Developing Ideas Sparks into QUICK Notes [QUICK Notes Series #3]

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.

In this third episode of the note-taking series, I want to share with you the process for taking that first fast capture of a note or an idea and how you can expand on it. to become a more permanent, durable note that becomes the building block of future projects and content. If you need to listen back to the first two episodes in this series, just make sure you check them out in your podcast player of choice.

In the first episode, we talked about what smart or quick notes are, the Zettelkasten method, Nicholas Luhmann, Zonka Ahrens, and how they are different than the way most of us took notes when we were growing up. In the second episode, I described my quick notes framework. how these kind of notes help you in your work and creativity, and a couple of strategies for capturing your first set of notes.

I want to start with just a quick reminder that there is a difference between the first fast capture of an idea and what becomes a permanent, durable, quick note. These types of notes, the latter, the developed ones, are elaborate enough and contextual enough and quality enough to become a standalone piece of a project.

In fact, several of the segments that I've recorded for you over this series, I've literally just read off a note card because they have been written in such a way that with the exception of maybe one or two words, I can just read verbatim what is on the card because it has already been developed into a standalone building block. Remember that Lego metaphor we talked about in the first episode of this series? I can just piece it back together.

with other notes, and all of a sudden, I have a podcast episode. There are two ways that you can take that first fast capture of an idea and develop it into something that is more useful and contextual going forward. The first one is expanding on your own personal ideas and thoughts.

So obviously, as you're working, as you're creating, as you're doing things, you're going to have your own flashes of inspiration or even just hunches, as Stephen Johnson calls them. I want you to get in the habit of capturing those. in any way that you find easiest and in the lowest friction. And then what you're going to do next is expand on that idea.

Often we don't have time to do this in the moment. If you do, then I highly encourage it. But just think about how you can expand your initial brainstorm, maybe connected ideas.

different sparks of inspiration or hunches about ideas that you have. The more you can expand on that idea, the better. And I want you to keep this in mind. We want to focus on keeping each idea individualized to a note card maybe to a bullet point or paragraph because the more you start expanding ideas in a single note the harder it is to connect them together in the future this is another reason that I do really like

using actual analog note cards, index cards, for your first set of notes because there is a natural constraint there. that helps you not go too far off or stray too far from the original idea because you have to keep it on the note card. I also want to encourage you and remind you that One of the most challenging parts of this note expansion, of this idea expansion from a quick capture into something that is more like a building block, is to say it your way.

This should be more than rewriting a quote or copying verbatim some passage from a book that you read. I will make a slight caveat here to say that this is an okay place to start if it helps you with your note-taking habit. but eventually you do want to add your thoughts and opinions as that second level of this expansion or summarization of the idea, leveling up to say it your way.

Now, if you need to make references and you need to say, like, this is the source material for this concept, then absolutely do that. You don't want to plagiarize. I want to make that really clear. But I also want you to think about, again, Going back to that quick note framework, how am I making this unique to my perspective and my ideas? And how am I individualizing it so that I can say it my way and add context to the other ideas that I'm developing?

What makes it special is that it does have to be your unique spin and perspective that you add to the content. Think about how you interpret it, because that will be key to developing it. Because if we're just talking about, I'm going to write down a highlight, I'm going to write down a quote, I'm going to write down something verbatim that resonated with me. Well, you can still do that to a point, but in order to use that for something in the future.

Obviously you're either going to have to reference it or you'll be plagiarizing. Now I'm not saying that if you put unique spin on it that it's completely your own but it does give you that little extra bit of like this is how I interpret something that was inspiring to me something that was thoughtful to me

And you can still reference it if you feel like it's still pertaining too much to the original source. But this is a really good way to think about how you can take your first notes. And then when you spend time to add your own unique perspective. to contextualize it with other ideas. Definitely write down your source if it's something that you are referencing from another creator, another author, another person, another concept, but then spend a little bit of time.

Think about what makes it unique to you. How do you interpret it and individualize it? So one way is we're talking about expanding your personal ideas, thoughts, and inspiration. The other one is to summarize.

the ideas and content of others. So this is often long form ideas that you may find in podcast episodes like this one, blog posts, books, anything like that. So these are all ways that you can take a long-form piece of content from someone else and continue to summarize it over and over again until you pull out these specific kernels of ideas and the different ones that resonate with you.

But instead of just grabbing like a highlight from an article that you've read or maybe a certain part of podcast that you've really liked. Then that's just doing what we talked about yesterday. You're just like grabbing the highlight without giving your own unique spin and inspiration to it. So what I want you to think about doing is summarizing and contextualizing.

the other ideas from people that you find inspiring and seeing how you can take something that was really big to start and summarize it down into key ideas and takeaways. that are relevant and resonate with you. I want you to focus as you are developing and expanding an idea that you had. Think about how you can make the writing really quality. Again, you make it a quality

piece of work so that it can automatically be a future building block of content, make it unique to you. How do you interpret the idea? How do you individualize it? How do you make it contextual with the other pieces? The last thing that I want to share with you, and this is really important because it will be difficult early on to get to a place where you're feeling good about your notes. At least it was for me and many others. And a lot of people quit.

in this phase i want to remind you that it's okay to start writing a note and then like halfway through or maybe even earlier you start to have an inkling that you're not really saying exactly what you wanted And this, again, this is okay because it's the tension of any creative work, realizing that what you wanted to do isn't quite what you're doing right now. And we're applying this to the humble note, but we talked about this with

the gap process that Ira Glass described. You can go back and listen to that episode of The Daily Dot as well. You have to be able to say and remind yourself. that as you are going through this note-taking process over and over again, you're going to get better at saying what you actually want to say.

Last thing on this episode, I have a few videos about the note-taking process as well, so I'll leave them in the show notes. They're worth watching even just to get a visual example of what you can be doing. I only use note cards in these videos. And part of the reason is because there's nothing to learn when it comes to writing down things on a note card. I don't want you to get stuck thinking about...

Well, I should be using like Roam or Notion or Obsidian or Apple Notes or Bear or Super Notes. There are so many notes, literally so many notes, so many apps, I mean, that you could be checking out. What I want to encourage you to do is get in this note-taking habit.

I do recommend using something that is individualized like an index card or a note card. If you use something like your bullet journal or even a field notes notebook for your permanent like quick smart notes, the challenge you'll find is it becomes really difficult. to then contextualize those notes and kind of remix them into new ideas or pieces of content because they are literally bound by the journal or by the notebook itself.

The reason that I like having a couple hundred note cards of ideas is because I can literally pick out the eight to ten index cards that make the most sense for this piece of content that I'm creating or this. new process that i'm putting together and i can stack those together to create the outline of the thing that i want to do i wouldn't be able to do that if i had one note on

page 48 and then another note that was related, but I couldn't really get to it, that's on page 84. You see the conundrum there. And so I do recommend using note cards for your initial note-taking experiment. 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 at Matt Ragland.

I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. So thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.