👨‍💻 How to use your notes for research

Everyone does research on some level.

Maybe you are writing about a new topic. Maybe you are doing market research or gathering niche industry knowledge for your career. Or maybe you are just researching Airbnbs for your next trip.

Whatever your research is for, you want to get the most out of it.

This email will show you:

1. How to collect and save information

2. How to easily organize your research

3. How to search and “chat” with your research notes

1. Collecting and saving information

Start by listing out each information channel you want to source information from. Most likely it will be a link containing an article or video of some kind, but it could also be a book or lecture.

Map out each main source and then get as specific as possible. Try to narrow it down to a platform you’ll be saving from.

video → YouTube video

link → Chrome browser

book → Kindle book

Next, list how you’ll capture each one. This is worth putting some thought into. What is the most frictionless way to get information from the source into your notes?

Here is a sample list:

Some helpful videos on information capture:

• How to save links and Kindle books with highlights to your notes

• How to take video notes using a transcriber

• How to take podcast notes

2. Organizing your research

After you save something, organize it into your research project. There are a few ways to do this.

#1 – Use tags

If you are working on a larger research project that will entail multiple or many notes, you might create a tag that you can add to each note. If I’m doing research on B2G sales for my company, for example, I might use #b2gresearch.

If you add this tag to all of the notes related to this research, you’ll be able to easily pull up a collection of them.

#2 – Use backlinks

You can accomplish something similar using only backlinks. Using the same example above, we would create a backlinked note called [[B2G Sales]]. Any time you save something related to the topic, just backlink to that note.

If you find an article that breaks down the B2G sales process, you can write “Article on [[B2G Sales]]”

It will then show up in the incoming backlinks section of the dedicated note.

One downside with this method is a lack of separation between general and research specific knowledge on a subject. For that reason it’s generally best to go with tags, but in practice you should always be backlinking entities. That means you’ll likely be using something more of a hybrid approach.

You could of course create a dedicated [[B2G Sales Research]] note, but if you are doing any sort of extensive research the note will quickly get messy.

3. Using the information you collect

After you’ve saved information to your notes from a range of sources, you’ll need to format it. This will likely be for some output like an article, proposal or project. All of these will require you digesting and utilizing what you’ve saved.

Resurfacing your saved information

If you want to search the collection of research notes you’ve saved, you can filter just those notes before searching them. In Reflect, you can select the tag and choose fuzzy or semantic search to find bits of information without knowing the exact words.

If you used backlinks, you can use the “linked to” filter.

Chat with your saved research

After filtering your notes, you can then select the chat button to chat with those specific notes using AI. This is particularly useful for developing your thinking and understanding around a new topic. You can ask questions and interact with the information through a chatbot interface that uses your specific notes as context.

Use AI to organize saved text

If you transcribed something or made many highlights in an article or book, you’ll be left with a giant block of text. Apart from being searchable, this is not all that helpful. You can highlight any text on a note and have AI format it for you.

AI is great for things like:

• Key takeaways

• Summaries

• Developing counterarguments

• Writing analogies

• Drafting article outlines

• A lot more!

Just select the text and click on the ✨ icon, or use the cmd j shortcut. Then select the prompt you want to use. We also have some custom prompts you can copy and save here.

If you haven’t used the AI assistant before, we have a video on how to use the AI assistant in your notes here.