are related, I could actually link to neurosis directly, not just by the Zettelkasten number that I talked about, because again, that's confusing. But as I start typing the page name, I can click on the card neurosis. And now there's a direct link to the neurosis note or quote.

So, and now I can click when I'm in the horse blinkers note, I can click on neuroses, and I can also search for an emoji.

I don't know. I love emojis so much. You know, it's like emojis just make me laugh. So, okay, now I picked a really, like, scrunchy face emoji for neuroses, the split between soul and society that each of us suffers. All right, so this is the gist of my synthesis thanks to the book how to Take Smart Notes. I can view them chronologically by the day that I created the note, or I can view them by zettelkasten number or create different views by topic or by JB project. That's what's so great about notion is that once you've created this database, which is essentially a table. Let me show you. If you're here with me watching.

I'll just say, let's say like full table. So you can name the view that you're creating and I can create a table. Essentially, what these notion databases are is like a fancy spreadsheet that when I look in table view, I see it all. I see columns for name, Zettel cast, a number created what JB project, note, type, et cetera, et cetera. And I see it all. It's just. It's as if I'm looking at a spreadsheet. But by looking at it by certain views, like if I view by chronological list or by Zettelkasten, you can also sort and filter in notion. So you could sort first by zettle number, then by date created, or you could leave out certain types of notes. So you could sort of. This is going to get more advanced than I want to go into right now. But the views are very, very, very powerful that these sorting mechanisms come in really handy for managing tasks where you can sort by only items that don't have the completed box checked. For example, it's like, only show me incomplete items. All right, we're almost. We're on the home stretch. Let's just quickly talk about index. Sorry, inbox. This is where maybe I have just like, I'm just copying and pasting, sort of like just dumping info and I need to go create a synthesis card or I want to create a reading record, or I need to create a reference article. Basically, I just. I'm on the go and I just need to capture it. Capture it. So, for example.

I have one here. David Perel and Ellen Fishbein teach writers to use the POP framework to write. Well, make it pop. And it's a Venn diagram that has three big circles. Personal, observational and playful. And then right in the middle, where they all intersect is memorable, naturally pops into people's minds. Personal, observational and playful. Maybe you're going to remember Reclining Liberty, even if you're listening to the podcast and you can Google it and see pictures. But, like, maybe you'll remember that because it's personal. I was observing a moment. I just come back to the city after many months gone. It just kind of helped me and just like get back into the swing of things, of this. These crazy times. We're in. So this is the inbox I am probably going to do away with. I have a quotes capture. I am not so sure that this quotes database needs to be its own thing. I am debating whether to combine quotes into the synthesis pros and cons pro. Everything's truly in the same place. Cons synthesis again is meant to have some JB originality. I'm not sure that the quotes belong there. I don't know. I don't know. I think the people who use commonplace books do include quotes over there and I do like to eliminate confusion and redundancy. But for now, quotes live in their own database and the fields that I have are the date I created it topics. So here's a quote. All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self. That's Khalil Gibran from on Religion in his book the Prophet, which I open and close free time with. Not this quote, but it's a shout out to my Lebanese side of the family. Michael, my husband's Lebanese and it's really to.

Khalil Gibran is a Lebanese poet and he moved to the us but it's just so important to me to kind of, I don't know, open and close the book with in honor. In honor to Lebanon. It's going through a very tough time right now.

So this quote, I'll read it again because it's so beautiful. All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self. Funny enough, I actually saw this tattooed on a girl's back in a yoga class. So the girl with the upper back tattoo. And that inspired me. It actually got me into reading Khalil Gibran in the first place. So I have date created topics, religion and time. The snippet if I want to link to another story.

The speaker. Oh, that would be who said it. See, I should write that here. And then.

The source, if it's in a book, I just typed Jabarn. Khalil Jabarn. No Gibran source. And then a link and again you can put more context in the actual notes area.

So yep, I think this could probably go into synthesis. On the other hand, maybe it's nice to have a whole board that's just dedicated to quotes because there can be a lot of them and it's nice to just have them isolated a little bit. I also am experimenting with podcast notes. I have to say I've not done much with this yet. It's. I listen to so many podcasts. I listen to two or three a day I listen on 2x and I tend to just put podcast notes in Captio, this great little app on my iPhone where Captio allows you just one click email stuff to yourself. And then I organize it wherever it belongs In Notion. So now that the book is off to the printers, I'm starting to build my magic mighty marketing machine for for the March22 launch. And I'm just collecting tons of book marketing ideas. So you better believe I have a page in Notion called book Marketing. And that's where I'm organizing all of my ideas. I have tons of checklists around the book process. And so we're going to get into that in a future session. Today I really walked you through In Notion how I collect and harvest ideas, research quotes, personal anecdotes. And that means that when I go to create something, even this podcast, I have stuff I have a well to draw from. So it is a good feeling to be organized, to know that these things aren't getting lost and to then let let our minds do what our minds do best, which is the thinking and the synthesizing and the connecting disparate ideas or putting one's unique take on things. In a future session, I will talk about how I then harness like lasso these ideas and actually start to move them around a board. So I have what is called a book board. This will be a sneak preview of the next one. I have a book board where almost like with physical index cards and I did use some physical cards with free time as well, but in both cases digital and physical, I'm moving them around, I'm shuffling them, I'm writing little anecdotes. And so it's similar to what I just shared, but it starts to become specific to one project. Like the free time book. What are the big three parts that I'm going to have? Intro, conclusion, what anecdotes get pulled out and then how do I shuffle those around the board? And that book board I created before, half the stuff that I just talked about in this session. So it will be interesting to see how they work together and to hear and by the way, you don't have to do any of this. Just take what works for you. But I love, love, love, love seeing how other people organize ideas and, and I just have to say that it feels good. There is a sense of daily accomplishment that even if I'm not sitting down writing, I know that I'm making that process easier for my future self by organizing and systematizing all of this, which is one of my great joys in life is creating order from chaos and then sharing it back out with all of you. I will put links to all the resources I mentioned in the show notes. And again, if you want to watch this and you're not already here with us on video, you can go to itsfreetime.com.

And get the free Author Toolkit, which is where the video version of this will live. Thank you so much for being here everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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