the goal of taking notes is to never look at them again i've taken a lot of notes in my life just basically everywhere from journals to literally sticking notes onto my wall and even putting stuff inside of a filing cabinet and files and folders because i just don't know where else to put them on top of all of this there's even the note-taking systems should force you to think and actually use that thing inside your head that you know we can use to think find a lot of systems like journals sticking notes on the wall and obsidian vaults actually completely missed this point and that's when i stumbled upon the xenocastin a system that actually forces you to use your brain and think about the things that you are writing down my internet friend scott shepard has actually coined the term antinet to define what this system actually is the ante at the start of antinode is actually an acronym the a stands for analog the n stands for numeric alpha the t stands for tree and the i stands for index so let's go and set one up here's what you'll need 10 index cards and a box to put your cards in if you don't have a box you can make one [Music] [Music] and if you don't have index cards that's fine too i have some notes in my anti-net that are literally just written on the back of a business management test uh results and i just cut them out afterwards and filed them in because i was born in class and wanted to write stuff but obviously you can take a bit more time than whatever this is to cut yours out to the right size i use 3x5 cards but a lot of people use 4x6 cards i don't have any of them but the size of the card doesn't actually matter that much what actually matters is that you have a pen and you have cards and you're ready to write stuff so let's kick this off we're going to start with five cards the way that i've structured my anti-knight is based on the academic disciplines so this is what we're going to do these five cards are going to be your top level branches first card in the top right corner right 1000 then in the center write arts and humanities great you have your first top level branch we're going to repeat this process with the top five layers which is social sciences natural sciences formal sciences and applied arts and sciences now we have our first five cards arts and humanities social sciences natural sciences formal sciences and applied arts and sciences sciences and this is how we want to organize them from biggest number to smallest number which is one thousand the main thing to note is that cards in the settle casting have two parts of the card there is the card address and the body of text the card address allows us to locate the cards when we want to reference them reference them on another card or reference what they say so the address is basically coordinates inside of the box to let us know where we can find this idea or card the second part of the settle casting is called the index the index uses lined cards so that we can separate things easier if you don't have lined cards then grab a ruler grab a normal white card and make some lines on the index cards we want to start by writing each letter of the alphabet in the top left corner of each card so for the first card we write a and then one right next to it then b one [Music] c one d one and so on eventually you want to have all the cards in the alphabet all the way up from a all the way to set what these cards do is that they allow you to write down where these cards are located so let's start with number 1000 is arts and humanities we're going to want to grab our a card from our index and write down a new point so we can locate arts and humanity easier now whenever i want to find arts and humanities i can go through my index find a and then find the bullet point that has arts and humanities and it tells me exactly which address i need to go navigate to to find arts and humanities which is one thousand let's go through all of these and do the same [Music] now we're back at a applied art applied arts and sciences but that's all right because we have an a card we'll just write it down right under and we're good to go let's quickly place these inside of our new box what we'll do is that will put the index cards sorted alphabetically at the front of this box [Music] now we're going to need some kind of separator if you don't have a separator with you just grab an index card flip it vertically put it in between and you're good now you can take your main cards which have the different categories written on them and file them right behind it welcome to the start of your anti-knife this is where it all begins obviously the main point of the anti-knit is to actually be able to put cards inside of it and build on knowledge so how do we do that let's say you just recently found out about a planet called kepler-452b it's basically earth 2.0 and you want to write a card about it so grab a new card grab whatever you learned about kepler-452b [Music] now that i've finished writing the card i need to figure out where i want to file this i'm going to link a link i'm going to link a wikipedia article in the description of this video that's an outline of literally all the academic sources so you can easily search through it and figure out where or not easily but you can search through it and figure out where you want to file these cards i've already decided that i want to file it under space sciences and space exploration so i'm going to make two more cards one is space sciences which i'm going to file under natural sciences which according to our index let's go find natural sciences natural sciences is at 3 000. so in this example we don't actually need to use the index because we have so little cards but we can find [Music] natural sciences if i didn't mess up the order here we can find natural sciences and we can file space sciences right behind it so to do that we want to do three one zero zero as it expands or is another topic related to natural sciences and then inside of space sciences i want to make a new card on space exploration which i am again going to file this one behind space sciences so i'm going to write 3 1 5 zero and now the last step is to file this card under space exploration to do that i'm going to write three one five zero slash one this puts it right behind space exploration which is behind space sciences which is behind natural assignments now that i've created these cards i'm going to want to add them to my index so we're going to start with space sciences which is under s and i can write down space [Music] and i also want to write space exploration now something that i like doing when i have two index entries that have the same word in it here we can see space appears twice what i'm going to do is i'm going to cross both both of these out i'm going to grab a new index card and right at the top space [Music] and then in parentheses s inside of space i'm going to write sciences and exploration now if i ever have a new index entry that is related to space or starts with space instead of running it down here and immediately crossing it out and adding it i'm just going to add it here right away the last step here is to quickly connect up both of these and i'm going to write space and then add arrows pointing to space to indicate that they were moved now in the index i put space behind the main note now let's file everything back now this is an issue in the beginning where when you write down notes they can't support their they can't immediately support their own weight because you don't have or they don't have they might fall over because you might not have enough notes in the box yet this is something that gets corrected over time once you add more and more notes to the box because your box fills up and your notes just don't have room to fall over one more thing that happens at the beginning is that you're going to be writing a lot of index entries as you write new cards this can be known as index fatigue and make sure not to get too bored with your index that you you stop using the system at the start you can obviously it's going you're going to write a lot of index entries because you're adding a lot of new topics to your antenna whereas now whenever i write something i usually already have a note related to it that i can go and search and then place this the new note right behind it but how do i do that if there's already a note behind it let's say you have more thoughts on kepler-452b but 315-1 is kepler-452b then 315-2 is actually the overview effect now one of the main things that you want to keep in mind while building up your anti-net is to try and put cards that have similar ideas close to each other so ideally we would want to put this at 315-2 [Music] but we already have a card there so we can't do that now because this is actually expanding on kepler-452b what we can do instead is we can just add three one five slash one slash one and then we file it behind here because it's building further on the base of this card now let's say you find about you find out about another cool planet like kepler-452b that could support human life now again it's more related to kepler-452b so we want it to be close to kepler-452b but we already have this other card expanding on 452b this card is not expanding on the idea of kepler-452b it's simply another planet similar to it so we still want to place it in a similar region or nearby but we don't want to have the overview effect in between the two because the easy part would be to put it here but then we have this random card that doesn't exactly follow what these three other cards are talking about so instead the anti-net allows you to put letters inside the address so we're going to do is write three one five zero slash one a because it is a variation of this card let's say that this is another cool planet that humans could live on just like kepler-452b it's a variation of kepler-452b this card is an expansion of kepler-452b so we branch it from kepler now we can put all of this back and put it back behind space exploration which is behind space sciences and then we can file it back into [Music] our box all right so quick overview so far we have the index we have the main anti-net these are called index cards these are called main cards [Music] now there's one more part to the anti-net that i haven't told you about when reading with the anti-knit you read with something called bib notes bibliography notes when you pick up a new book that you want to read at the front you write the name of the book atomic habits then you write the name of the author after writing the name of the author you write down public publication information some people write down everything from this i just write down the year that it was published in just so it gives me a better idea of the context of the world when this was written and then we flip the card vertically as you read through the book whenever you find come across an idea that sparks peaks your interest like the valley of disappointment then you make a quick bullet point where you write the page number which in this case is 22 and then a quick note on the the value of the valley of disappointment as you read through the book you start to make more and more of these notes on the bibliography card once you're done reading you can go through your same bibliography card and find the things that you found interesting and then decide whether you want to actually write them down as a main note here's my bibliography card from atomic habits that is filed in my actual system i didn't write main notes for every single one of these there are only a few of these that i actually decided to go and take the time to write a main note and file it inside of my anti-net one of the things that a lot of beginners struggle with including me and this is still something that i struggle with is being selective about about what you actually write down and then even more selective about what you turn from having written down two main notes inside of your system now there's one last step in your bibliography note once you've gone through the entire book and written everything down you make a quick address for the bibliography note as well but you store it in a different box or just in a different section for your anti-net [Music] so for this one for bibliography notes you start with the author last name clear in this case and then something that indicates the book that you just read so for this i'm going to write atomic and then you sort it alphabetically inside of your bibliography section i won't walk you through how to create a bibliography section because very very simple you just make dividers with the uh with all the letters in the alphabet and then you sort you sort your big bibliography notes by author last name so james clear would go inside of c and james clear now whenever you want to reference something from that bib note you can write in the bottom left corner your references so for this one there's b dot clear slash habit and then the page number 22 and this is on the valley of disappointment now just like the valley of disappointment when using the antinet you don't actually gain immediate value it is just like the valley of the valley of disappointment you don't start gaining value linearly over time as you start to use it it's a more slow process at the beginning but then value skyrockets as you use it more and more a good benchmark to see once you've reached a point where you're going to start to gain increasing amounts of value from your anti-net is once you actually start to forget about the curves that you put in it and then you start getting surprises as you're searching through it okay so one last step here i want to quickly search through my anti-net and find a card on stupidity that i know i've written so first let's go to s this is the second card in s i know there's self-esteem and stupidity so i now know where stupidity is but as i was looking for it i randomly bumped into self-esteem and that reminds me of a few cards that i have on self-esteem so this just looking for stupidity makes me think about self-esteem so let's go find stupidity 163 3a [Music] a [Music] and here it is what is stupidity now while i was looking for that what actually happened is that as i'm flipping through all these cards i start to get reminded of a bunch of different things that i've written about that are slightly related to stupidity because remember cards that are similar in concept or idea are actually stored in similar locations well i hope this helped you set up an anti-network and if you have any questions leave them in the comments i'm going to link another youtuber in the description who actually inspired me to start this and has a bunch of videos on his channel like a hell of a lot of videos on his channel just walking you through a more complex and more developed system than the one that i have because he's been building an anti-net for much longer than i have so his is more developed it's older he gains more value from it and he's writing a full book on the anti-net his name is scott shepard so i'll link him in the description and you can check them out if you have any more questions [Music] hope you enjoyed i'll see you soon