For a long time, one of the most confusing parts about taking notes in Obsidian was figuring out how to classify them.

There's so much information. Books, podcasts, academic articles, and more.

Lucky for you, in this article, we are going to explore my classification system which will allow you to focus on learning instead of agonizing over what to call something.

Types of Notes In Your PKM System

One method I have found particularly helpful in classifying notes comes from Bianca's Build Your Knowledge Portfolio course.

She categorizes notes by input, idea, and output but we modified them for this course to fleeting notes, input notes, concept notes, and output notes.

I also add in fleeting notes.

✈️Fleeting Notes

Fleeting notes are passing thoughts that you have throughout your days.

They are usually one to two sentences long and exist only to remind you of an idea. I usually write them down in my daily note, but If I don't process them within two days of creation, I will probably forget what they mean.

📚Input Notes

Input notes are your notes from the various pieces of information you consume, like podcasts, academic papers, books, etc.

These are the highlights that come from Readwise into my Literature Notes folder that await to be summarized and processed into the other types of notes.

💡Concept Notes

Concept notes, usually called permanent notes but sometimes referred to as evergreen or atomic notes in the PKM community, are a specific type of note within a Zettelkasten or note-taking system.

I didn't like the original Zettelkasten term permanent note because it makes it sound like once you create them, they don't change, which goes against the principle of growing notes for understanding rather than for truth.

There are a couple of things that make them different from the previous two notes:

1. Ideally, they should focus on only one idea. One idea forms the emphasis of the note, and the other ideas are background contextual or supporting evidence. This means they can actually be quite large and have many ideas.
2. They should contain your own ideas. They can and should contain ideas--even quotes--from your literature notes but should have your own thinking inside.

✍️Output Notes

Finally, output notes are notes written for outside expression.

This doesn't mean they are the final expression. They are instead the intermediary between your PKM system and your medium of expression.

Often times, they just have the linear sequence of ideas that you will use to create your output. For example, your output note for an article might have the outline in Obsidian but the final written piece in a Google Docs.

In this course the most common output notes are assignments but if you got into creating YouTube videos, blog posts, or other content they could also become output notes. We differentiate between different output notes by tag.

How To Create Fleeting, Input, Concept Notes And Output Notes

Now that we know the four types of notes that go into creating a Zettelkasten system let's go through an example of the core workflow of the Zettelkasten.

✈️How To Create Fleeting Notes

Fleeting notes are passing thoughts that you have throughout your days.

They are usually one to two sentences long and exist only to remind you of an idea. I usually write them down in my daily note, but If I don't process them within two days of creation, I will probably forget what they mean.

Let's say you're having a conversation with one of your friends about spirituality.

You're discussing the spiritual path, how to begin meditating, breathing exercises, yoga, and journaling. They say something really interesting. In the West spiritual practice has been been made into a ego strengthening exercise. They want to do meditation to get better focus, do yoga to get better flexibility, or journal to get more happy rather than to dissolve the ego like spiritual practice is meant to do. This is called spiritual materialism.

You don't want to forget this idea, it resonates with you.

So you write what's called a fleeting note to remind you to write more about it later on when you have the time.

That's how fleeting notes get created and used.

📚How To Create Input Notes

To create input notes I generally write down my major takeaways and action items from the information I consume.

We differentiate input notes by tag.

For example your lecture notes have "#lecture" at the top of them.

And if your learning outside of class (go you!) you could use i/articles or i/book to differentiate between the different types of inputs. For example, say you wanted to learn what sources gave you the idea for a number of your essays in school. You could simple see what input notes connected to it.

I have the highlight capture app I mentioned earlier, ​Readwise​, automatically sync highlights into my Sources folder. This way whenever I'm highlighting a new piece of information it automatically shows up in Obsidian with a link back to the original source.

💡How To Create Concept Notes

Bianca calls these idea notes but we call them concept notes.

Concept notes are created from the mixing of your own ideas with those of your idea notes from podcasts, lectures, books, videos, etc.

The best way I have found to process input notes and create concept notes with them is to make it a habit.

So everyday, for 15 minutes usually in the morning I will go through my literature notes that need to be processed and create concept notes. This is the single highest leverage habit you can build toward your Zettelkasten. This seemingly small amount of time spent processing literature notes is how you create a notetaking system that scales across semesters.

Concept notes are stand alone notes that focus on one idea. My favorite way to create them is to word them like statements. For example, my concept note everlasting happiness comes from living a life in accordance with virtue.

This is an idea I had after reading Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Siddartha by Herman Hesse.

This note started out as a fleeting note but over time as I learned more about the idea and fleshed it out it became its own concept note.

Notice how it focuses only on one idea, that everlasting happiness comes from living a life in accordance with virtue and links out to other concept notes in my system. You can tell it's because more fleshed out because of the tag next to the status symbol up above. Concept notes start with "#🟥" than go to "#🟨" and finally to "#🟩" over time. I change these tags as I grow the note more and more to reflect it being more fleshed out and time tested.

This is the core process through which your Zettelkasten grows on a individual note level, fleeting notes and literature notes become concept notes which then grow and get fleshed out over time.

✍️How To Create Output Notes

How to create output notes can be explained more here:

Differentiating Note Status

Another thing I love to do in my PKM system is differentiating note status.

In other words, indicating how old and fleshed out a note is in my system. I like doing this because it gives me an idea for the level of quality a note is when I open it up as well as what I need to do to improve it.

TL;DR

There are four types of notes you can have in your Zettelkasten:

• Fleeting Notes: Fleeting notes are passing thoughts that you have throughout your days.
• Input Notes: Input notes are your notes from the various pieces of information you consume, like podcasts, academic papers, books, etc. These are the highlights that come from Readwise into my input notes folder that await to be summarized and processed into the other types of notes.
• Concept Notes: Concept notes, usually called permanent notes but sometimes referred to as evergreen or atomic notes in the PKM community, are a specific type of note within a Zettelkasten or note-taking system.
• Output Notes: Output notes are notes written for outside expression.