How Note-Taking Improves Creativity & Capture Strategies [QUICK Notes Series #2]

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. I want to start this lesson first by saying sorry for the late publish time. I had a lot of things come this morning, but I should have been prepared. This is why you create a content backlog so that when things happen at the beginning of your day and you're not able to record, you still have something to go out. I also want to add some context for a reference that I made yesterday to something I call quick notes. Now, quick notes is my acronym for what a good useful building block of a note is. So let me share that acronym with you real quick, because it will give you some context for when I reference it throughout this series. Q stands for quality, as in it is quality writing, thought out. It's something that you put some time into. U stands for unique, as in the unique, as in the note has a unique perspective to your ideas and research. The I is for individual, meaning that each note, especially in the context of note cards, is that you keep one individual idea per card. You want to keep it simple, and then you stack ideas with cards, not inside the cards itself. Basically, one individual idea per note card. C does actually stand for context. Like I talked about yesterday, Luhmann and Ahrens both say that the power of a note and its usefulness is only in the context that you can understand how it connects to other cards. Now, this can be challenging, but we'll talk more about that as the week goes on. K stands for KB, as in knowledge base. And what this means is as you continue to create these quick notes, you are able to build up a personal knowledge base of ideas, building blocks of, building blocks of content that you can repurpose, reassemble, and reuse for any project or goal that you have in the future. So now that you know a little bit more about what SMART notes mean and how I think about them as quick notes, Q-U-I-C-K, and just to be clear, that does not mean that the notes that you make are fast, even though I did talk about fast notes yesterday. And that's something that we'll talk about today as well. I want to remind you that these types of notes that are smart, durable, Q-U-I-C-K, quick, are incredibly helpful building blocks for any type of work that you want to create. And this can feel a little counterintuitive because it does take time to create these, and it does take extra brain power. You have to spend the time to expand on a highlight, a note that you've taken in the past. And it's easy to think about, well, I have work to do right now, so I can't spend time working on these notes. But what I want to encourage you on is as you continue to do this, as you're writing down notes, ideas, and information, it's giving you a way to record them without having to rely on your top-of-brain memory or your first brain to have access to them in the future. Having to rely on that top-of-mind memory and highlights is only part of what you're capable of. This note-taking system, this personal knowledge base, is what you're able to build over time. And much of this good stuff that you will create in the future is a level deeper and can be— what these notes allow you to do is help you archive it almost like in your second brain, whether that is through through analog note cards or a tool like Notion or Roam or Obsidian or SuperNotes. There's a lot of different options out there. We'll talk about the pros and cons of each in a later episode. If you need to go back and listen to yesterday's opening episode or the episode on January 12th, never start from scratch. But what we're talking about at this point and what you should understand is where SmartNotes, where the Zettelkasten method started, how it's helpful now. How it can help you never start from scratch with new content or new ideas or new projects, new proposals, whatever it may be, because you've developed this series of notes and building blocks of ideas that you can reassemble and repurpose and reuse for anything going forward. This is worth repeating because it is so powerful that even though you might think that it's a little counterintuitive to expand on your ideas in the moment, It helps you reduce the friction of starting something new or even building on something existing in the future. The second part of this episode is talking about how to think about taking your first set of notes and what we grew up doing, at least what I grew up doing when I thought of notes. I mentioned this yesterday, but it's just jotting down whatever came to mind, underlining parts of books, highlights. Doing things like that. If I was in a class and the professor said something, just writing that down, maybe making an additional like scribble note about it, but it wasn't very well thought out over time. And I don't know if you're like me, but especially if they're just like written notes and I look at them and I think, what was I even thinking about in that moment? And so one of the things that is important to distinguish between is how you think about the difference between a highlight and a quote. That you just copy and maybe a durable, permanent quick note that can become an independent block of creative work. And so if I'm listening to something or I'm hearing something, what I'm trying to do is just capture that first, like, fast or fleeting note, as Ahrens calls it, those little scribbles and like jotting down ideas, that quick capture. That is the fast or fleeting note. The last thing that I want to share is just a couple of quick capture strategies. There are two ways that I do this. The first one is that I do often have either my bullet journal or a small field notes pocket notebook that I keep around me to write down any ideas or thoughts that I have. The other thing that obviously I will use because I pretty much always have it with me is my iPhone. The app that I like to use for note-taking is called the Bear Notes app. That's like bear, like the animal, B-E-A-R, not like B-A-R-E, that's a completely completely different type of note app that I would not recommend. Just kidding. It doesn't exist. Or maybe it does. I haven't looked into it. I promise. But with BearNotes, it's just a really simple, clean app and it works well between my iPhone and my computer. So what I have in BearNotes is just a page called SparkNotes. And then what I'll do is I go back through that page, that list of recent fast notes that I've taken down. And see, is there anything that needs to be expanded on here? Is there anything that I want to develop into a permanent, durable quick note with more context? So I'm building on my knowledge base. It's important to realize that not every, like, fast capture of a note or an idea that you make then becomes the building block of an idea. So don't feel like every single thing you write down is eventually going to be developed into a note that you're going to use in the future for other content. Just get in the habit of capturing your ideas, and then you'll be able to go back through them and decide which are the ones worth developing and which ones can you just kind of let lie to see if they spark something else in the future. Okay, that's going to do it for the second episode in our note-taking series. Listen back tomorrow. We're going to be talking more about how to expand your ideas and summarize others. Moving from this quick capture into the permanent, durable, quick note structure that it becomes the building block of your ideas. 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.