Bridging The Gap Between Knowledge And Creativity
MipMap #016: Telling you to use Obsidian for the second time
Creativity is a process, not an action.
Channeling our creative abilities is a skill that takes time to hone. Therefore, we want to make our transitions into a creative state as smooth as possible.
Maybe I’m alone in this regard, but I find that unless I’ve practiced a certain technique for (what feels like) a thousand hours, my creative sessions are spent scrambling through my search history looking for the article or video that showed me how to do a specific technique.
At least I used to, until I started taking notes.
My mindset before note taking was that practical application was the best way to broaden a tool kit. Watch a video, repeat the steps shown several times over the course of a couple projects, profit.
Lo and behold, taking notes has made that process redundant. I discovered this after beginning to take notes on writing and story structure. I found that even if I wasn’t writing a script or outlining a story, I was recalling plot elements and imagining themes and character arcs. All because I took notes.
It might seem far fetched, and I might be embellishing it slightly, but the principle stands. Taking notes (actually useful notes that is) is key to developing an understanding of a certain topic.
As I outlined in my article on learning, I’m not referring to the note taking that you probably used in middle school and high school. We aren’t trying to achieve an arbitrary score that shows you know how to write down something from a textbook.
Instead, the notes we’re taking are going to be relevant, connected, and iterated upon.
Our tool for the job? Obsidian.
Let’s get into it.
Creativity Is Messy. Don’t Lose Track Of Your Ideas.
If we aren’t taking notes by simply copying verbatim what we’re reading/watching, then how are we going to take notes?
We’re still going to copy what we’re reading/watching, but we aren’t going to copy it 1:1.
Instead, we’re going to create a fresh note and create two sections; one named “Direct Quotes” and another named “Summarized Notes.” Those of you familiar with the Zettelkasten system will see where I’m going with this.
In the “Direct Quotes” section, we are going to put down exactly what the author of the video/article says. However, we’re not just going to put in anything.
This section should be filled with quotes that are impactful and meaningful to you specifically. Not what others say you should write down, but what resonates deeply with you. We do this in order to remember those little phrases and sayings that create those moments where we feel a light bulb go off in our heads.
Now, some videos or articles won’t have a lot of those. That’s fine. Direct quotes are great if you find any, but they aren’t required. In fact, I find that a lot of articles and videos don’t have succinct quotes to write down unless they’re a bit broad in subject and are created to teach a certain field or subject. Videos and articles showcasing how to do certain techniques aren’t likely to have that.
It’s in our “Summarized Notes” section that we are going to enter a summary of what we believe are the key points and ideas. This will be done after we’ve finished reading/watching, and will likely require you to go back through and seek out the sections that weren’t so impressionable. If you’re handy, you’ll be able to take jot notes and make filling in the gaps much easier.
Summarized notes are meant to be taken in your own words so that you are able to understand them. Make sure that these aren’t too similar to what the author is saying, otherwise that note might be better off in the direct quotes instead.
An important addendum is that you are going to make one note (consisting of the direct quotes and summarized notes) for each individual video or article or other piece of media. This is crucially important since we don’t want any bit of information to get lost or overlooked.
So at the end of a note taking session, you should have a summary of all of the information along with (maybe) a couple of quotes that emphasize the key points of your summary.
This also might take a couple of attempts to get used to. It’s an awkward process at first, but as you keep going you figure out what works best for you.
Link Your Knowledge, Tap Your Creativity
Once you’ve collected a couple of notes, you might be thinking to yourself:
“Gee, these are getting a bit overwhelming to keep track of.”
Don’t worry. This is natural, and part of the process.
With this collection of (hopefully) semi-related notes, you are now going to create an “Assembled Note.”
Assembled notes are where we compile all of the relevant information on a specific topic. It’s also where Obsidian begins to differ from your average note taking software.
Say you’ve collected notes on a bunch of articles and videos relating to how Geometry Nodes work in Blender. One video might specify how to do certain simulations, another talks about procedural modeling, and there might be one or two on the new hair system that came with Blender 4.0.
An Assembled Note is where you are going to compile a brief overview of all of the notes you’ve taken on that particular subject. These are the notes that you are going to review when you go looking for a specific bit of knowledge.
Obsidian factors in here specifically because of it’s ability to use links to, you guessed it, link our big collection of notes (called media notes from now on) to our assembled note. I’m sure Notion or other softwares has similar capabilities, but I use Obsidian so that’s what I’ll focus on.
Assembled notes are fairly subjective in terms of what you want to include, or even as to how many media notes make up an assembled note. Again, this is where you have to experiment with what feels right to you. However, I can give some recommendations as to how an assembled note should function.
Your assembled notes should serve two purposes:
To easily access a specific topic or subject (and its constituent media notes).
To make sure you aren’t overlooking or forgetting any notes you’ve taken.
As mentioned above, the assembled note is the way to make sure you can easily access a collection of related knowledge and techniques to save you time and hassle. However, the secondary benefit is that (if you’ve created your assembled notes correctly) you shouldn’t have media notes that you can’t access.
Of course, you might end up with one or two isolated media notes on topics that you thought you were going to dive deeper on. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in those cases I’d recommend looking into tags and metadata in order to make sure that you can access those media notes when you do decide to go further in that area.
Access Everything, All At Once
These are the methods that I use to compartmentalize and store everything that I learn. Obviously there is still the applied effort of actually creating and utilizing those techniques, but this is a guide to help you spend more time creating and less time searching.
The media note and the assembled note are two parts of a bigger system that I use in order to keep my grander collection of knowledge organized and consumable. Like I had mentioned above, if you know what a Zettelkasten system is, you know that there is still more you can do.
For example, assembled notes can further be aggregated into a higher level of note called a “Map of Content,” which is just a fancy term for groupings of related assembled notes. Those utilize a more directory approach as opposed to summarizing and compiling media notes like assembled notes do.
There’s also an insanely powerful plugin known as Dataview that allows you to create queries of your vault for notes containing certain tags and metadata. This is a firm step up from simply categorizing your notes using media and assembled notes, and isn’t needed unless you really want to get deep into note organization. (Although I will say that Dataview single-handedly saved my butt when it came to writing a research paper.)
In case you’ve made it this far and haven’t seen the point in utilizing the media and assembled note system for organizing your knowledge, let me do my best to give you one last pitch.
Traditional note taking has you make one-off notes that get stacked up into a folder system and sealed away until you dedicate the time to go searching for them. Utilizing linked assembled and media notes allows you to create launchpads for collecting knowledge and constructing coherent, accessible groupings to expand your understanding of any topic.
I’ve used this system to begin my exploration into Unreal Engine 5, categorizing everything from how the engine functions to creating blueprints to viewport navigation under different assembled notes. All of them are collectively listed in a UE5 map of content that I can easily access and see where I need to research next. All with two clicks of a button (three if you count opening Obsidian itself).
That is effective note taking.
Outro
I hope you enjoyed that quick rundown of how I utilize Obsidian in collecting and organizing my notes and knowledge. While it isn’t the standard article from MipMap, I’ve found that exploring the systems we use to be just as interesting as the art we produce. Hopefully you can see the value in that as well.
I know I had said that I’d be expanding upon my last article on stylized art with Project Titan, however this past week has been spent wrapping up the last assignments of university courses. Fortunately I have a full week and a half before the next semester starts, so I’ll be sure to dive deep into Project Titan and report back my findings.
Until next week, stay organized!
- Adam