hey everyone today i'd like to walk you through my book on a page summary for how to take smart notes a book by zenka arens and if i've heard to summarize the book in a single sentence or quote i would use this quote from zunke that every intellectual endeavor starts with a note this plus the idea of having a simple repeatable atomic workflow or the two building blocks upon which the entire book is built there's an anecdote about richard feynman when a historian walks up to his desk and sees all the sheets of paper lying around on mr feynman des and makes a comment about these being a record of feynman's thinking and then mr feman corrects the historian and says that these are not a record of my thinking i think on paper and then the historian presses on and says that surely you're thinking in your head and these are only records of the thoughts in your head and that's when mr feinman says that no they aren't a record of my thinking process they are my thinking process i actually did the work on the paper for some reason for mr feman this was an extremely important point to make that he is thinking on paper and without paper he is not able to do his thinking neil levy makes a similar observation in his book that notes do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavor easier they make it possible you need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding and for me the takeaway from all of this is that writing is not a chore writing is part of the thinking process and you could even argue that writing is the thinking process itself so the book is about a system that was developed by a german sociologist nicholas luhmann who was quoted to say that i only do what's easy he had a system that made it easy for him to be very productive so let's see what that very productive means mr lumen was originally trained in law and he worked in the german administration and in the evenings he had a hobby to read about sociology and to make notes and as he was doing it he started to develop a system which he called a zettel costan and zettel means a slip of paper with notes and custom means a slip box a set of drawers with the cards inside he was discovered based on one of his articles and eventually he became the professor of sociology and over his lifetime he published close to 60 books and 600 articles many of them bringing completely new and fresh perspectives to his field and overall he created about 90 000 notes and of those about 1200 for index entries he had 600 manuscript outlines and he also had a separate box for his literature notes which he had about 15 000. if you think about it 90 000 seems a lot but just counting workdays so not counting weekends this is an average of six notes per day so the volume of knowledge that mr lumen accumulated is actually a very doable volume of work if you just take notes every day consistently so let's look at how these slips look like he had multiple types of slips and we are going to talk about it in quite some detail later on but just to give you an idea you can see two types here the one right here this is a permanent note and permanent notes contained a single idea they contained some references and he had a clever numbering system that we're going to talk later on so each note had an id and this one here is a literature note on the back side of this sheet you would see the bibliographical reference and on this side you can see the page number and you can see a couple of words jotting down what's important or what caught his attention on that page thinking about mr lumen's productivity you can think about this simple process that to write a good paper you just need to rewrite a good draft and to have a good draft you just need to turn a series of notes into continuous text and if you think about it a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip box thus all you really need to do is to have a pen in your hand when you read and to take notes before diving into the process i think the last bit i want to highlight is this idea that the notes are the shipping containers of ideas for you to understand how this relates to note taking let's just talk a bit about container shipping there were multiple attempts at introducing container shipping but there were many failed attempts and it only succeeded when there was an end-to-end standardization in the industry meaning standardization in the factories in trucking in the cranes and the harbor the ships and also the warehouses every step of the supply chain had to be adjusted to work with the standard shipping container once that happened it all became significantly more efficient and if you think about it this is a bit counterintuitive because if you are a ship owner the traditional way of putting goods on the ship made better use of space on the ship however if you think about the end-to-end value chain it is quite obvious that the shipping container has changed the world has changed the industry has really brought supply chain to a global level an important idea here is that less choice drives more focus and drives more productivity in terms of note taking this is using a single format one idea per note being selective brief and precise in your notes and following a simple and consistent workflow and in the end this level of standardization drives creativity because you don't need to use your mental energies to think about the process you can simply focus on the act of writing and connecting your ideas so let's dive a bit deeper into all of this before going into the process and walking you through the process and then walking you through some of the details of how this process works i wanted to give you a bit of a comparison at a glance to compare the status quo process with the settle casting process and explain you some of the differences and then we can dive into the process and the further details so the status quo and this is what you will find in many of the books about academic writing is about finding the topic then doing your research finding literature doing some reading and taking notes drawing conclusions outlining your text writing you might be lucky or not by hitting or missing your deadline and once you're ready you file everything away and you start the whole process with an empty sheet of paper all over again compared to this the settle casting approach goes in a bit of a different way so your main work is reading thinking and understanding and coming up with ideas that's what you do every day every time you have an idea you know that down and you know then your ideas your arguments your quotes with bibliographical references by this you create this web of notes that are important to you and when the time comes you look at these notes you assemble existing nodes into a sequence based on that you create your rough draft you create your final paper and you publish so instead of a top-down approach where you think about a topic you look for content and then you develop your paper you work bottom up you read you find interesting ideas and then sufficient number of ideas accumulate then you make it into a draft and the final paper and you publish it so why is the slipbox approach better than the status quo when you're thinking it doesn't feel productive you're staring out the window you're thinking thoughts and while that's a very important activity it doesn't feel productive and because you want to feel productive you will look for some instant gratification and maybe go and wash the dishes or do something else the benefit of the slip box approach is it gives you an atomic workflow that will help you feel productive in this thinking process because you will be taking individual notes you're going to be creating links comparing those notes with your existing notes it will have small atomic steps that will make you feel productive also compared to the status quo or traditional approach you have a goal and maybe that goal is daunting it it will dishearten you that you need to write 100 pages and you're not making progress it will feel awful that you're missing your goal in the settle casting you focus on the workflow and you refine your workflow and the workflow has very short cycle time so your feedback about moving forward is there and then if you trust the system that you do each of the workflow steps repeatedly it will build something in the end that is very valuable you build on this compounding value of ideas and that difference is a very important distinction between the status quo and the zettelkasten approach in the status quo taking notes is just one activity among the many in settle constant only the ideas that you've written down count it is the fundamental building block of the entire settle custom approach in the status quo approach you think about the topic top down and then you search for literature which you will find or not and the literature will support your thesis or not in the settle constant you will have already accumulated notes you look at those notes and based on the number of notes you have on certain topics topics will emerge and therefore it's a bottom up approach but also because these ideas emerge from the material you know that you already have notes on the subject so you're definitely not going to be starting with an empty sheet of paper while in the status quo approach the questions are brainstorm the approach is brainstormed and i'll talk a bit later about brainstorming being outdated in the settle custom categories emerge you read different things based on your interest you make connections and as you do this categories will emerge from your work in the status quo ideas are compartmentalized so if you want to research a subject you look for books in that subject you read those books and you're really not expanding the field because you only look for items within that category and you're creating a new article or a new book in that category there is no cross-disciplinary connections that you would be making in the central custom because of this emergent approach you have this very strong interlink between various different subjects in the status quo you're creating an r hive maybe if you write a lot then you create a large archive but it is not connected it is compartmentalized it's very hard to use in the zettol casting you create an externalized system to think in you create this scaffolding for your thinking process the benefit of the settle casting system as i already mentioned with the shipping container is that it's highly standardized it's repeatable it's simple in the status quo it's different approaches sources different formats you might be making underlines in the books and writing some notes on the side you might be creating paper notes and you have your notes and ideas all over the place in different formats the settle casting is process oriented and i mentioned it up here avid washing the dishes that if you focus on the workflow that is a much more motivating approach than if you have a goal-oriented approach and you set a challenging goal that you are not able to achieve or that takes extremely long time to achieve then your progress is going to be stalled eventually you will lose momentum so those are some of the reasons why overall the slip box approach is better it's a bottom-up approach it's a process-based approach and it focuses on writing each of your thoughts down so let's look at the process in a bit more detail so here i have this process flow of what you do in a settle casting system it all begins with when you have an idea make a note of it a fleeting note is something that you can write on a paper napkin even it is just a reminder of a thought zenke stresses that you should review your fleeting notes once a day while you're still remembering the context take your fleeting notes place them in an inbox once you process your fleeting note it goes into the vase pin so you're not using the fleeting notes later on what goes into the inbox will be filtered so you want to create permanent notes and bibliographical notes but you want to be very selective this is a very interesting takeaway for me from zinke's book he talks about the importance of forgetting in remembering there are many approaches about improving our memory but it turns out and you'll need to read the book to see all the examples that zenka brings in that there's research to prove that we have quite some serious infrastructure in our minds to inhibit remembering if you were to remember everything then you would have an extremely hard time to select what's important and indeed there are some people who have difficulty forgetting and that is a major disability so in terms of making a valuable system you don't want to capture hundreds of notes each day as i mentioned here with mr lumen his average was six notes per day so that is the the target that you want to be selective you only want to capture the important ideas and when you make a note you have two types of notes you have your literature notes they go into a reference system and we looked at this literature note right here so the literature note includes page numbers and notes of what you read an important point here is that you're not copy pasting text but you're rather paraphrasing with your own words and the other side of the literature note is the bibliographic reference and then the other type of notes are these slips the permanent notes or the zeptiles in here you create one idea per note you write in full sentences and you include precise references you write these in the context of your other notes and we'll talk about this in a bit more detail later on and the way you organize your permanent notes is if the permanent note is in response to a previous one so you're working on something and there was a question that came to mind and you found the answer to that question or you're working on something and you found a good example to demonstrate that concept and these are notes that would go directly behind the previous note if there is no note that is being referenced you just put the new note at the end of the notes you add links to other notes to your notes and you also create an index and your index should only have a couple of entry points into your note system and again we'll talk about this index a bit later so here you can see the different type of nodes so overall we have three type of cards we talked about the literature notes the index notes are special type of notes that give you entry point into a certain topic this is where you can start to navigate your settle casting and then you have the permanent notes that build on one another both of these are good explanations mr lumen had a clever numbering system of numbers and letters and that using these numbers and letters and commas he was able to create sequences of notes and he was also able to create branches of his thoughts so he had this trail of thought and then he could branch off into different directions and he could do that by doing this numbering system so in this case you can see that after 3d7 i have 3d 8 continuing on on this trail of thoughts and 3d 9 and 10 and here i have 7a and then 7a1234 going off in this direction if you're interested to understand this numbering system and to see how these nodes branched off in real life i recommend that you visit this site so this is the nicholas lumen archive and here you find all of his zettel's scanned in if you turn on google translate it will automatically translate the german site to your own language and there you can navigate lumens numbering system and you can see how these branching off works the bottom line is you create these hierarchies of nodes and here's a point i want to highlight which was something that wasn't trivial to me and i actually didn't learn this from the book i'm sure this is also mentioned in the book but i was listening to an interview with zenke where he highlighted this in response to a question that the big difference between a personal wikipedia and the zettel costing system is that the zettel custom system has a hierarchical node structure meaning it is not just that you link items to one another and and there's this web of thoughts that is true so you have cross-references between notes but you distinguish between two types of references you have the hierarchical reference which takes you from one idea to the next to the next going deeper in that idea and then you have your cross-references which interlink related ideas with one another and this also helps you so this was a question in my mind okay i accumulate notes but what does it mean that topics emerge and that i can identify that the topic has emerged so in this case you can actually visually identify looking at the length of the note sequence you know the number of thoughts you have in that area and these clusters emerge by the way that was a good feature of mr lumen's numbering system because just simply looking at the structure of the number you knew how deep and where you are in the tree and that already gave you a good understanding if this topic had many notes or only a few notes to it in terms of the type of permanent nodes there were a couple of special type of permanent notes that mr lumen used so he had overview notes i colored these the location of them in the sequence is just for a demonstration purpose completely arbitrary but the point is that the overview notes cover a topic so then you have sufficient number of notes on a topic you might want to create an overview note that lists a set of entry points there you have couple of words and then a link to a note and this is like a table of contents or a map of contents for that topic he also had summary notes which are similar to overview notes but a they are less important and they cover a cluster of notes in a similar manner you get a an overview of what's in that cluster of notes so overall just to recap where we are so you took your fleeting node you went through this filtering process you created a node for an important idea and then you filed it in your permanent notes in the note hierarchy as well as if required you created a literature note for it so you can have that reference but you kept that reference separately and with that you have these topics emerging this is where it becomes interesting when it comes time to write something to publish about something the old approach is called brainstorming which is surprisingly often used and recommended still today you use your memory to come up with some ideas to write about or topics to write about instead of this the emergent approach is much superior and i talked about this already earlier that in this case you look for topics where you have notes accumulated the issue with the top-down approach is you decide on the research topic you start to do your research and you might find yourself in a conflict of interest situation where your research is proving to disprove the point that you're writing about but you're under pressure to finish your work so in the end you're writing about something that is no longer relevant to you and you get into this negative spiral of writing stuff that really doesn't interest you that much here the idea is no one ever starts from scratch so when you start to write something you don't start with a blank sheet of paper you select the set of notes you want to write about and you organize these into a sequence of notes because the issue with the notes in your settle casting is there might be circularly referencing each other they are branching off it's not a linear story when you write a book it has to be linear in the end so that's the first stats that you selected your notes you put them in a sequence and once you have that sequence then you can write your rough draft proofread your manuscript and you can publish as you are doing this you will also create some project notes in a way there are three types of notes and maybe let me just mention it at this point so we have the fleeting notes we have the project notes and we have the permanent notes these are the three big categories of notes and project notes are things like comments in the manuscript or outlines they can be to-do lists at the end of the project you can either decide to archive these or to discard these this is up to you however as you're doing your research as you're doing your organization of notes and you might have some additional question and doing some additional research inevitably you will come up with ideas you will encounter ideas in the process that are not directly related to your research and that is when the settle constant becomes extremely powerful because a you feed these back as fleeting notes and they go into your system so you're able to work on parallel topics in fact zenke encourages us to work on multiple topics at the same time also i think the idea is that the byproducts and products of our work in one topic become inputs for another so this chart down here tries to explain this concept that in a production line and this can be of course a production like like in manufacturing but also this is now your thinking production line the byproduct of one production line becomes the resource for another which again has byproducts and becomes a resource for another so i have my original idea or literature here i do my processing it has a by-product it also has a product that i ship so this is my publication that i publish and it has a by-product which is some ideas that came up during that work and this plus some other reading i've done i process into another product which i ship and again the whole process continues so this your your projects become this interlinked activities where nothing really falls on the ground you're reusing the knowledge that you have created and this is why this arrow here is important because when you're working on the project you don't throw away other ideas you keep them you store them you work them into your process with this this is the core workflow there are a couple of pitfalls and then we are going to look at some best practices for each of the activities so some of the common pitfalls that you want to be mindful of is if everything is a permanent note then it will dilute the value of your zettel costume because this is back to the point about forgetting is an important skill if you want to be able to remember if everything is a project note and that is the feature for example of the status quo approach as well then you're always back to square one you don't reuse knowledge from the previous processes or at least you don't have an efficient way to do that and if everything is a fleeting node then you get into this vicious cycle of a growing pile of notes and then you'll have this urge after couple of months to clear the house your throw out all your notes and then you start from nothing and this cycle will repeat but again you're losing important knowledge you're losing important thoughts so let's look at some of the best practices that you want to pay attention to and these are following the logic of the process the first set of ideas are about the importance of reading for understanding so your goal when you're reading is to enrich your slip box and you typically can do this by looking for information that this confirms your ideas that are opposing views or that contradicts corrects or maybe supports and adds to your ideas but the way to enrich your slip box is to deliberately look for ideas that are different than yours otherwise you're really not learning the other idea here is to practice every day so this activity of writing your ideas down is like piano practice for a pianist you do it every day it's a repeating activity of extracting the gist of the text and writing it down and as you do this more and more you'll get better and better at it finally your focus should be on distillation and not on quantity being able to reframe questions and assertions is even more important than having extensive knowledge because without this ability you would never be able to put the knowledge to use so how do you write your notes how do you create your permanent notes and the idea is that your literature note captures what you read in the book or in the literature it is a short summary of the idea by the author it is in the context of the book or the source where you read it a permanent note is in the context of your other permanent notes in your zettel custom system so you write it in the context of your research of your ideas you write it such that you no longer need the original book you do make a reference if it's relevant to the source but the permanent notes are written in the context of your existing notes it follows the trail of thought it reflects and reference your existing notes in your system and with that you create notes that are now your own ideas in your own system keep in mind that these nodes should always be atomic aim to create one idea per note the next step is to develop your ideas assigning keywords is a key part of the thinking process this is when you think about what topics or what other notes are relevant if you're using tags as indexes then xenka recommends to use them sparingly because your indexes should be brief if you overuse tags then it will dilute the value of your indexes there are two types of people you have the archivists and the writers the archivist looks for the keyword that's most fitting where you can archive something this is like the librarian looking for the topic where the book belongs and the writer who's thinking about in which context do i want to stumble upon this information even if i forget it and of course for the settle casting system the writer's mentality is the better mentality so a common way to embed an idea in the context of a slip box is to write out the reasons for why it's important how does it link to your line of thought so you just write a paragraph explaining that i found this idea interesting because and you finish the sentence another approach for developing your ideas and for connecting them with other ideas in your xethel casting system is to practice seeing small differences between seemingly similar subjects or ideas and to see connections between seemingly different ideas one tool that you may want to use for this is the double bubble map that i talked about in another video this is a visual tool for comparing and contrasting two ideas albert rosenberg suggests that the construction of opposites is the most reliable way of generating new ideas in this sense the double bubble map can become a core component of your settle cast and approach where you practice this activity of seeing differences between similar concepts or connecting different concepts and finding the similarities and with generating brand new ideas it's important to think outside the brain because if you think in your brain you try to bring in different concepts and think about them then just simply holding those concepts in memory in short-term memory is going to burn up the very mental resources that you need for scrutinizing it for thinking about it comparing is one of our natural strengths so if we can see two things and we can move our eyesight between the two to compare them that is a very powerful and natural way of how our brain works so in all of this and that again just underlines the value of using a tool like the double bubble map is you externalize this thinking process and i'm going to link the double bubble map video here it's a three minute quick video explaining how the double bubble map works i think in this context it is spot on a perfect tool for this process also learn to ask questions the most difficult question to answer is this question of so what's not in the picture but there are some other questions you might want to ask i'm not going to read all of them but you can see them here on the screen the first question is about questioning your question what kind of answer can i expect from asking the question in a particular way to me this is a very important question because i firmly believe that the issue is not finding the right answer usually the issue is finding the right question that you can then answer finding the right answer is usually then the easier part before we go and talk about the limited mental resources i wanted to just have this side note about study and research and zinc writes quite extensively about this in the book i just pulled out a couple of highlights around these ideas first of all the question is do you really understand and the point is that writing a summary of what you understood is an excellent way to test if you really understood something and to confront yourself unfortunately there's a thinking fallacy that just because something is familiar that you also understand it you read it once twice three times it sounds familiar you feel you understand it but when you try to explain it to someone else it turns out that you're unable to and writing your thoughts down writing the findings of your research down in your own words will help you test yourself on this as well as help you think through and internalize what you've read studying and research is really just the flip side of the coin the long story here is that if study is research and research is study and both of them are supported by writing then you should really work as if nothing else counts than writing and we're back to the atomic activity of creating nodes and that is how the zettel costing system works so here's a point about testing being more valuable than rereading interestingly even if you don't know the right answer testing will help you internalize what you've learned more than rereading the content so self-testing is an important tool in internalizing a concept and learning it deeper these cards are similar to the cards used in the spaced repetition approaches zunker talks about elaboration versus repetition elaboration is this process that we talked about earlier of developing your ideas it is this process of building one idea on top of the other and building these sequences of ideas the difference between elaboration and repetition is that in repetition you're reading the same card over and over and you try to memorize it the focus here in case of repetition is on storage strengths and in case of elaboration it is about seeing the differences and similarities between different ideas and building this chain of ideas the advocacy of zenke is that elaboration results in deeper learning and frankly outside the artificial environment of the school system memorization is not as important elaboration and internalized understanding is very important so let's look at how we manage our mental resources and this will also talk a bit about why this whole approach works so here this section is more about why the settle casting approach works and how it goes in lock step with your mental resources your mental energies and just dives into this topic you need to understand that all your mental resources are limited there are three in particular that are mentioned in the book your attention span or focus is limited our short-term memory is limited and also our willpower our motivation is limited so let's look at each of these one by one in terms of our focus there's a big benefit of the settle casting approach because it is built up of atomic activities like reading taking a note placing that note in the settle casting system or sequencing notes for a publication or proofreading you have all sorts of different activities that require different type of attention so you might need floating attention when you are looking for the right word to express something you might need focused attention when you are proofreading something and you want to find the errors in what you're reading or you might need focus on not one thought but the whole argument when you're trying to create an outline or even when you're trying to place a note into a sequence of notes the benefit of the zether custom approach is by having these atomic activities in the workflow engage in different type of focus we can maintain our attention and focus for much longer because we are using different types of focuses and that helps in that so our short-term memory is not very good it is said that we can remember between five and ten items but there are a couple of tricks here to keep in mind and couple of features of the settle cost system so the first one is chunking and just to get started uh try to memorize this number sequence so look at it and then close your eyes and try to repeat the numbers you've seen i guess you will not get very far with the process not unless i tell you that the numbers that you saw there were five years of the world cups numbered consecutively so the first was 1958 and 1962 etc and then if you look at these numbers then you will see that the first is 1958 the second is 1962 the third is 1964. and now you only need to remember two pieces of information you need to remember the starting year and that this goes for five years and then you know the system and you can write down the entire system and this is what chunking is about so while it is true that it's five to seven items that we can hold in our minds if we have conceptual models that integrate a number of different concepts then those will occupy a single slot of the five to seven short-term memory slots and that will help us in a way extend our mental capacity so chunking learning mental models is an important way of improving your short-term memory or addressing this resource gap the other aspect of short-term memory is that open tasks also occupy short-term memory so bloomer zaygarnick observed this phenomena they were out for lunch with a group of people and the waiter was extremely good at remembering who ordered what and was very friendly after they paid they left the restaurant and bloom had to go back a couple of minutes later and the vater who performed extremely well just couple of minutes ago didn't even recognize her and this started her thinking in this subject and she discovered that indeed when the task closed when the waiter collected the pay for the dinner or the lunch he was able to clear this stable these gas from his short-term memory and move on to the next table and this way conserve short-term memory so in a similar way the settle constant is consisting of small atomic activities and each of them you can complete in couple of minutes this is not multitasking so multitasking is stepping from one activity to another without really completing those activities it's being distracted by social media by an email by a phone call by someone walking up to your desk by someone interrupting you or jumping from one topic to another even though people who are multitasking so there was a test and there's some longer discussion about this in the book where people who multitask were compared to people who do not multitask on a comparative test so the activity was the same people who multitasked felt much more productive but in measurable actual fact their productivity decreased a lot so multitasking is not good however the small tasks that are involved in the settle casting system are all individually all encompassing so writing a note takes couple of minutes you finish it it's done you don't need to return to it there's no switching cost in terms of mental resources it actually helps free up short-term memory and it is a productive approach whereas multitasking is not and then finally this self-control and motivation being a limited resource and this is where the standardization approach of the settle custom comes in i guess we are back to this point about the notes or the shipping containers of ideas the the point is that by always using the same notebook the same note format the same process for storing your ideas and by reducing the number of decisions you need to make it it just makes the flow better the flip side of this that if you lack structure it makes it much more challenging to stay focused on a topic for an extended period of time so the other aspect of self-control motivation willpower is that you should follow the path of least resistance so it's the easiest to do self-control when you're doing what you want to do most this means that you should always work on the projects that are most important to you that are most interesting to you and the settle casting process will ensure that your ideas accumulate this is where i would want to point back to this comment by mr luman that i only do what's easy he was always focusing on the topic that was important to him and you can see here this feedback loop we talked earlier about that the other ideas that you encounter during the project you place them in the settle casting system so you have a place to store those ideas you can jump from topic to topic because the system will take care of capturing those ideas just simply by collecting these notes ideas will accumulate over time i found this quote very important that even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea i think this is core to the whole process that the settle casting approach the smart note taking approach is to create these steps on this staircase and in the end the compounding interest will be very significant when you look at your settle casting system and you have topics emerging that you can work on the basic idea is you should let the work carry you forward you read you take fleeting notes you create permanent notes you write down what you've read in your own words your understanding then you file them in your zettle casten system and the more connected that information it will create you the more docking places so it comes back to chunking as well the more things you can relate a piece of knowledge to the better you're going to remember that and you publish your ideas i think this is a very important point here to praise the workflow not the talent this is why sometimes the most talented students don't turn out to be the most successful because they are always praised for their talents and they never need to learn at least not in school to have efficient workflows so the workflow is much more important than talent the slip box gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks each of them can be completed in reasonable time and it provides you with instant feedback because these writing tasks are interconnected and i think that's also a very important point here that while creating a manuscript for a book for example can take up to a year the feedback cycle is very slow if you take six notes a day that's already six feedback cycles in just one day and that is just going to make a huge difference in your personal improvement so just to close all of this how do you get started a good way to start is to create a brain dump of the topics that are of most interest to you today and to note down some of the foundational thoughts you have in all of them you should keep it simple so don't get distracted by trying to create the perfect process or perfect system in the end this is an absolutely simple system you have a simple note with couple of sentences and links and you have some reference notes it is really as simple as it gets the important part is to consistently write these down and to connect them and for sure don't spend huge effort on reworking your existing notes into this system if they become important later on you will anyway reference them and move them in here if not then you saved that effort hopefully you found this overview helpful this is an extremely rich book even though this was a long video and a long summary trust me i'm just scratching the surface it was a very hard one-pager to create because of the rich content i've learned so much and i've started to apply zettel costin for my own workflow as well in a couple of weeks or months i'm going to share about some of my settle costs and approaches i would be very interested in your implementation of zettel costan and maybe some of the questions that you have after reading the book what's unclear or how have you modified this approach to fit your workflow the best thank you for your attention and until next time