For this week’s December reflection, I’m talking about my note-taking process in 2023.

It all happens in Capacities, but this is more about the process than the actual tool. However, I do love talking about Capacities, so if you want to know what this translates to in Capacities, I will happily share!

TL;DR

Let’s look into this a bit deeper (or watch the video below)

So three pieces of context first:

1. I love learning, particularly about history and politics, and typically learn of things through film, tv or books and then research from there.

2. I also love connection. Some people seek thrills by sky-diving, for me it’s finding connections in my notes.

3. My note-taking goal is essentially to capture that which interests me, and to develop and connect my curiosity with the world around me. It’s nothing to do with being productive or more creative. If they are by-products, excellent, but this is a hobby before anything else.

The Process in More Detail

The “warm up”

Pretty much everything I learn or even become interested in is inspired by books or tv. Going forward I will refer to all such related things as media.

All media I’ve consumed lives in Notion with my LifeOS. I only create a note in Capacities about it when something has either sparked my curiosity, interest or teaches me something completely new. Typically then, media about historical events or people gets a note, because that’s what interests me.

To physically create the page, I use the handy ‘hook to new’ command from Hookmark between Notion and Capacities (which I discussed here).

Once I have that initial page object in Capacities, I turn it into a media object which assigns it some properties. Once I have that, I’m ready to start the actual note-taking process in Capacities.

Some people understandably wonder why I use both apps, so I have a post about that here

Step 1: Source Summaries

Every source is dealt with on the understanding that it’s a representation of whatever it’s talking about. My academic brain reminds me of the importance of reading/consuming multiple sources in order to build out a picture and have more trustworthy notes and understandings. This is particularly true for the subjects I’m inspired to research from fictional books or tv.

By giving these sources their own object (Capacities speak, if you use another app, think ‘page’), I have the space to write down what the source is representing, how it represents it, and how I feel about it.

I might also do some very preliminary Google searches at reviews, wikipedia etc to build out this picture (more for tv/films).

There are varying levels of depth here depending on what it is (a film I’ve watched once in the cinema vs a book I’ve annotated over a few weeks) but the end goal remains the same. I want to summarise everything I just mentioned, for the simple reason that:

Sometimes my summaries take weeks because life gets in the way, so I’ll summarise chapters at a time. But regardless of this, no links before summaries.

This is important because linking summarised thoughts is more useful for the next stage than linking to my scribbled out notes I take whilst watching something.

A pause for some thoughts on sensible linking

If you just want to read about the process, skip to the next section.

A couple of years ago, I went through a documentary phase and basically wrote out their transcripts thinking I was extracting knowledge. It would take me an afternoon to watch a 1 hour documentary.

Not only was I writing out transcripts, I was linking every single mention of a page elsewhere in my graph. It turned into a mention-finding exercise rather than watching and understanding exercise. I just created tens of links that looked too messy and overwhelming to even review.

I thought this was fine, any note taking = learning.

But in reality, for me to feel like I’ve learned something, I need to mindfully consume it, and then think about what I’ve learned.

In practice, that is now done through summarising at the end of my reading/watching. This is much better than the uncontextualised, under-developed, link-filled messy transcripts I’d create beforehand.

Now I feel much better about note-taking/media consumption etc, and I have double the fun. I enjoy what I’m watching/reading and I enjoy the slower, more considered approach to note-taking and link making.

Ok back to the process

Step 2- Synthesising what I’ve learned about individual things

So at the end of step 1, I have a summarised source note. Step 2 is the actual linking. I’m linking to the topics, people, events, locations etc I learned about from that source.

Essentially what this process is doing is getting a coherent account of topics/events/people from a source and breaking the interesting things out of that original context so I can deal with them individually.

Remember, a lot of what I’m doing is watching/reading representations of the topic notes, so I can’t take them as truth. I want to read more in order to learn and understand more.

“Dealing with them individually” means processing the backlinks between source and topic, and synthesising the information within them. I read through the backlinks and try to organise what I learn into a coherent page above the backlinks, with headings and a nice layout. This also shows me the gaps in my knowledge and understanding, which will spark curiosity or invoke further research.

Here’s an example. Say I’ve watched 10 films about World War Two. If I open my World War Two page, I’ve got 10 backlinks. If I open my atom bomb page, I might have 4 backlinks. If I open my Eisenhower page, I might have 2 backlinks, all of which will be from one of those 10 films I watched and took notes on. I want to review these backlinks to write up what I know (and find what I don’t know) about WW2, Eisenhower and the atom bomb.

This step is never finished. I’m always reading and watching, and therefore summarising and linking. There’s always more to process, synthesise and learn from. This is so exciting. I guess in that way, my note-taking is largely a cyclical process.

However it became clear to me that I needed a way to show that the individual topics (the people, events, locations etc) do not exist in isolation. For example, understanding film portrayals about Winston Churchill make more sense when you know about World War Two as a larger context. So this lead me to thinking more about step 3. This step is the most work-in-progress one, but I’m still doing it, so I’ll still talk about it!

Step 3- organising into thematic contexts

As a history nerd, I am always looking to understand the greater historical context. It just makes things make more sense.

A few months ago I showed how I did this for my notes on the early modern era using a Map of Content in Capacities. That is essentially what I think many pages will end up looking like, but I’ve been doing much more of steps 1/2 this year, so I don’t have much to share about step 3.

This will allow me to see all the related things to a given context (e.g. WW2) without just using the graph view. It’s a more flexible and personalised approach which I can still explore in depth (looking at the individual topics) or by exploring representations of these times through the source notes I’ve created.

And thankfully, Capacities helps me make it look good along the way. I get a real sense of pride looking at these pages, and real happiness.

That’s how I know that even if this isn’t the most perfect note-taking workflow we’ve ever seen, it’s doing it’s job for me and I will stick with it.

I feel I’ve really grown in confidence with my notes this year, in the sense that I’m not longer forcing myself to use other people’s systems or ideas. It’s ok that my activities might not nearly fit into the Zettlekasten terms. These systems and words are inspiration, and that is evident, but we have to find our own way. The P in PKM is possibly the most important word in that phrase, but that’s a conversation for another day…

I hope that makes some form of sense, let me know if not!

Again, if any Capacities users want to see how this translates into object types and properties just let me know and I’ll film an updated tour.