Origins of smart notes & difference from "regular notes" [QUICK Notes Series #1]

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.

Greetings, everyone. This week in The Daily Dot, I'm going to be taking you through an entire week of content on smart note-taking. So far, the past three weeks, as we start the new year, the most popular episode.

The most downloaded episode has been the one I did on SmartNotes back on January 12th. So you can check that out in... the show notes if you want to listen to it, but I'm going to be going deeper every day this week, Monday through Friday, and then wrapping up on Saturday with different details and deep dives into the

Smart Notes, Zettelkasten, what I like to call Quick Notes methodology. I'll keep reiterating this because it's so true, but Smart Notes, Quick Notes, the Zettelkasten method over the past two years has been one of... the game changers for me. Proper note taking removes the top of my creativity that I find myself too often stuck in. Notes end up becoming the building blocks of my future creative projects.

all i have to do is add the context in for the specific type of work or project that i'm doing right now in fact this episode that I'm recording for you right now and every episode that I will do this week and most episodes of the Daily Dot and the Connect the Dots podcast, follow this method. Because what I do is I start to make an outline.

of ideas that I want to cover in the show, then I go through my notes and I start to pull out relevant notes and concepts from the smart notes that I've created. and they feed into the outline that I've created, and then I add additional context based on this new quote-unquote new idea that I've come up with. that is really just a reassembled collection of ideas and concepts that I've had in the past with some new context and relevance sprinkled in.

So what are smart notes? What is this Zettelkasten method that you've heard me and maybe some others talk about? Well, the book How to Take Smart Notes, which was one of my 22 books for 2022, and I also referenced in that January 12th episode. was written by Zonka Ahrens, who's a professor and researcher, and he was very much inspired by Nicholas Luhmann, who was also a professor, a researcher, a writer.

Many other things. True polymath. He wrote more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. What I love about his breadth and depth of writing was how he said that he didn't do anything that he felt was hard because he had already done a lot of the work.

his friction for creating something that to him was drastically lower than anyone else that he was working with or around because like i said at the beginning of this he just started to assemble the notes that he had and he already had a good chunk of the work done. Now it was, yes, creating new concepts, but they were concepts that arose from ideas that he had already developed and had written out in the past.

Again, we're going to go really deep into all of this over the next several days. But the thing that I want you to take away from this that has really helped solidify the concept in my mind is when you take smart notes.

they act almost like Lego blocks for your future work. So you do have to put in the time to develop those ideas, but when you do, they literally become... building block concepts that you can use over and over again, just reassembled and reworked into the goal or project that you have to complete or achieve in the present moment.

One of the things that Lumen and Ahrens both reiterate over and over again is that these smart notes are best in the context to other notes ideas. They are these self-sustaining micro pieces of content that can exist on their own. A misconception about notes that I had growing up and going literally all the way through school is that the type of notes that I used to jot down while reading a book or listening to a lecture or if I was in class...

These ended up being what Luhmann and Ahrens call fleeting notes, and they rarely have depth or context. They're written in the moment, but most of the time we don't put the additional effort into drawing contextual comparisons to other ideas that we've had or to expanding or summarizing.

the notes that we have to create this building block piece of content that is a really big concept that i'm going to spend an entire episode on so if it doesn't connect right now don't don't worry about it just look for look for that in a couple of days I want to be clear that it is still good to capture these faster fleeting notes. The key is making and taking the time to review them so you know which of these fast notes, while they're still fresh in your mind,

are worth expanding on if they're your ideas or summarizing if they're someone else's ideas, okay? And again, this can sound like a lot, but it will... change how you work. It will change how you assemble ideas. It's not just for creative people. it is not just for people who are writing but you know most of us whether we want to think through it or not we're doing a lot of writing and a lot of speaking often every day one or the other or both

And so when you have these contextual pieces of information, this type of note taking changes how you interact with that information. You think differently when you realize that each part will become a part of your next or future. project, goal, masterpiece, whatever it is. And I have certainly found this, that even though it makes my reading a little slower, it makes me more engaged, I get more out of the content.

So when I'm going through a book or piece of content or whatever it is that I really want to learn from, this type of note taking helps me take it a little slower, but then I get more out of it.

so that i can develop these ideas add my own context and build on them for future projects and goals that's going to do it for this episode of the daily dot the first in a series on note-taking make sure you check back in tomorrow we're going to be talking about how to take your first notes how to think through capture strategies a couple of tools that you could use and then we'll keep learning about how to expand your ideas on and on and on this whole week thanks for listening to the daily

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.