Never Start From Zero: How to Use Smart Notes

Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast where I share one small lesson with you each day to help you be happier, more productive, and focused in the work that you do. In today's lesson, I want to share with you the idea of SMART note-taking. There's a lot of different directions we could go in this, and I'll probably end up doing an entire series about it. But the beginning of this smart note-taking idea actually began many decades ago with the academic researcher and professor Niklas Luhmann, who coined the idea of the Zettelkasten. This is truly the beginning of the Second Brain movement, and Zonke Ahrens took that idea and translated it into more modern context with his book, How to Take Smart Notes. One of my 22 books for 2022. You can go back and listen to that episode. I linked to it in the show notes. And as I already mentioned, it is the genesis of the second brain movement that has been continued by Tiago Forte. But the big picture principle that I want you to take away from this lesson and the power of smart notes, of this like second brain, is the ability to build a library of ideas and information that essentially act as Lego blocks for new ideas and projects and goals that you have happen in the future. What a library of Smart Notes of a second brain of a Zettelkasten will do is essentially mean that you never have to start from scratch with a new project again. Because if you have access to these and you have a way to sort through them and organize them, It means that anytime I want to record a new podcast, it means that instead of trying to think of something off the top of my head or draw from a recent experience, both of which can still work, but can feel a little overwhelming, or you get stuck thinking like, well, what if I don't have any good ideas right now, or nothing interesting is happening in my life, and so I'm not going to record anything. But now I have hundreds of these notes available to me, and when I want to record a new podcast episode and maybe I don't have a good top-of-mind idea. Maybe nothing has inspired me lately. Instead, I get to sort through these notes and pick out 3, 4, 5 that really resonate with me, and I can reorganize them and basically use them as an outline for a new podcast episode. This makes it as easy as it could possibly be to create a new episode every day, because basically I'm just finding a few notes that I like, reorganizing them into an outline, and then boom, give it some connective tissue and I have a new podcast episode. Remember, this is just a 30,000-foot view at the note-taking process. I'll probably going to be diving into it in more detail because I mean, it's, this is basically the basis of Tiago Forte's entire Building a Second Brain course. Is that you are curating and building this library of notes that function as your second brain so that you no longer have to try and grab something from the top of your mental stack. Instead, you can use the breadth of the knowledge that you've accumulated over the years. Now, I know if you're listening to this, if you're like most people, you're thinking, well, what does it mean to take a SMART note? How do I organize them? How do I actually use them when the time has come? What if I'm not doing creative projects? I'm just working a normal job. I can answer all of those things for you. It would be a much longer episode. And you can even go back to episode 11 of the Connect the Dots podcast, How Notetaking Improves Creativity, to listen to a little bit more about how I've been thinking about this. But I really am standing on the shoulders of giants when I talk about notetaking. Again, people like Nicholas Luhmann, like Zonka Ahrens, like Tiago Forte. Nat Eliason has been very impactful about notetaking for me as well. So in encourage you to check out that episode. Let me know on Twitter or Instagram if you found this episode and the other note-taking one interesting, because I can dive into it. I could do a whole, like, series over a week on note-taking because I've just found it so fascinating, and it really has been a game changer for me the last couple of years as I accumulate and curate basically my own ideas over time so that I never have to think of something from scratch again. I can take content, ideas, notes, information that I've already created in the past and create something brand new out of the tools, out of the materials. Okay. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Daily Dot, and I'll look forward to talking to you again tomorrow. Thanks so much. Bye.