Transcript
When you're taking a course, whether mine or somebody else's, what is my recommended method for taking notes?
Alright.
So What I don't think is efficient is just to watch the videos and just take notes on everything that you watch.
Because how many of those notes do you have from all the courses you've taken in your life that you haven't really applied.
So what I recommend instead is a method that I call hat manuals.
Okay.
What's a hat manual?
I had a YouTube video about this.
If you just go to my YouTube and search hat manuals, George Cali, you'll find it.
But essentially, as a business owner or as a worker, as a person who does things in the world, you wear multiple hats.
As a business owner, you are right now, you're wearing the learning hat, the student hat.
And then later on, you're gonna be, you know, wearing the content creator hat and then the client, you know, client service provider hat or whatever, bookkeeper hat, you know, as you do your own bookkeeping.
You have different hats that you wear in your business.
And for each hat that you wear, do you have a hat manual.
Do you have a manual for that role?
And a manual by by that, I don't mean literally a, you know, 45 page thick or 450 page thick manual.
No.
I just mean a simple checklist.
So for example, when I create content, even to this day, having created 1000 of pieces of content literally, I still have a checklist I looked at for myself.
Even though I've looked at that checklist, 1000 of times.
I mean, even my morning review, when I review the day, I've looked at my morning review checklist I don't know.
Probably 10,000 times away, but I still look at it every day that I that I work.
I come and look at my morning checklist, oh, yeah.
The okay.
I've looked at and I don't if you force me to say what's on my morning checklist, maybe I'll I'll be able to either, you know, re to to to to regurgitate maybe 75% of it.
Doesn't matter.
I try not to remember anything.
In my mind, in my business, I write everything down, and I have it pop up at the right time.
So I've all yeah.
That's right.
I had to look at my phone here.
So the same thing with learning when you're taking a course is instead of taking notes on everything, what you should do is first skip around the course, you're welcome to, honestly.
Don't don't go from stage, you know, lesson number 1, if you don't want to.
Find a lesson that you're interested in.
Watch it or read it, and then find what in that lesson is something that you can add to one of your hat manuals.
That's how I learn too when I'm learning a course.
I just go, how does this apply to any of my hat manuals?
For my work or for my life.
Right?
I mean, I literally have a hat manual for my for my day, my spiritual practice during my day, and I call it my life monastery.
You could look up life monastery on on YouTube, and I have a whole podcast, a YouTube playlist about that.
But I basically go, well, This course is useless to me unless I'm gonna add something to my hat manual so that when I'm doing stuff, I've added to my doing list.
So that I can do better.
I could do either more or I can do better or sometimes I do less because learning from a course, my name to go, wait.
Why am I doing these things?
I don't have to be doing those things.
I've been doing this one thing that will make everything else easier or make 3 other steps eliminated.
So That's what I recommend.
Stop taking notes for everything.
Just, you know, add things to your hot menu.
And then the last thing I'll say is, this is related to my method called CCC.
Capture, categorize, calendar.
And I also, of course, have a video about that.
Go to YouTube search Patrick categorized calendar, and you'll find my videos about that.
The idea is when you whenever you have information come at you, which we all have in in overwhelming amounts every single day.
We capture what interests us, what you enjoy, what you feel is important, only what you feel is important because there's too much else you can't capture everything.
Just like within a course, you can't capture everything.
You capture what interests you the most.
Okay?
Go with your interest.
Go with your energy.
Capture what interests you the most.
Where do you capture it?
You capture it in your cal in your in your hat manual.
That's what that's what categorize means.
You captured this piece of information.
Where is this relevant?
What do I what do I what do I do with this in my life?
Literally.
Oh, I do this when I'm playing this role, when I'm doing this project.
When I'm doing this habit, when I'm doing this task, you you categorize what you capture.
Okay?
And then you calendar the categories.
That's all I'm gonna say because you can go to CCC to learn much more about this method.
But that's how everything pops up for me just at just the right time so that I have so much more peace in my life because I don't remember anything.
Everything is written down and it comes up at the right.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
I use my brain for improvisation.
I use my brain for spiritual growth.
I use my brain for having recognition, for relationship, but I don't know not to remember a single thing.
So that's what I recommend going through my courses and anyone else's courses.
Just capture what's it what interests you, categorize it onto a hat manual, and then let the hat manual pop up at the right time with your calendar.
Alright?
So I hope this is helpful, and enjoy the best of the course.
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Recommended method for taking notes when working through a course... (hat manual)
Updated Oct 15, 2024
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Love this so much
I have a question about categories as you also mention projects vs. tasks when doing the Calendaring. I'm confused about how you track or remember your categories? Would they be all the same category names under a Project that would be easy to remember? Alphabetical or areas of life? I can see myself losing track of categories :-( I depend on my search function to find everything and it's time consuming.
So when a category pops up in my calendar (when it's time to look at it) I look at that category of tasks in my Todoist to see what's priority to do.
Let me know if that makes sense.
Capture - Categorize - Calendar.
1) What are the effective ways to decide our categories (e.g., health, work, family - I suppose)?
2) Just to clarify, you schedule your calendar in terms of categories instead of tasks?
3) What determine the priority of the task in each category?
4) I wonder since you allocate tasks in each category (aka "project" in Todoist), wouldn't you be unable to have a bird eye's view? Tasks in other categories will not be seen.
5) While I understand that what pops up in the calendar is the cateogories we need to prioritise. What if that category does not fit the context at that time?
Thank you!
@Roxanne Koh (Therapy Without Boxes) great questions! And, I dive into all this with depth in the Joyful Productivity course -- http://smpl.ro/JoyfulPro -- but you can also get find answers to these in my blog post and free video about CCC -- https://www.georgekao.com/blog/ccc
Take a look at least at the blog post and video, and let me know if that helps :)
ADORE the CCC method
Learn it as if it is part of our job :)
(I find uni course more theoretical haha so change it to working)
Anyhow, it would be great to see an actual example of using the Google doc with link to learn the course :)
I love it :) Will try it out :)
What a completely novel way of thinking about this. I LOVE to take notes and I'm intrigued by this method that may actually help me to make my notes more relevant, salient, and useful. Interestingly, I had the CCC module on my list to work with today :)
Very helpful with the ccc method
In the first bookmark above, the name is George Kao, not "George Cali"...
In the second bookmark, it should say, "Stop taking notes for everything...add things to your hat manual, not "hot menu"! 😆
Also, in the last line, "Patrick" makes an appearance, but "Patrick" is actually Capture... 🤣
But now that you mention it, "hot menu" is way more interesting than "hat manual" 🤣