I Never Thought I’d Take Notes This Way

when you think of digital notes youprobably think notes folders Pages linksin other words you think of text butthere's been a quiet Revolution going onin note taking see digital notes have aflaw when they're out of sight they'realso out of mind unlike physical spacesmost digital notes don't have any kindof spatial memory a digital note isn'tplaced over here or living over there orbehind that a digital note is just inthe app somewhere I've been living inEvernote for the last seven years butlately I've been exploring Newnote-taking Frontiers and today I'mchecking out millinotes I'm going todesign a building a second brand stylemillinote workspace step by step fromscratch then I'm going to share my topthree visual note-taking practices I cansee myself using in my own second brainin the future[Music]so how does millinote work once you signup you'll immediately notice that you'rein a massive open canvas view withnothing to See For Miles Don't Panicjust click on the upper left or doubleclick anywhere to start making notes anote in millinote looks like a floatingbox you can move around and add text toyou can format that text in a variety ofways add a color or colored bars or picka different kind of note from thesidebar such as an images note or abunch of different types of media butthe main way of organizing millinote issomething called boards when we think ofnotes apps like Evernote or obsidian wethink of folders which are pretty muchjust containers to put similar notes into help you find them again and if youwant you can put irrelevant foldersinside those folders the informationlives in the notes you create and thefolders exist to store and organize thenotes but you also have apps like notionthat combine the idea of a note and afolder into something called a page apage has information it's a traditionalnote but it can also store other Pagesby creating a new page inside that pageMiller note boards are kind of likepages in notion when you create notes ona board it stores that information sothe board itself is one big note but youcan create new boards inside thoseboards like a folder but there's one keydifference from other apps you've got acrazy amount of Freedom instead of asingle vertical space outline or fixedcolumns your information can liveanywhere on the board or even be stackedup on top of itself so let's create ourfirst board by dragging it out of thetoolbar on the left obviously I'm ThiagoForte so my first board will be calledprojects and next we'll do areasresources and archives as you can seethe boards are Auto assigned a color andan icon to match the board based on itsname but let's go over to our lefttoolbar and recolor these so they lookextra appealing nice I like this muchbetter and then just for fun we'll leftclick drag to select all four of theseicons now right click and select connectwith lines and now if we move theseboards around they'll still stayconnected so we have four boards thatare ready to put content inside of thema project board for the things I'mactively working on that have a clearend goal an areas board for theimportant stuff in my life I need tokeep track of and maintain a resourcesboard for anything that might be usefulin the future and an archives board forthings I don't expect to look at againbut want to keep around just in case nowthese look just like folders right nowbut since this is a visual space I couldadd all kinds of stuff here like a noteabout what each of these mean or imagesthat get me excited to open these up butfor now I think what I'll do is just usethe draw feature on the left to remindmyself of my prioritization here forprojects I'm going to check these weeklythese are important to keep top of mindand refresh regularly my areas I'llreview monthly or whenever it feelsimportant resources I'll only review asneeded and archives are storage okay Ithink we're ready for the next layerlet's double click on the projects boardnow we're inside a new board if I wantto get to the previous one by the way Ican hit command and left bracket orforward bracket to jump back and forthor look at the top of my screen to seemore information about where the boardI'm looking at lives so one way to add alittle more structure to a board iscreating columns wherever you like onyour board let's click on columns in theleft toolbar and drag one out into ourspace we can click into the column toadd a title I'm calling this one activeprojects if you're familiar with paraprojects are anything you're workingtoward with a clear goal and a time tocomplete a buy so let's make this extraclear and create a big visual reminder anew note up here and we can color it soit stands out a bit and then if we clickon the note and hover on the rightcorner we can click this Arrow to createa connector line between these notes youcan change the ends of the connector toBe an Arrow or a dotted line but I thinkI'm going to leave it as a normal lineright now this column is a bit empty solet's add a project here we'll createanother board and drag it into thecolumn so that it clicks into placeright here one of my projects right nowis tracking our YouTube videoperformance so let's call this UTMtracking parentheses YouTube conversionsonce we click into this project board wecan start adding content so I've added acolumn here because really the UTMproject is being spearheaded by ourvideo producer Geo so I added hisproposal and some of the details here aswell as a cool image of him as part ofhis proposal Geo shared this article soI'll go ahead and add that onto theboard by the way whenever you copy andpaste a link it's stored in thisunsorted area on the right side whichyou can close or open this is a good wayto just hold on to notes that you aren'tsure where you want to place yet onceit's here I can drag it out into theboard and then connect it to the initialproposal you'll see that itautomatically pulls in the thumbnail andsummary too okay course in the processof reading through the article I usedhighlighting to note the most importantpoints I'm going to do a form ofprogressive summarization and grab themost important highlights and put themon my board either as text so I can editit or just screenshots of the page thatI copy and paste into the board to dothis extra fast and I noticed there's aUTM Builder Link in that article so I'llpull that out here as well since that'san important resource if we move forwardadditionally let's add a few actionitems I'll go to the toolbar and dragout this item which creates a to-do notenow I've added a few action items fromGeo and from the article I just read Ican leave comments and tag others tohelp if they have access to my board orI can even just share a public versionof this and enable commenting I can justlay out the information in an intuitiveway and even leave little notes orguidelines for myself or a futurecollaborator let's go back to ourprojects board and add some more contentas we start to add projects we mightstart to get a little too ambitious ornot ambitious enough so let's addanother note to remind me of myphilosophy of projects thiago's rule aimfor 10 to 15 active projects these areprojects I'm committed to completing inthe near term this is a good reminder asI'll actually be able to see visuallythe amount of projects I have here as Iadd them and there's this nice littlereminder up here of the number of boardsI have in this column so it's evenfaster to evaluate how many projects Ihave in motion I'm going to go ahead andcreate the rest of my kanban as well asa few more projects you'll see there's asequence here from future projects toupcoming projects active projects thencompleted and archived projects to keepthese categories clear I've added littledescriptions of their purpose as notesthat I drag into the columns thenwhenever a project is ready to start Ican pull it from the upcoming projectsor when a project is complete I can moveit to completed projects here's one I'mworking on with my team a potentialreshoot of one of our courses if youlook at this we have a high levelvisualization of our annual calendar andwhere this project could fit in I'vedropped in images of a blank calendarand then used the draw tool to outlinekey dates and timings I could easily addmore details for each calendar eventhere or whatever else is relevant forthe project as it develops let's go backto our home page now and click into ourareas here's how I've set up my areasyou'll notice it's similar to theprojects but it's a lot more free forminstead of a clear sequence thatprojects move through areas are groupedmore by interest and type and they'remeant to inspire me or remind me of mypriorities not keep me laser focused onwhat I have to do immediately it's moreabout habits and daily practices a kindof mindfulness if I click into an areathere might be structure and specificitems or things to manage or it mightjust be visual inspiration or even aworkflow of how to think about aparticular aspect of my life it's aboutthe intersection of creativity andproductivity where those two meet andcomplement one another by the way youcan put one board in multiple places allyou have to do is right click it andselect create a shortcut for this boardthis will allow you to put a relevantproject in both your active projectsboard and then also have it accessibleunder an area this helps out when youthink something should be in multiplespots at once after using millinodeshere are the three features I find mostinteresting about its visual note-takingphilosophy first I love the combinationof a free form structure on a page levelwhile structure enabled on a folderlevel in apps like logseek and obsidiansometimes there's not enough structureit's free form but it takes work toorganize things whereas in apps likenotion or Evernote there's so muchstructure that you have to dosignificant pre-planning millinote is agreat balance of the Best of Both Worldssecond ease of sharing with externalcollaborators it's very easy to addcollaborators or share a public versionof the boards you're working on it'sinstantaneous has a notification systemand feels great a third in generalvisual formatting makes note-taking muchmore accessible to others in the firstplace visual organization makes thingsso much more digestible and moreinspirational for you or for others andit's clear that features are only addedto Milano when they work and are builtinto the product at a deep level neverjust hacked on to increase the featureset so if you'd like to check out Milanogo ahead and click the link in thedescription and get started organizingyour visual notes today thanks forwatching and good luck on building yourvery own second braingood[Music]