How I write my fleeting notes

seedling

planted Jun 22, 2021

Fleeting notes are an integral part in the Zettelkasten workflow. They are non formatted notes that should be written frictionless and are reviewed regularly.

I use daily notes in Obsidian to create my fleeting notes.

Each day has its own note with the ideas that I had that day. This allows the daily notes to create a backlog of my ideas and to-dos and review them later. Having them in a note with a specific date keeps me engaged to review them soon enough as I see the daily notes folder growing. After I reviewed a note, I move them into an archive folder for my daily notes. This way, I can easily see how many daily notes I haven't reviewed yet in my daily notes folder.

When working through a fleeting note, I go through every bullet point and do one of the following things:

Transfer it into a permanent note

I create a permanent note in my inbox with the title of that idea. I write this note right now or just leave it as a reminder in my inbox and do more research on the topic when I have time. In this case, the new note serves as a reminder and the fleeting note can be trashed.

Transfer it into a to-do

If it is an actionable idea, I write it in my to-do app and give the task a date to remind me later. It is then put into my to-do workflow.

Trash it

Sometimes an idea looked good in the first place, but turns out to not really go anywhere later. Don't be afraid to trash a fleeting note if it doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

My template for my daily notes is quite simple:

⬅️[[Yesterday]] ||| 📅 [[Today]] ||| [[Tomorrow]] ➡️
# Fleeting Notes
…

# Daily Dump
…

I use a header at the top to quickly switch between my daily notes. Then I start with my fleeting notes. I also have a section called daily dump. This is a space to just take a few minutes to write anything that comes to mind without judgement. This routine is called morning pages and originates from the book The artitst's way.

Creating this template is easily done with the Templater plugin.