My Note Taking Workflow

I do a whole lot of reading and watching and listening and logging, here's a my workflow for getting all those things into my second brain, called 🧠 My Vault.

Notes in 🧠 My Vault

Household management (shopping lists, chores, etc.)
Task management
Various kinds of annotations
Shared work notes (meeting minutes, documentation, etc.)
Personal work notes
Idea exploration
Journalling
Scrapbooking (digital and analogue)
Research management
Information management (bookmarks and the like)
Project management and support notes
Client management
Concept database

Process

Create a new note using Templater and Quickadd, easy access through My Hotkeys
Set the status for either 📥 or 📝
See My Meta for more details about status and tags.

Status

Status for All Notes (📝)

This status is given to any note that's written in my own words

#📝/🌞 Incubator/Needs Work
#📝/🌱 Sprout/Keep Working
#📝/🌿 Sapling/Final Push
#📝/🌲 Evergreen/Completed-ish

Status for All Sources (📥)

This status is used to categorize all of my highlights from external sources. Notes that spawn from these highlights will have a regular note status to distinguish anything that's not my own words.

#📥/🟥️ Not Processed
#📥/🟧️️ Processing
#📥/🟨 Synthesizing
#📥/🟩 Completed

Notes

Tools + Plugins are categorized as 📥 Sources since their content is mostly external
Any newly spawned atomic notes will link back to the original source, but now embedded in a new note with my own annotations recognized as a sapling 🌿, the note must be fully annotated and linked to become an evergreen 🌲 note in my cards.
Kanban board for sources and status

Christian's Sources

For sources I am mostly using Christian B. B. Houmann's Guide to Importing Sources.
See: Issues · chhoumann/quickadd · GitHub

Books I read on my iPad, from which I send the notes from Kindle to Readwise Reader
Articles I read on their respective webpages. On the page, I use Reader to write notes. These are synchronized to Readwise, and then I manually choose to add these to my vault.
Tweets Same as articles
YouTube videos I use a template in Obsidian along with the Media Extended plugin to write notes with timestamps. For importing videos I use the Quickadd command "Add Youtube Video", make sure the video URL is copied to clipboard, and then copy the related highlights from Readwise along with other related info.
Podcast episodes I've made a plugin called PodNotes that helps you write notes on podcasts. This is much faster and more reliable (in my opinion) than other services. Check that out instead! Instructions in this post will follow my previous workflow, so you can choose whichever fits you best.

I have an option here, either listen to the podcast in Obsidian and take notes directly OR use Snipd and sync with Readwise.

Papers: See My Zotero Workflow

Processing Notes

The Konik Method
Link to related notes
Reflect on the content, think on how I can apply it to my life
Create new notes based on information (or just keep and do progressive summarization)
Create aliases to help with retrieval
- What would you search if you needed this information?

Projects

Create Project using quickadd hotkey cmd + shift + p
Create a corresponding Todoist project with the same name as the project filename in order to automatically pull tasks from Todoist.

up:: 🧠 My Vault