The Powerful Way to take Notes as A PhD Student

[@shevacharya1030]

This video is great! As a new incoming PhD student I have been looking for a great system to use to get a hang of all the reading! Thank you so much for this video, it was very helpful!

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

You're very welcome!

[@YiranZhang-y3p]

Very useful! Thanks Dr. Miles! Three principle of good note taking - take notes in your own words - 'irreducible' notes - connect the idea to other knowledge How to take fleeting notes - the source - the context (digested version)

[@walliswilliams394]

This video is full of great info and tips. I've started a Masters Program and have been very overwhelmed. I'm going to try these tips. Thank you

[@chane-nel]

I absolutely love this system for keeping track of research! Thank you for sharing!

[@teakrose8613]

This is wonderful! I'm 4 years into my program and this solves so many issues I've had with organizing.

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

You're welcome!

[@maya-moo182]

This is unbelievable! I've been trying to make something work between a Notion database and a monsterous Excel spreadsheet, but now.. now I can go back to enjoying doing the research! Many thanks to you!

[@liyanaazman4712]

I like how it's cloud based and how it can be traced to the original pdf source (unlike obsidian). And the interface can display permenant notes more clearly !

[@SRBallard]

you can just embed PDFs in obsidian tho

[@williamstensen5586]

Starting my Masters in Psycholinguistics next year and hopefully PhD not too long after. I have been using Obsidian for quite some time now, but I have really been looking for a program that would let me read PDFs in the same program as I take notes. I love this!

[@filippo7349]

Currently you can read PDFs directly in the Obsidian and make notes on the side panel.

[@snooz5019]

This is really cool! It's a lot like Capacities in the way that it kind of blends obsidian and notion. I like that you can connect individual ideas with a larger theme/rest of knowledge base. But, I do like that this can create notes directly from the PDF, I wish capacities would do that!

[@Paprica008]

I’ve been contemplating using NVivo to organize my literature review, but OMG you do so much better job explaining how your app can be useful to poor Phd students!

[@aleks0_o879]

i already use nimbus note. im impressed with your app, i checked it out. I appreciate you can choose any color you wantto color code a text, thats what I never like about most other apps with its limited color pallet. good luck on development on a mobile app

[@severine_aurelia]

Very helpful to see a specific, real-world example. The PDF integration capabilities of your app make it an attractive choice for people who read a lot of papers!

[@Antonia-yj4de]

I'm in the start of my second year, really really appreciate you calling your first year your write off year. Mine was a shit show haha, thanks :D

[@chloe_steward]

Great point about consistency and creating a work-flow that is effective but not high-maintence. Thanks for the time you invested in sharing this. Just subscribed to your channel for more great advice!

[@310cdarren]

I subscribed because I enjoy listening to credible sources with relevant experience.

[@rafaelkr]

I loved this tool. Thank you so much

[@velbixfilms]

Thank you for sharing! Amazing thoughts that I needed.

[@parizashah7305]

this explaining is very good thanks

[@PriDrummond]

You explained your system so clearly. It gave me ideas on how to improve my process. Thank you! (And great app!)

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

You're very welcome!

[@guillaume6373]

This was great, thanks for the video!

[@mahsammdz9340]

Wow I will save this for future. Your app is great 👍😃

[@laulaja-7186]

A word is used several times in this video, and for those like me who want to know the spelling: Zettelkasten.

[@jimgrant1776]

I'm very impressed with the app you've developed. Apparently, my mind doesn't work at all like yours. I have difficulty understanding what are the different types of entities and how they relate in your system. It just looks like a mass of notes and details. More specifically, I couldn't detect any "hierarchical" structure, which I've found as typical in most note-taking systems. - - - I guess what seems to be missing (for me) is come approach to "categorizing" your notes. Also, when you search for something, I would think you would get a long list of "Items" covering a large variety of related matters and it would take you some time to home in on the specific "item" you want. I would think that Evernote or Apple Notes would do a great job for your needs. No response needed - - - just offering a different perspective.

[@tamalpal6368]

Great video, very useful

[@zachariahprajeeyachat3436]

How do you keep track of permanent notes in relation to each other as the system becomes larger?

[@93bigelow]

Thanks for putting this together. I'm a seasoned Obsidian user but the examples you give will help me improve my workflows.

[@jaw0449]

Thank you so much! I wish I had found this at the beginning of my PhD, but it's still very useful and especially a fellow physicist as there's differences between us and many other fields

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Hey, I'd love to know what you think! How do you manage your knowledge base, PhD or otherwise?

[@LearnWithJake]

Hi Dr Ben. I'm excited to finish my MBA so that I can pursue my PDH right after!

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Awesome! Hope it goes well!

[@Scicodemy]

Thnak You!

[@boxerfencer]

Is your app or any of these programs GPL'd? I've used org, was an early adopter but I must admit I'm baffled at what people have morphed into it. Bullet points works well for me, and I like the collapsible tree structure.

[@pradeep.s]

great system

[@sorcererstone3303]

This way of rewriting the highlighted/captured segments of the paper using your own words (in permanent note video segment) will work when we are reading "normal length" papers. I am reading a report cited by a thesis. That report is 250 pages long & full of ideas. In this case (reading a very lengthy document), what is the most efficient & effective way to capture key ideas from it. Probably not by writing fleeting notes + permanent notes methodology. Correct? Because this approach may not be efficient at all for long documents. Any thoughts?

[@knw-seeker6836]

thanks for sharing your approach Its really interesting how people take notes individually Could recommend anything in terms of preparing for an exam?

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Totally, I'll add it to the list of video topics 👍👍

[@rajanvk939]

is it similar to the notion?

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Sort of, yes. The page-based system is similar, but the focus of Protolyst is the knowledge or "atom" layer, that let's you collect insights from across your documents and collate them together.

[@pipeg.3611]

Nice video, i am in the last stretch of my PhD and would have loved to have found this a few years back. Anyway, I noticed that when you show you notes on a table and assign categories and other properties, it resembles tagging said notes. I've never thought of tags as a table of variable columns but it was very nice to link the two concepts. Thanks for the nice video, I've been looking for a starting point to manage the scientific literature I have to deal with and this is a good tutorial for those interested. About you app, is the PDF reader included in the whole thing? I noticed that once you make a fleeting note on the paper it remains highlighted, however in ZK (afaik) you want to "upgrade" the fleeting notes to permanent ones and then delete those fleeting ones. In the video you don't show that, what happens if you delete that fleeting note associated to the paper?

[@anchitavijayaraghavan4809]

Can I add the paper that brought me to this paper?

[@mattiek7526]

Oh my gosh, you are so nice 😋

[@work_in_progress161]

Hi, I am going into my second degree and have a few quick questions that my teachers never answered. I will appreciate the clarification if you find the time. I have noticed that your citation was from a secondary source. Which one would you cite? I always get confused by going into the secondary source and trying to find what the original article got from it as sometimes authors use different words and their interpretation of the information differs. Also sometimes authors write a paragraph and put in only one caution at the end, how do I know if the rest from that source or only the last sentence preceding the citation is?

[@MontyTomm]

Hi, Ben. Is there a way to work offline with Protolyst, that perhaps syncs when a connection is available? Thanks

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Hey, I'll chat with the dev team on Tuesday and let you know 👍

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Hey so response from the dev team: Ric - 8 minutes ago Yes this is on the roadmap for this year. As a 'collaborative-first' platform, we have to consider edit conflicts that arise from multiple users editing offline, which is why we have not implemented offline capabilities to date. We'll keep you posted Feel free to join the Slack channel that just launched to chat directly to the devs join.slack.com/t/protolystcommunity/shared_invite/zt-1u9lm8q7q-0Dj261friyoTlsjI8F7mZA

[@theverasilva]

Hi, thank you for sharing! So, I know you mentioned this, but I just wanted to confirm, did you use 'Protolyst' in during your thesis writing? How did you go from your notes to writing?

[@quantumofknowledge1981]

Hi! Great question. Protolyst wasn't around when I was writing up my thesis. I used a very early version of the app that I had written. I'll do a video soon showing exactly how to go to from atoms and notes to literature reviews and thesis writing!

[@theverasilva]

@@quantumofknowledge1981 sounds good, thanks! I’m a third year PhD student and I’ve created my own note taking system in Notion and my notes are also called atoms and there’s a lot of other similar terminology around my system haha! Looking forward to the next video.

[@anitamaylone]

Is there a transcript to this

[@mariyam_bashir]

📌 (so i come back later, inshallah)

[@fredericktee9827]

Loving the tool so far! Could you point out how to do one thing though? I can't for the life of me figure out (or find instruction on) how to get have several columns on vertical view with the "Group by" option you have in 21:35 when you're showing the "To Do List" view.