How I Use Notes in Content Creation [QUICK Notes Series #5]

Hi, and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan, and in each episode I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now, here's today's lesson. This week we've been going through a series on note-taking. The first day we talked about the history of this type of Zettelkasten smart note-taking. We talked about Zonka Ahrens and Niklas Luhmann. We talked about why these are different than the notes that you probably scribbled down going through school. On day 2, we talked about how these could help you at work, how to start capturing smart notes, how to develop the different ideas that you have. And then in day 3, we talked more about how to expand on the ideas that you have and summarize the ideas of others. We talked about truly creating a knowledge base of your ideas so that you can use them as the building blocks for future work. So listen back through to make sure that you get all of that, and it will help you have even more context for what we're going to talk about today. In this episode, I'm going to be giving you the lifecycle of a note. So how something goes from the first initial fast note or book highlight or spark of an idea that you have all the way through to an actual piece of published content or output-worthy work. And in case I haven't made this clear, every day this year I've followed this kind of cycle. I've published a short episode of this podcast calling it the Daily Dot. Well, it comes out every day, and often I will wake up and not necessarily have an idea for an episode that day. And in the past, That would've been something that was really overwhelming to me. But now that I've followed this virtuous cycle of note-taking, now what I can do instead of feeling overwhelmed or like I don't have any good ideas or feeling like nothing interesting has happened lately for me to talk about, instead I flip through my clusters of note cards. Instead, I can scroll through different content categories in Roam or in Notion. And I pick out several notes that seem to fit together, and I basically use that to make an interesting outline. After that, I spend another 5-ish minutes picking the notes that will make up the episode. So I whittle it down from the initial 10 to 15 note cards that I might pick out. If we're just talking about a 5 to 7 minute episode, then I probably only need 5 to 7 note cards. So then I will narrow those down. And then the other thing that I'll do, and this just helps me stay organized, is I create an outline note with just another note card. This is often something that I'll just throw away. I'm actually looking at one right now for the outline for this episode. Since I have this stack of note cards, I can go from having no idea what I want to talk about to having a very real and fully fleshed out concept for an episode in just 15 to 20 minutes. You still have to do the work, but now all I have to do is record, edit, and publish the episode. And this entire process usually takes me less than an hour and requires little to no in-the-moment creative thinking. I've mentioned this a few other times in the note-taking episodes, but I really like the metaphor of the Lego blocks. If you think of each note as a Lego, then you can now find new ways to assemble them into the new thing that you need. And even better, each note can be endlessly duplicated and added to new projects. One of my favorite scenes in The Lego Movie is where Emmet the Special finally sees the opportunity in each block that allows him to build the machine that defeats Lord Business. Now, that's not something you can see in a podcast. I'm not going to attempt to recreate it or describe it, but the point is, is that as you take notes, you can stay mindful of the endless possibilities that just one idea can have. Think of yourself as a master builder of projects, able to take your power-up skills, note-taking here, goal-setting there, and assemble something great. If ever this feels like it's just too small, remember the tiny habit and first track mindsets that we've talked about in earlier episodes of Daily Dot and Connect the Dots. All you have to do is go find that first spark of the idea, expand on that idea, take the ideas of others that resonate with you and summarize them into something that is quality and unique and contextual for the type of work that you do and for the kind of interest that you have. Thanks so much for listening to this 5-part series on how to start a proper note-taking practice. I hope it sparked some interest for you in how you can use these really special, really unique pieces of content to create building blocks like Lego blocks that you can reassemble, reuse, and repurpose at any time, you never have to start from scratch again with your ideas because you can start to assemble a project based on work that you've already, already done. I've always loved this. Like I said in the first episode, this has been a game changer for me over the past couple of years, and I was really excited to share this series with you. If you want to listen to a couple other episodes about note-taking, make sure you listen back to the January 12th episode. There was also one that I recorded back in 2020 that is all about the quick note process. It will sound a little repetitive to some of these ideas, but it's a longer episode. So if you want to listen to a single episode all the way straight through, that one will give you the best, like, normal podcast experience of a 30-ish minute episode without having to go one by one by one like this 5-day short series has been. Thanks for listening to The Daily Dot. I really appreciate it. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram. You can find me @MattRagland. I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. So thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.