Jeremy Caplan
Using our notes and finding old material in our notes. So that's the subject for today, and we'll wait a few minutes for people to join in, and then we'll kick with the conversation. Hey, Mike, how are you?
Mike Reilley
Good. Jeremy, how are you?
Jeremy Caplan
Good. I'm just sending you a cohost invite for some reason earlier when I tried to do that, it wouldn't let me do that, but now it lets me, cause I guess you're already a participant. I don't know if that makes any difference or not.
Mike Reilly
Yeah, I was able to log into the workflow too.
Jeremy Caplan
Okay. Great. Yeah, I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure if there's a good way to share a link within the space itself without making it a public tweet.
Mike Reilly
Yeah, they need to add that. That's the issue with Clubhouse, too, is they haven't had anything like that. You could share a document. If they do, they would really have something, I think.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. I'm surprised that there's no simple method for that. It just seems like something everyone would need, but maybe on its way later. I don't know. Yeah. I set up the recording for this space also as an experiment in two ways. One is through the Twitter Spaces has its own built in.
Mike Reilly
Yeah, I saw the little icon.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. And then there's also something called Backstage By Headliner. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's basically a mechanism for recording Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces sessions. The link is just backstagebyheadliner. Com. So we'll see if there's any difference in those recordings or if there's any benefit to having it in a different way. So Bob, Sasha is here. Bob, good to see you. I don't know if you're able to chat or not. Either way, that's totally fine. We're just getting going here. I'll invite you to speak in case you'd like to. I don't know if Bob is a colleague of mine. Mike here at the J school.
Mike Reilly
Oh, okay. Hey, nice to meet you.
Jeremy Caplan
And is our all star video Prof at the J school?
Mike Reilly
Cool. Yeah, they're pouring it.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. What's the newest thing in your world of tools today, Mike?
Mike Reilly
Yeah. I put up a lot of stuff just here in the last week or so. News Nodes has a little Omacron tracker. It comes from breaking news online. Bno News. I'll add the link to my what's new page into our little note making our little workflow. What else do we have in here? Press Mob, which is a search engine to find journals in orders. That's a really cool one. I played around with that a little bit to some of my classes, and that's about it. I've been writing a book on data journalism, so I've kind of been down the rabbit hole last several days working on those chapters. It'll be out on Rutland in 2023, but we're making progress.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, that's exciting.
Mike Reilly
Those are the big ones. It's kind of interesting that you mentioned the tools. I went into the Journalist Toolbox social media page. I started to kind of reorganize it a little bit. It kind of started to expand some of the social media tools a little bit into different categories. I've got one for TikTok now, one for Insta, Snapchat, Facebook and so on and dropped a couple of training videos in there. Also just dropped a new training video on the homepage of journalstoolbox. Org on how to scrape data out of real time stock quotes and data out of Google Finance, which is kind of a cool little technique. I've been doing some of those trainings for newsrooms around the country, and it's been very well received.
Jeremy Caplan
That's neat. One thing that Mike and I are trying out today for Bob and Vanessa and others. We're trying out using a shared workflow note to take live notes and share live notes, and if you're interested, you can see what that looks like. If you're at a computer, it's just Bitly. Combitaly. Com Jcnote for short for just create notes. Bitly. Com JC notes. And that should take you to this shared workflow document and workflow if you haven't used it is just a bullet structured note taking application that lets you start with a bullet point and then create an infinite number of other bullet points and nest them and rearrange them and so forth and share them and collaborate on them. So we're just creating a little live note to document what we're talking about in this session. And so far we have sections for some tools for note making, some resources on note, making some tips for effective note making and taking, and then some other resources that Mike has been focusing on, which he's added to this. And I'm curious, Mike, since we're talking about notes today, what your kind of default go to is? So when you're just sitting down to get ideas down out of your head, what are your kind of default apps that you use for that, Mike?
Mike Reilly
Yeah, notion has always been my go to. I was just putting a little note on there. They keep disappearing. I think after a few minutes.
Jeremy Caplan
I moved the Notion note just into the section on Tools right above it. So you'll see it's? It's within other Bullet Points video.
Mike Reilly
I dropped it just disappeared. But that's cool. Yeah, I'll second notion. It's a great app I use that one Evernote took me back a few years. I used that one for a very long time. It was really kind of the go to for a long time. One of the first apps I probably put on my phone. Ever know it was it's been around for a while. So that's another big one for me as well. And just the simple Notes app that comes with my iphone. I use that one quite often. I just like it because it keeps me organized. I keep a lot of my notes in there about maintenance on my cars, things like that. It just keeps me organized. Those are the big ones workflow. I just started playing around with Rome. I've used a few times too. Some of my students really like Rome. I know they use that for some shared documents for what they were using for projects last semester.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, it's been an interesting space over the last couple of years. It's really expanded a lot in terms of the different kinds of tools for notes. Obviously, the big players like Apple and Google still have their default apps and Evernote kind of had a comeback last year with a new overhaul of its kind of core app. But essentially it was the same thing. And the Apple Notes is essentially still the same thing. It's a little bit easier to use on an ipad to sort of get started note with a sort of finger shortcut. There's a few little tweaks, but those old noting tools I feel like have basically been pretty static for a long time. And so there's been this big move, I think, towards new note taking and new note making apps. And I use that term, by the way, note making, because I feel like a lot of what we're doing is not just taking notes on other people's material, which is kind of notetaking. It's also kind of making our own notes about things, which is a slightly different thing anyway. But I think the new note taking and note making apps like Notion like Rome and Mem and to some extent now workflow now that has these new features. I think they've changed the paradigm a little bit. Instead of putting something a note into a folder and having a hierarchical system, I think people are starting to move in this direction of having an infinite canvas of notes and just kind of start typing and you tag things and by tagging and back linking things they're connected to other things. You don't have to and you're relying on search. And so you don't really have to worry about filing in the way that people used to think about filing. And I think that's a big change. And obviously it's not something people are all overnight comfortable with or used to. It'll take some time, but I think it's a more logical paradigm, at least from my perspective, because one note might have to do with ten different things, and one bullet point might have to do with ten different topics. It might have to do with a person with a book with a place with a subject and to put it in one particular notebook. To me, seems like an artificially limiting approach, which is why I like these new kinds of tools.
Bob Sacha
This is Bob here, and thanks for letting me join. I use one called Obsidian, which is very similar to Notion, but I would love to both hear Jeremy and Mike talk a bit about how you sort of think about organizing. It's pretty clear that you can just open it up and start typing. But how you get around to things and back to things, for instance.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. I'm really interested in hearing your experience with Obsidian, Bob, because I haven't used it as much as I've used these others. But just in terms of what you're asking about, the kind of structure I think of it as having, basically, like, four core ways of organizing things. One is by date. Right. So if I'm looking at today, I want to know what I have to do today. I want to block out everything else and just think about, okay, what's happening today and what notes do I need for today? So that's, like, an important frame. And in Rome, you have a daily note, basically. And in craft, you also have that in memory. You have that in a lot of these tools, you have kind of like a daily note where it's just kind of by default. That's the starting point.
Bob Sacha
Obsidian The same thing with Obsidian When you open it up, it just pops up with today's date in the notes. So that's a similar thing.
Jeremy Caplan
So that's the first level. And I think that's familiar to people in terms of just thinking in terms of time. I think we're all probably thinking about what we have to do on a given day. The second one is about people. And so I think, like, Bob, you and I have had many conversations on all sorts of different topics and collaborations. And Mike, you and I also have. And so with both of you, I have a note with your essentially what I would consider a note. You could also call it a page for both of you. And so whenever I have a conversation with you or you mention something to me or resource, or we collaborate on something, I'll basically be on my notes page. My just general Internet canvas note page on Rome, which doesn't really matter where you initially put the note. It just matters how you tag the note or what Tags you put into it. And so I'll tag it with Bob, and then I'll also tag it with new video software or, like, new technique for shooting or editing. And so then basically, whenever I want to recall something that you and I have talked about, Bob, I can just go to that page, which is the same on Obsidian. It's the same on Mam. It's the same on Rome. It's the same on really any of these tools that have backlink capability. And that's to me. Fantastic, because I don't always remember how else to look for it. I'll just remember. Oh, it was something Bob mentioned, but I won't necessarily remember the name of it or how to spell it or exactly when we talked about it. I'll just associate it with you or Mike, the same thing I'll associate with something you presented in one of the Google tool sessions. And all I have to know is that you are the one who did it. And then I can go to your page and I can scan through the back links to things that you've told me about or that I've written down in Association with you. So that's the second category. So there's date and there's person. Then to me, there's kind of core topics. So like teaching is something I'm thinking a lot about and trying to work on and learn about when something is useful as a resource, or when Bob gives me a great idea, or Mike or you or anyone else gives me a great idea about teaching or read a great book about teaching. I'll tag it with that backlink, it with that. And so then the teaching page then becomes this kind of topic page with all these great topics. So to me, those are the three kind of core ones. Sometimes they'll be an occasion for a fourth, which is either a place or an organization. So, for example, something to do with my work, the Newark J School, or something to do with something about my apartment or other kinds of, like places or organizations would be a fourth kind of category, a different sort of entity. But basically those four pretty much worked for me in terms of structuring things. And then when I'm looking up things, I think that's part of what you were asking about. Bob, too. When I'm looking up things, I'm basically just punching in those backlinks. So I'm just punching in your name, like into Rome, or I'm punching in Mike's name into Rome, or I'm punching in the NJS, which is my shortcut for Newmark J school, or I'm punching in apartment. If I'm thinking about trying to remember all the stuff I have to do around the apartment or anything like that or teaching any of those core kind of words. And that kind of basic search functionality works pretty well with some of these tools, like with workflow in Rome, and pretty much any of the tools. You can also start the key pages. And I find there's like an Ad 20 rule where it's basically 20% of the stuff you create in notes that you're going to refer to 80% of the time. So like, the main pages, the main people, the main pages, I'll star those. And so I don't even have to search for them. I could just click on the Sidebar and pull them up. And to me, that creates a really pretty simple workflow to find stuff quickly and easily. One advanced feature that Rome has that I haven't figured out in workflow. It might work in workflow as well. It may work in other tools to some extent. I'm not sure if it works in Obsidian, it might is doing kind of like multiple sort of queries, basically, I guess, is what they're called where you can say I want things that Bob has told me that has to do with software. I want things that Mike has told me that have to do with maps. And so you can sort of, like, basically just create a couple of different filters, basically, and just get those notes. And that's kind of handy for narrowing the search process a little bit further. But anyway, I'll stop there. That's kind of my overall structure and approach.
Bob Sacha
Cool that's. Thanks. So on a page, if you're listening to a lecture or something, then you would have sentence hashtag, sentence hashtag. Sort of like that word.
Jeremy Caplan
Exactly. Like right now, if I were doing this, if I were taking a note on this, it would be tagged. Bob, it would be tagged. Mike. It would be tagged Twitter spaces because I may look back way. I knew this topic came up into Twitter spaces, but I don't remember who was there. Let's say yes, it would be tagged all those things to be tagged the topic if we're talking about teaching or if we're talking about tools. And then once in a while, there's another feature which is pretty new to me over the past couple of years, which is this idea of a mirrored note. And the concept is that like if we're talking about back linking, let's say, and that's like a concept that I want to figure out how to explain or how to summarize in a sentence. And I know I'm going to do that in other contexts in the future. I might create a mirrored note about that, which is basically like it's basically like a bullet point that is kind of like the essence of what I think about that or what I want to say about that or an edited version of that. And then if that subject comes up again, let's say I'm writing something like three weeks from now, and I know I'm going to talk about back linking. I can basically pull in either embed or pull in that mirrored note, and then I can edit it and it will edit in all those places that it's appeared. It's a bit like using text expander or something where you kind of have a shortcut and then it expands into the same text that you often end up using. Except it's for having, like, a kind of single point of truth for that particular topic. If that makes sense that you can kind of mirror and put into any note you want to at any point. So that's one new thing that I've been trying to use as well.
Jeremy Caplan
Bob, how have you been finding obscene or what's the typical use case for you?
Bob Sacha
The same idea for me is to sort of it just pops up in the day and then trying to keep things writing notes in there. I still have a sort of bad habit of small pieces of paper because I thought that it would be great. But every time I could accomplish a job. I could throw it out. But then the small pieces of paper have begun to pile up. And so now I have small pieces of paper with close bins for topics. And so I'm trying to get away from that and into getting them more into sort of something that's easier to search. And that's part of my task for this week is to take all the paper and close things and put it into that into Obsidian. I would love to, Mike. I don't know if you're still there. I'd love to hear your approach to all these things as well, too.
Mike Reilly
Really, for me, it just depends on the project. I use them for smaller class projects where I get students started on them. They're doing the final project or something like that and start tagging them on various things that I run across a tour, like to a story about COVID or something I think would help them some data and things like that. I just haven't taken it and expanded the process. Something like the book project or something like that where I'm still kind of in the Google Docs world there. But I think back to how much easier things have become since the days of us emailing notes to ourselves. Remember that attaching documents to emails as ways of transferring them and things like that. But that's how I think through it. It's pretty much smaller project based stuff and a way to get them something very quickly and not clicking an email button and giving them a place to collaborate, whether it's on no baking tool, whatever, as long as it gives them a nice little list of something and some structure to it that's going to get them through to the end.
Bob Sacha
So you're passing this along. You're creating a thing for students as well that you're all in together.
Mike Reilly
Yeah, I like having the collaboration tools started a few years ago when we were using Google Docs and things like that, but I try to get them everything from Jamboard or notion. I've given a couple of groups last semester, as I said before, some of them take to it. Some of them don't. It's kind of like the chat apps. Some of them like to order a little, organize a little we chat the class just so they can kind of discuss things without me in there. Sometimes they'll put me on, but a lot of times it's just them. So it's a way to get them structured and thinking about organizing and thinking through a problem or a project in a more digital way than that type of thing.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, I think that idea of using it with students is really interesting, Mike, and just even seeing this workflow and other kind of live notes on how students respond to it, I think it really works well to have students in the document live together. Bob, you and I have done this together, too. I just feel like people are able to put in their ideas even when they don't want to put up their hand and talk. Or it just like gets everyone engaged at the same time in the same, you know, building something together collectively in real time and then having a resource afterwards is super valuable. Welcome to Lisa. By the way, I see Lisa joined. We're talking notetaking and note making and different tools and workflows that we use for that in our own personal workflow and our own kind of teaching. So welcome your input on that and how you kind of think about your notes and how you make notes. One other thing I wanted to say about these different tools in terms of notes is that I feel like there is, in a way an inverse relationship between the complexity and the ease of use. The more complicated is the more likely it is to be a turn off when you're just wanting to dive in. And so one of the things about workflow that I really like is that it just doesn't have that layer of complexity that a lot of the tools do it's, I think much more inviting to get going. And that's a big plus.
Mike Reilly
One of the reasons students love it is it's plug and play. It's very intuitive to them. Jamboard for brainstorming, too, has caught on with them a little bit. But if you're getting into a lot of submenus and things like that with them, as far as picking up something quickly, then it sort of drags out a little bit. But that's one of the appealing things about it.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. I think also when there's an individual or two who has a little difficulty that can throw off a group. So as an example of that, you mentioned Jamboard, which I think is great and super intuitive. And I was playing around with fig jam with one group recently, and a couple of people most people were like, Got it, picked it up. It has some additional bells and whistles that Jamboard doesn't have, which I wanted to explore, and most people were right on it. But a couple of people were sort of messing around with zooming in and moving stuff around in kind of an unusual way. And that basically threw things off for a lot of other people in the group. And so I think that tools that allow for that extra functionality are often great in many ways. But then there's also that risk that a couple of students either don't get it and can't figure it out, or they kind of hijack some aspect of the exercise and distract people. Mike, I'm curious with notion since you mentioned that one as well. What sort of been your primary use for that if you found it to be useful when you're kind of organizing data and moving things around in sort of table formats, or if you've used it for handouts or other kinds of purposes?
Mike Reilly
Yeah, I've done some handouts and collaboration work on it. It's interesting that you mentioned the tables and data work with it. I've used Air table and things like that. They do have some workflow tools in there as well. I tried that a little bit with my advanced data class last semester, but I might give Notion with my advanced data class this semester. I'm now teaching it two semesters a year, as opposed to one because we're getting more students flowing through the UIC program and getting the prerequisites in place. It's one of those things that I'll throw it out to them and just kind of see what sticks. It's interesting you guys were mentioning to using it as these tools as kind of in class thing. People that are shy and won't speak up in class will do the back channels, Twitter hashtag chatter, or they'll jump in and do something on Notion. So I might try it that way a little bit with this advanced data class, but I also want to dig into it a little bit more content development tool as well. I think it could be promising in that respect.
Jeremy Caplan
Actually, Mike, if you do try using Notion for the data class, I would also recommend potentially considering Koda as part of that, because Koda has a nice feature where if you're creating data and putting it into a table and quota has a lot of formulas. Notion has formulas too. But one thing that's neat about Koda, which I don't think you can do with Notion is that after you create the table, you can basically have text underneath it. And within the text, you can use a formula to basically update the text live. So, for example, if the table has a formula that calculates the average of something, you can then have text below it. That says the average so far, the average whatever covered Positivity rate across the state is blank so far, and the blank can be pulled from that table basically just with like a little formula, basically, which is kind of unique. I think I don't know that it's that easy to do with other sort of off the shelf tools like that. And I don't think Notion does that. As far as I can tell.
Mike Reilly
I'll give Koda a little spin. It's interesting. It's one of those that I've added to the toolbox site, but to use it.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, it's a bit complicated. I find initially like it has a lot of power, and there's, like, a lot of different kinds of formulas and stuff you can put into their tables, so it can take a little bit of extra, like, initial investment of figuring it out. But it's quite handy in a lot of respects. One thing I like about it in particular lately is just the ability to put multiple pages within a document with Notion. You kind of have to create a separate document in a way, or you can create sections within a page. But it's not as easy to create these kind of like pages within a document as it is with Koda. So for teaching purposes, I find Koda useful because you can create different pages either for different topics or for each for one week, each class in a series of classes, or for each person in a class without having to create 20 different documents, which is always a nuisance with Google Docs or with other tools. So that's one nice thing about Koda, and you can also embed other documents in it, so you can put in a Google Doc within it or Google spreadsheet within the coded Doc. So it's pretty flexible that way, which is kind of nice. Bob, I just wanted to go back to one thing you were saying earlier about those paper notes. There's a post that I linked to in my Wonder Tools post today about workflow, which was about using, like, working analog and digital together, basically. And I think it's a really important subject because I don't know about you all, but I feel like it's pretty hard to be exclusively paper, and it's pretty hard to be exclusively digital. I mean, I don't know. I just always find I'm writing some stuff down on paper. And so figuring out the routine of, like, how do you get stuff from on paper back to digital and sort of do that efficiently? That, to me, is like a really interesting question. I'm curious if people have thoughts on that. I'm looking at my office at, like, an old stack of paper notebooks that I still have never brought into the digital realm. This is how geeky I've been about this. I even got this Evernote scanner. It's like a physical scan snap scanner for digital paper. I mean, for paper to scan into digital, but somehow that didn't magically make those notes digital because they're in old notebooks. But anyway, I'm curious if people have thoughts. Anyone has a thought on that on taking their paper notes and making them digital and welcome, by the way, to Jimmy and Maria, Victoria, feel free to chime in to the conversation at any point if you'd like to.
Bob Sacha
I still really like sitting in a chair with a reporter's notebook. The other thing, too, is I always have, like, a piece of paper in my pocket, and so somebody will say something that's like, Whoa, you definitely have to watch this or you should do this or something. And I kind of feel, I don't know, socially, it's a little less aggressive than taking your phone out because everybody sees you take your phone out, you go like, oh, he's simply tweeting or ignoring me or something. You just scribble that and stuff it back into my pocket. But like you, Jeremy, I think the trick is then how do I get that into a, you know, a digital form where it's quicker and easier to pull out? I'm going to check out your wonder tools and see what you suggest on that, too.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah. Just to second your point, Bob, about the social awkwardness of like pulling up a screen when you're talking with someone. We have to do it sometimes, but I agree with you. It's much more comfortable. It feels, at least to me much more comfortable when there's just paper involved. And it's not like I'm bringing a screen that's going to break the flow of the conversation or change the dynamic. And there are also just times where we're screened out, or at least I'll speak for myself. There are times when I'm screened out and I've just been looking at a screen all day and it's bright and I'm just like getting distracted or there's too many windows or I just want to look at paper and feel paper and focus on a piece of paper. And so then the question is, how do you kind of work out a routine whereby you bring in that into the digital realm in a way that's useful and not just busy work or kind of time wasting? And this post just as a summary of this post. It's actually by Mike Sturmat at workflow, and he doesn't have any magical answers, but talks about using essentially a bullet Journal style thing. Like writer Carol is the founder of the so called Bullet Journal, which is based around this idea of a daily log and basically just kind of like taking a particular time. It's almost like the Weekly Review and the getting things Done methodology. It's just like setting aside a weekly time, essentially to look over the notes and put the key ones into whatever digital system you have. So it's not rocket science. It's nothing terribly shocking, but he gives a couple of examples of simple templates that you can use to make it a little more efficient, I guess. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this in terms of taking paper notes and making them digital or a way that you've done that way that you've experimented with doing that or something that works for you? One other thing that I found helpful along the way is figuring out some kind of like starring system coloring system. I know journalists tend to have different approaches for this, like they'll color facts with one kind of a symbol or color. They'll color quotes with another similar color. They'll color things that are questions that are yet to be answered, another color or another symbol, and then that sort of speeds up the process or acts as a memory jogger. Later, when you're trying to relook at the notes or digitize the notes, I don't know if anyone has any tricks or systems that you find useful for. That for me. Whenever I look at the notes later, I often have trouble remembering them. If I haven't quoted them in some way. Mike, did you have a thought on that?
Mike Reilly
Yeah. One thing that comes to mind, I use this. It was a few months ago. I was doing a lot of trainings on the Google Journalist studio in Google Pinpoint. If you have a picture, maybe of some notes or something like that, or somebody sends you. Sometimes public documents come to you as written notes, handwritten notes. Still, that somebody shot a picture of or scanned his PDF. You can load those images into Google Pinpoint for free, and it will extract and basically transcribe the text out of the image, including JPEGs, which is really cool. You have to clean it up. It's a lot like any OCR software. It requires a little bit of cleanup on the back end, but could save you a lot of time if you're trying to pull that out. A lot of documents I know at IRA conference every year Nightcar, they flash and tools that do similar things or some other ones out there. But I tested the pinpoint one a few times in some trainings, and it's worked pretty well. It requires some cleanup, but not too bad.
Bob Sacha
Yes. I just wanted to say that Jeremy onto something that did that on your desktop, but I'm pretty sure that the latest version of iOS the camera. I don't know if you noticed that if you pose it over something that's written or Typed, it gives you a series of yellow brackets, and then when you touch that, it'll actually read the text and copy it to the clipboard. The idea of doing it that way is really brilliant. It's super fast rather than having to Retype them. I never put those two ideas together, but on your phone that works with the camera too.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, that's a great point, Bob, actually. And that's something I think I really need to explore some more. My iphone is already a few years old, so I don't think it's up.
Bob Sacha
I have an iphone X.
Jeremy Caplan
Okay, so we're on the same one. Has that worked for you? Have you tried that yet?
Bob Sacha
Or not yet? Yeah, it's great. It's amazing. Since my background is as a photographer, I'm wondering, what do these little yellow brackets around type mean? And then when you touch them, I'm pretty sure it copies it someplace. And so then you can download it to a note. But to Mike's point of view of my endless amount of written notes, rather than having to go back and do them and just take a picture of them and then do that. That's super smart. That's a great tip, Mike. Thanks.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, on screen. The text sniper too. I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to earlier, Bob. That has been super useful for me, just being able to grab something on the screen that's not text. I can copy and paste because it's either in an image or because it's on someone else's slide that they are presenting or for whatever reason. Or it's like locked, like in a Kindle or something where you can't. It doesn't let you copy and paste out of it or locked PDF or something using Tech Sniper has been great for that. That's kind of like a specific notetaking case and Read Wise for books. Read Wise to me, has been huge in terms of taking the text from a book, a print book, and being able to put that in my book highlights notebook, just being able to put the phone over that passage in the book, and I try not to do it all the time because I don't want to interrupt the process of reading, but I'll doggy or a couple of pages or use a little tape flag for pages in the book, and then periodically I'll just go and snap a few of the highlights into Read Wise and that takes the print text from the book and makes it digital. But my handwriting is so poor that I can't imagine any engineer would be able to figure out a software that would decode it into digital text. But I'm going to try that. Yeah, the OCR world has moved very quickly, so that's a pretty exciting area. One other thought about notes that I've been trying to work on is just taking fewer or smaller notes, like taking less notes. Basically, I've tried always not to overdo it in terms of writing too much down, but I have a hard time doing that, but I find that whenever I take fewer notes, it's always more useful because I've already boiled it down, and I've only written down like the five things that actually I'm going to pay attention to. Whereas if I'm not really focusing on it, I'll end up with pages and pages that just become too hard to go through and too hard to find the important stuff. I don't know if other people have processes around that or suggestions around that.
Bob Sacha
Well, Jeremy, you turned me on to that book how to Take Smart Notes, which was really I mean, it basically just says in a number of pages what you just said there, which was instead of writing down exactly what it is, writing down, what it means and how it fits in your own world work. I found that to be super helpful.
Jeremy Caplan
Yeah, that book really changed the way I approach books in terms of trying to think in advance of how I might want to use this information later and then trying to keep that in mind when I'm actually writing something down or taking a note, as opposed to just kind of like doing what I did for a lot of years, which is just like jotting down what it seemed like the author was emphasizing as the author's most important points or whatever. I think that's an important difference. And if anybody's interested in that, it's Zonke. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name, but it's S-O-N-K-E-A-H-R-E-N-S harrins is the author of that book how to Take Smart Notes and it's kind of a cult classic. Now, I would say among digital people and people are interested in sort of personal knowledge management, as people are calling it PKM these days, he's become like a favorite in the Rome community. He did a book club with the community of people who use Rome research, that note taking tool Antiago forte, who's another kind of guru of the sort of David Allen sort is also a big fan of Zonka Aaron. He has a lot of fans in that kind of I don't even know what these people are like. Productivity, influencers. I don't know if that's a thing or not, but Maria, I would love to hear your thoughts on kind of note taking or how you go about taking notes if you have the opportunity to join us. And Jimmy, also, if you have any thoughts on this, feel free to chime in about your note taking approach and just beyond notes. I'm curious, Bob. Anything that's been on your radar kind of new that you're experimenting with or trying out these days or Mike, anything you're using that's kind of new and different for 2022 in terms of your workflow or how you're getting stuff done. Jimmy, did you want to chime in?
Speaker D
Okay. Hi, everyone. I just wanted to know more about the program you're talking about. I haven't used any app to turn my manual transcript into document in my computer, so I would like to know more features about this program. You are recommending.
Jeremy Caplan
One of the ones, Jimmy that Mike mentioned was Google Pinpoint, which is part of the Google Journalist studio, and it's actually really robust. It allows you to take either audio recordings or even handwritten documents and to basically scan them in and then upload the PDF and correct me. Mike, if I'm getting any of these details wrong and then once it has the PDF, it basically OCRs. It does optical character recognition to sort of turn the handwriting into digital text. And I kind of thought of it as interesting to hear you talk about it, Mike, as a tool for this because I sort of thought of it as like a kind of research tool when you have an old archive of stuff, but it's interesting to think about it as something you could use for a more functional kind of day to day purpose.
Mike Reilly
Yeah, it does all the stuff you described, and another good use for it is Loading those PDFs in there. It will track how many times a word shows up in those documents, which is really nice typical Cr type thing and where something like that would come in handy is like when the NFL was analyzing all those emails from the Washington football team and they started to see some of the objectionable words that John Gruden was emailing to Bruce Allen with the Washington football team, you start to see some of those four letter words and other words show up quite often. And then all of a sudden you see them in the PDFs of his emails. It makes it easier for you to track that how many times he sent it in which emails they sent it. So if you have large volumes, maybe you've done a public records request and you have a large overabundance of emails that you've got to go through and analyze. This can be a great way to pare it down. Just load those PDFs in there. It'll handle huge volumes of PDFs, and you can analyze them that way. And it just gives you a little menu in the upper right hand corner almost instantly of how many times that word appears in there. They have some samples in there. Some of them come from some of the documents from the Kennedy thing like that. As you see how many times we already appears in there, in other words, that appear in there as well. Book Depository things like that. And it's a really good way if you're trying to break down a large group of documents, it's a good, easy way to do it. And you can just parse out what you don't need.
Jeremy Caplan
Thanks, Mike, for that. Yeah. As you were talking about that, I looked at something and found a resource that talks about from MakeUsOf dot com, which often has some good resources on tools and stuff. And they have a piece about a few different tools. And they mentioned that Google Docs or Google Drive, I should say, does this has this function which actually is really interesting because I use Google Drive every day and I never paid attention or didn't notice that. So you can apparently in Google Drive do OCR by uploading a file that's either JPEG, PNG, GIF or PDF and it will recognize the text and basically give you editable text in Google Docs that you can just edit. So that's pretty. That's pretty interesting. And then there's some various apps that do this also with your phone. So yeah. So a couple of different ways to do that, which is interesting. I think that one of the big challenges from my perspective is like just the friction involved with it. I mean, if you have one page of notes, no big deal. But if you've assembled whole notebook worth or many pages of notes, it just starts to be a really laborious process. And then if you have debt to deal with the stack of notebooks that I have in my office, it's going to just take hours and hours. And then the question is how many other things you have to do instead that are more pressing. So that's where there's I think, a big question Mark in terms of whether it's worth fighting through the friction of the process, any other kind of new things. So moving outside of the realm of these note taking tools, any other kind of workflow, things that people are thinking about or new tools that you're experimenting with or looking for these days.
Bob Sacha
Well, this is really very old school, but my desk has tons of stuff, lots of things I'm thinking about reading or doing or notes I've taken or books or things like that. And so one of the things I do at the end of the year is I basically put everything on the floor and then I just sit down. I sort it into piles and then decide what's important and what isn't and what I should keep and what I shouldn't and organize it. Ideally, if I followed both of you and what other people have said, I'd never have to have anything on my desk at all. But I find it kind of helps organize all these little things I've just put aside and helps me think about what is important and where to go with them. It's very old school, but my floor is nearly clean now, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself.
Jeremy Caplan
It's almost like a Marie Condo approach, right, Bob?
Bob Sacha
Yeah. That would be a better way to think about it. And you sort of have to be in the mood to decide that this pile of newspapers you put away no longer brings you joy. So you just need to heaven. But I think it's valuable to apply her kind of thinking to all of these things, too.
Jeremy Caplan
That's interesting.
Jeremy Caplan
I guess seeing it visually helps. We were talking about Jamboard and fig jam. That sort of allows you to put stuff on a visual campus digitally. But essentially, you're kind of bringing that approach into the analog context as well, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, I guess we're finally kind of reaching the top of the hour pretty soon. Any final thoughts? Final tips? Maybe if you have something to share that people might be interested in hearing about, something new that you're trying, something that you found useful lately or that you've discovered recently that you're experimenting with that people might want to hear about. Feel free to share that as a final thought. I'll share one that I mentioned in passing in the post today in the workflow we post that I wrote, I mentioned in passing this tool called Whimsical, which I find a lot of people have never heard of or haven't tried, and I really like the simplicity of it. It's a visual tool, kind of like mural or mural. If you're familiar with those as kind of a visual canvas for ideas or images or anything you want to diagram or mind map. And it's got a few different modes, so you can use it to mock up a website, but you can also just use it to do a mind map. You can use it as just like a sticky board for Postits. Just kind of ideas and stacking different ideas and organizing them and dragging them around. And it's free. It's easy. It's got a nice interface. It's really easy to share and collaborate with other people, including students or colleagues. And it's got just kind of a pleasant UI that's not too crazy or complex. Mirror sometimes overwhelms people with its functionality. And this is kind of a lighter, simpler, more friendly version of that. I would guess I would say so. It's whimsical. Com and it's got a nice name too. Just like WorkFlowy. I like those W names that are a little bit different from the names of other more techy apps. Anyone else have final Thoughts before we close it out today?
Mike Reilly
Just a quick point of reference for everybody. I dropped it into the document. Adobe has kind of rebranded kind of like Google Journalist Studio did a year ago and repackaged and added a few new tools. They've taken Adobe, Spark and some of these and pulled them under Adobe Creative Cloud Express, and they're promising some changes to the tools, too. I haven't seen too many of the changes yet, but I put the link in there, too. If you want to go in and read a little bit more about it.
Jeremy Caplan
Thanks, Mike. Yeah, that's great. It's really interesting to see. I feel like Adobe keeps kind of changing its app stack and keeps trying to add these kind of more user friendly ones. And to me, Adobe is the most complicated software, even though it's fantastic and powerful and great. It's so complicated. So it's interesting to see them playing at the edge of the more usable, user friendly kinds of tools. The Spark suite was so great at that Spark post Spark page, Spark video, and now kind of they're repackaging them. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. But yeah, they're definitely so much easier from a sort of beginner point of view. They're so much easier to use than the fancy Creative suite. Others final Thoughts Anybody have any final tools? Final resources? Final Thoughts final Questions before we wrap it up. By the way, the note that the shared note that Mike alluded to in case you joined later, didn't hear it. We're just putting some live notes onto a workflow document as an experiment, and you can get to it at Bitly. Comjcnotesbit. Ly. Com J-B-N-O es. It's nothing too robust or fancy or anything. It's just some live notes from the session, just experimenting to see if workflow would work well for that kind of live collaboration.
Jeremy Caplan
Any final words, anyone?
Bob Sacha
Well, I just wanted to say thanks both to you, Jeremy, and Mike, for a couple of neat things. I hadn't heard of that seem like they're going to make my life easier. And also just thanks to both of you for sharing all the kind of cool things that you find. So I really appreciate that.
Jeremy Caplan
Thanks, Bob. And maybe next time or another time we'll get you to share some of the video secrets that are so amazing for students that you share. And there's all sorts of new video stuff coming out this year and new photo apps. So there's a lot of new stuff. Maybe that's a subject for a future conversation. Well, thanks everyone for joining and have a great rest of your day. And we're doing this every Thursday too, as kind of an experiment this winter for live conversations and live chats. So feel free to come back another week and different topics and different people stay well. Stay safe. See everyone soon.
Mike Reilly
Thank you, Jeremy. Take care, buddy.
Bob Sacha
Bye bye. Thank you.
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