My Note-Taking Process from Capture to Communication [QUICK Notes Series #6]

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 give you a really tactical timeline for the life cycle of a note. So as we've referenced before, think about those early episodes in the series that it really does start with a spark, a spark of an idea that you might have, a realization, a recent experience, something really fast that you capture and jot down. Can also be things like book highlights. Maybe you're watching a YouTube video or listening to a podcast, but you have something that you want to capture. And you can do that in an app. You can do that on paper, whatever it is. Now, the next stage of this is to review your recent Sparks and Fast Captures and decide which of these are interesting enough, which still resonate with you enough that you want to expand on them from a Fast Captured note to a permanent durable, remember what I call quick note, Q-U-I-C-K. Listen back to the other episodes for that description, but it just stands for quality, unique, individual, contextual, and knowledgeable. That it is becoming that building block, that Lego block of future content. It's a standalone piece. Now, this doesn't mean that I'm going to use this quick note right away. What I do at this point is I'm clustering it or putting it in a category of other similar notes. Maybe it is about. Creativity, maybe it's about habits, maybe it's about work, maybe it's about personal development, maybe it's about literally note-taking. I have lots of notes on note-taking because it's been such an important piece of my work for the last 18 months. If you're using actual physical note cards for this, now obviously you can't have the same note in multiple categories or clusters of notes, and so that can be an analog drawback, but either with synced blocks or with block references in Notion or Roam respectively, you can endlessly reference and duplicate the same piece of content in multiple categories of interest or in multiple projects that you use them for in the future. Let's take a minute to recap. The note starts with the spark of an idea, with a highlight in a book, with something that resonates with you that you hear someone else say. That's the fast capture. You get that down and you capture it. Number 2, you review your recent captures and either expand on your ideas or summarize them. Follow that quick note framework: quality, unique, individual, contextual, and knowledgeable. Next, add that finished building block of a note, that quick note, to a cluster or category so that it stays in context with the other notes related to it. This is what I personally am talking about when I reference my note stack or stacks. Now what I can do is when it is time to start a new project, or for me, develop a new piece of content, I'm not starting from scratch. I'm never starting from zero. I can look through my category clusters. For the Connect the Dots podcast, I'm often looking through creativity, work, habits, note-taking, these categories, these clusters. And I'm assembling them as an outline with working usable content that already exists. Those are in the note cards. The next thing that I'll do, and I mentioned this in the outline at the beginning of the episode, but I will occasionally create one or two additional notes at this point, because as I'm looking at the outline in these 5, 6, 7 notes that I want to use, for the podcast episode, I will realize like, oh, there's something else. There's another idea that I need to use here. And I will right then and there create a new note card that serves as the connective tissue for one idea to the next. And from that point, I have already started to assemble the building blocks of the project, of the content, of the work output that I need to publish, that I need to share, that I need to send to colleagues, coworkers, workers, collaborators. Another point that I want to emphasize that I want to make really clear for you is quick notes are these ready-to-use building blocks with only minimal or contextual edits needed. That's what I'm talking about when I mean that I'm adding in a couple of new notes to add as the connective tissue. It also means that if there is a new name or word or change in punctuation or structure, that you have to make with the note when it becomes a part of a new individual project, that's totally fine. But there's such a shift that you make when you don't feel like you're starting from relative scratch and instead you're just making tiny tweaks to optimize. You're becoming more of an optimizer than a start-from-scratcher. So that's the entire life cycle of a note. It starts with that fast capture. I review the recent captures to expand or summarize, and then adding those quick notes to a cluster or category so they stay in context with other notes that they are a part of so that when I go to start a new project about a podcast, a YouTube video, maybe it's a course lesson that I'm putting together, or maybe it is something like a standard operating procedure that I'm putting together for a new collaborator or assistant that's going to help me with my work. I'm taking these notes that I've already created and I'm assembling them like Lego blocks, like a Lego master builder, as an outline with the content that I already have in these notes. I'm adding connective tissue as needed. I may create additional notes that help me say more of what I want to say, optimize the content that I have, and make it more specific to the goal that I have or to the person that I am sharing it with. But after that, my work is done. I've optimized, edited with only a minimal amount of in-the-moment creativity. I'm effectively dispersing my creativity across many small moments throughout the day, week, month, and year that allows me to pull from those creative moments at any time to assemble a collection contextual notes that help me create great creative work. Even if you don't think of yourself as a quote unquote creative person, you're able to reassemble, reuse, and repurpose work that you've done in the past to use as building blocks of current and future projects, goals, and deliverables. 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.