Taking notes on people + behind the scenes footage (Patreon)

I love people, and my Obsidian vault reflects that. This video is all about why, when, and how I take notes on people in different situations. This isn't for everyone, and I totally understand if my system is a bit overkill for most situations, but I've found it useful for getting to know people and for making sure I stay in contact with those I really connect with and want in my life.

Note: This video will be unlisted until Friday, when I have to mark it as private shortly before it is published for everyone to see. If you try to watch it and get a "Private video" error, you've probably caught it in that small window. Wait a few hours and try again-- it will be published shortly.

Behind the Scenes: I often get asked about my process for creating a video. I do want to address the entire process at some point, but I thought I would start by showing you the filming part. This is the full, raw, unedited video of the video on taking notes on people. Be warned: it's long, and it contains all my mistakes.

Livestreams

This week, I did two livestreams!

On Monday, I interviewed Bianca Pereira about taking notes for research. Here were my takeaways:

• Research isn't necessarily academic; anyone who applies critical thinking to solve a problem is a researcher.
• Bianca thinks visual thinking is extremely useful for research, especially because she uses visual indicators like the distance between notes, color, and shapes to give notes meaning and context.
• Bianca calls her research process the "one-pass reading strategy", which involves:Creating one note per source and immediately taking manual notes in her own words as she reads the source so that whenever she stops, she already has notes.
  Creating idea notes (or atomic notes) from the source note.
  
• Bianca's process de-emphasizes highlighting and starts with her writing notes in her own words. She believes highlighting encourages information hoarding, rather than learning.

Today, I interviewed Andy Polaine, my D&D 5e DM, and compared notes with him about the same TTRPG campaign and the same session. Here were some things we talked about:

• Andy's DM style is improv-heavy and inspired by the Lazy GM, Sly Flourish. His notes reflect that philosophy.
• Andy primarily uses folders for organization due to concerns regarding futureproofness, whereas I use links and Dataview and have no sub-folders.
• Andy has Dice Roller tables for random generation, but he also embeds existing websites as iframes within Obsidian.
• When a situation calls for many moving parts, monsters, or factions that the party might encounter, Andy uses an Adversary Roster to keep track of where everyone is.
• Andy uses Canvas to display multiple statblocks at a time and be able to zoom in individually when necessary. He said he initially had performance issues with this approach, but those seem to be resolved now.

Project updates

• nvdh-vault: I updated the Person and Daily templates in the vault to align with what I showed in the preview video, Taking notes on people in Obsidian.
• obsidian-playbook: I've updated it with recent videos, and I'm also starting to add captions to each video. It's becoming a useful database of content I've already created!

To access these vaults, check out this list of Patreon perks-- they'll always have the most updated links and passwords for the vaults.

Obsidian news

Obsidian v1.2 has been released as an insider build! If you're on the Catalyst plan, make sure you have automatic updates turned on if you want to receive insider builds automatically.

I've been playing around with it for two weeks. Here's a Patreon-only early preview of it, though the issues I describe in it have been resolved in the current build.

Have a great weekend, all! I appreciate you.