Full transcript of “How to Capture, Review, and Use Your Notes”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 So, you've set up your note-taking app, but you're not sure how to use it consistently. In this video, I will give you a workflow that you can use as a foundation. You can absolutely adapt it over time, but start here if you're stuck. So, a note-taking app is a place to write things down. But how do you know what to write down? We're looking for two signals. The first is, do you want to remember this thing? And the second is, are you interested in this thing? They're very broad questions, but that's fine. When you're getting started with using a note-taking app, I don't think you can capture too much because the step after this is to review it anyway. Over time, you'll notice patterns for what you actually want to capture and do something with. But when you're starting out, just capture anything that answers those questions. If you're wondering where to start here,
0:45 I would recommend looking in your screenshots folder, find the screenshots, and put them into your note-taking app as text. But how do we actually do that? And where do they go within this note-taking app? takeaway decision- making when you're capturing. Send everything to your daily note. With capacities, there are various ways of sending things to your daily note. You can, for example, text capacities through our WhatsApp or Telegram integrations. You can send yourself a note to self via email, or if you're on your MacBook, you can use the raycast integration, or of course, just the dedicated apps. So, there's always a way to access your daily notes to send content to. So, I've put some real examples of previous daily notes of mine into today's daily note. You might have more than this, you might have less than
1:31 this, and it will certainly vary dayto-day. Something that you'll hear me say throughout this video is there is no madeup standard to maintain here. Your daily note needs to look how you need your daily note to look. So, if on one day you don't capture anything, but the next day you capture 30 things, that's fine because that's reflecting your needs. Because remember, you've already asked yourself the really important questions of do I want to remember it or is this interesting to me? If things pass that filter, send them to your daily note no matter how much stuff it is. Getting used to the daily note is a good thing because it's advisable to use it as a hub. Everything flows into your daily note and new notes come out of it. So in capacities, our daily note is surrounded by this calendar. So people
2:17 often use daily notes to create new meetings. And of course you could write the meeting down underneath the rest of the text like that and create a new meeting or you could just use our calendar integration and create a meeting that way or even these buttons which you can create objects from as well. Either way again the daily note is your central hub. If you spend a lot of your time in your daily note you're reminded of the next steps of this workflow which I will get on to now. So once you've captured the next very important thing is to review what you have captured. Reviewing is really important because things pile up fast. We get a lot of information throughout the day. We need to review what we've captured in order to know that we're working on or thinking about the correct things. You've already kind of done one
3:04 review and that is when you're capturing you're asking yourself if it's important or if it's interesting. But now we're doing like a second filter. And the question to ask yourself here is, is this thing useful to me now? Is it interesting to me now? Or could it be in the future? This is not an exact science and only you have the answers to this. You've basically got to make an educated guess based on your current needs and your current context. So, for example, if you learn something about an employee or a colleague that would be useful as you go through projects together, then it's definitely worth keeping it and connecting it to a project page or to a note that you might have about your colleague. So, if we're looking at what I've captured here, I would say that only
3:51 this note about having finished a book is important enough for a whole note because I want to actually write on it. So, I'll highlight this and turn it into a book. When you create a note, you're giving it a title, some properties, and somewhere to write. So, I want to start writing about this book right now. So, I'll create a note. The same is true for the water cycle. I'll create a definition for that. Whereas these other two things that I captured, I don't want to write any further about them at this time, but I do want to keep them and be able to resurface them later. So when you're asking yourself what's useful now or what's useful in the future, you can also ask yourself a secondary question
4:37 of where do I want to see it? So for me, I want this to come up when I talk about habits and for this one when I talk about productivity. And I can just use tags for that. Tags are kind of a way of grouping anything in capacities and then seeing like a nice wall view of everything. So that's just one, but another and we'll come back to this page later is curiosity where you can see I've collected lots of things and tagged them all with curiosity. So, I've now started my productivity and my habit tags because I don't want to work on them now, but when I later come to thinking about habits or productivity in more depth, I definitely want to see the two things that I've captured here. So, that's an insight
5:23 into some of the thought processes that might go on when you're reviewing your daily notes. If you decide something that you capture isn't helpful, just leave it where it is. You lose nothing by leaving it untouched. I'd say that what I've shown you so far is the cornerstone habit. Capture regularly and review regularly. If you're wondering how often, I would say aim for weekly. Do it more if you need, but weekly is a very nice cadence. Nothing will go wrong if you miss a review, but it just means that you might be missing sort important information or something really useful to you. So, if you can get into the habit of doing a weekly review, then definitely do. But it goes a little bit further than just capturing and reviewing your daily notes. And that's because we've created these links. Any time that you link to something in capacities, you are told where you
6:09 linked from. So in this daily notes, I linked to this book. And in the backlink section, I can see the daily note that it originated in. And this concept is the same across capacities and across note-taking apps as well, regardless of where you've made that link. So it's not just daily notes. I'll show you an example with Chyros. My original interest um came on this day nearly a year ago and I can actually see on that day that I also read this source this link about it and in that source I linked to Kyros a couple of times. Meaning when I open that Chyros note currently empty I see the places I've linked to it. You can see a visual
6:55 representation of that in the graph view here. Now, backlinks are really powerful. What they're essentially saying to you is you're in this note now. Here are all the other places you've mentioned it either by choosing to create a link or in capacities we also have mentions which scans for places you've written the word but you haven't linked to it yourself. So, it's looking for all the places that Chyros is mentioned and it's presenting them together for you and it's giving you the opportunity to review them and kind of ask yourself what the back links are telling you about this note. So, from these back links, I have some insights into how to define it. This is a definition object. So, it makes sense that I would go through these back links
7:40 and create my definition of chyros. It's essentially giving these notes another use. We're saying that this source note was really useful for writing down everything that I read in this article, but this specific section of it can also be relevant and useful for creating this definition. So that is what I will do. So I've read uh these back links and created my definition. I also really like this quote from a different web link about Chyros. So I'm actually just going to copy that whole block and display it underneath here. And now I have my definition of chyros based on other notes that I have taken. And this is how you build a network of notes over time. I wasn't passively capturing cool
8:26 articles and hoping that one day I would find it again. I was actively reading the article and deciding what parts were interesting and why and creating notes for the things that I knew were interesting to me. And then link by link and note by note, I have now got a definition for it and some sources that helped inspire me. And this can just build and build over time. And this exact same concept works with any note. It's not just for research workflows. So here is a note about a colleague for example. And the back links here are giving me some information. So I can update a birthday and add some information to a memory jog. I know what projects are going on, something that's been recommended to me by this person. And other times her name's been mentioned but not actually linked. Back
9:12 links give you information that live elsewhere in different notes and that are just a great reminder of, hey, this could be useful to you right now. Do you want to do something with it? If you don't, or if you've done your review, you can just collapse the section and gain some focus. But don't underestimate the power of your backlinks. They can be very helpful to you. But that does not mean that you have to review every backlink of every note. This is not a reasonable standard to maintain and it's arguably completely unnecessary. The notes that you'd be revisiting every day probably aren't actually helpful to you right now. Remember when we were reviewing the daily notes and we were thinking what's useful to me now or probably useful to me in the future. Whatever you're linking to there, that's probably where you want to be spending your focus rather than on random notes you've taken 2 years ago. So always be
9:59 thinking what's relevant to me now and just spend time with those notes. That's probably something that you can be consistent with and that will help you adopt this system over time. So that's the main part of the workflow, but there is one more thing that a lot of people like to think about when taking notes, and that's creating something new with them. I don't think this is completely necessary. If it's something you want to do, then absolutely, but I'll show you what that could look like if you are interested. We'll go back to this curiosity tag. And basically, these tag pages, as I say, they're a way of grouping any type of note that you've got under this shared keyword of curiosity. All of these things have curiosity in common and tag pages can be really inspiring. For example, let's say I wanted to do some thinking about what
10:46 a curiositydriven life looks like for me. I've clearly already started thinking about that but not continued. So I've got that question there. And what I'm able to do is use what I've already collected as a starting point for engaging with that question. So the way I'd do it here in capacities is shift and click on that question to open it in the side panel and then start looking at what I've collected and add some kind of commentary about it for this new context of answering this question. So I've picked out a few quotes and this web link and I've put it together just as a few lines in this question note. That whole process was made a lot easier because it was building on work I'd already done which was I've already captured this quote. I've already read this web link and I've already tagged them with curiosity. And
11:31 simply by coming to this tag page, I don't have to start from zero and use all my thinking power to answer this question. I get a bit of a step up and I use this as a starting point. Once I'm happy that I reviewed all of that, I can just open this page in full and refine my idea. The same kind of thinking works with a project. You can open up your project note and pull together the things that you need to do it. And this helps you get started with momentum because I think the goal with note-taking is to keep up your momentum and keep doing it, keep capturing, keep reviewing, keep learning. And I think momentum can come from the fact that you're always working within your own notes and within things that you've captured and you've interacted with already. And that's far easier than starting from zero every single time you need to do something. So, back in the
12:18 daily note to close off this video, I hope that this has given you an insight into a foundational workflow that you can use where you capture what matters, you review it regularly, you link ideas together, and you really think about how your back links might help you learn something more about the notes that you've created. In other words, the core practice here is learning to engage with your notes and showing up to engage with them regularly. As your needs evolve, the system will absolutely evolve as well. But the very basic building blocks of capturing, reviewing, and processing never changes. So this should be something that can help you set up a really useful, supportive note-taking system for you. If you have any questions about this, then please let me know in the comments below.
