Cyber Means Pilot

Author’s Note: This post is not an attempt to get into the productivity thought leader space. I wrote this article as a response to a Threads posting about Ph.D. journals and what one should incorporate into such a book. The following is the extended reply to my original remarks.

Introduction

It seems fair to note at the beginning of this writing that the following is borrowing from some of the practices of Zettelkasten, but it is not a faithful representation of the process. There are many others that have perfected the form; this is merely an attempt to get stuff put together. I have cobbled together some of the higher-end concepts I used in grad school and in my academic career, because there were questions online about using journals during one’s time in grad school (especially when you are in your Ph.D. program).

Nearly two decades ago, I had a ton of notebooks that I wrote in (my wife can confirm this), but they lacked the connective elements. I played around with wiki sites and applications as the iPad was becoming more accessible, but it was more of a hobby. I couldn’t wrap my head around how to functionally use the wiki as part of my system. When I taught at the University of Kentucky, I taught a class for Information Studies and focused on knowledge organization systems. That was the foundation of my Commonplace Book article I wrote some years ago. That course also kickstarted the pursuit of the system as it is laid out in this article today.

The following set of notes is used by me in Obsidian. This is ABSOLUTELY a work-in-progress. I am not sure if this will ever be a perfect system, but it is a starting point that I can come back to once I gain the strength and focus to work on it, and stop when it becomes too much. The six steps mentioned in this article are more akin to stages, but there are also the steps in the development of these notes. The first three (fleeting, literature, and permanent) come directly from the original Zettelkasten scholarship, where the last three (structure, project, and status) are ones that I bolted onto this system. It is also fair to note that I’ve been working on this since 2023 as I was playing more and more with Obsidian. So, just keep that in mind.

First Step: Fleeting Notes

This is the “writing stuff on post-it notes” stage of the process. It is getting the details out of my head and into a more “semi-permanent form” that I can pull from at a later date or throw away if it is not useful. I need to use Merlin Mann’s One Trusted System mentality to be actively recording. The brain is not meant to be thought of as a computer. We tend to forget things over the course of a day. I will need to review at the end of the day and attempt to pick out the things that I will:

a.) need to come back to at some point in the future, b.) need to add to an already established permanent note in my system, c.) quickly review later for deletion, or d.) develop into something new for my Zettelkasten.

Fleeting Notes Template

Unique Id: {{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Fleeting Note: Treat this like a tweet, no more than 280 characters. If a fleeting note is longer than 280 characters, it should most likely be a literature note or a permanent note.

Processing Code: Explain where this information should go and/or how it should be used. This goes back to the four earlier things to do with the note in the forms of circle-back, append, assess, or develop.

Second Step: Literature Notes

The focus of this step of the process is translating the stuff that I read that is of an academic nature into more bite-size pieces that I can reference for later works. I tend to use the SQ3R method from Francis P. Robinson for my literature notes, as it is the method I learned when I was in elementary school. It is from the late 1940s, but it is still an effective means of taking literature notes. This useful strategy aids reading comprehension and is especially helpful for difficult textbook material. Each part of the process is helpful by itself, so do not feel that you must follow all of the steps. Use what works for you.

Survey

I will open up the chapter or article to skim the highlighted and bold areas of the work to get a feel for the main topics and ideas in about 10 minutes. This involves a full read of the introduction (as long as the full introduction is less than six paragraphs/1,000 words). The scanning looks for the contrasts in the work, mainly anything that is not body text (headers, visuals, bullet points, and questions). This step helps me orient myself to the structural elements of the writing.

Question

The easiest thing to do is to take one of those contrasts at a time and turn each one into a question. If the header is “Survey,” the question can be “What is a survey?” or something more substantial based on the nature of the writing. The same can be done for the titles of the visuals, or for the key points raised within the visual in the facts, examples, statistics, testimony, and analogies presented within it. The bullet points and introduction can be deconstructed to look for the terms or concepts the article or chapter is attempting to present, and form a question or two about the term or concept.

Read

Reading for academic works should be done with a focus on the first sentence and the main idea it presents. It helps to paraphrase that introduction in context with anything else the author(s) use to develop their points. This can be in the form of the transitions the author builds in the paragraphs or the examples that they use to frame their arguments. Processing the read portion of this process is not copying and pasting. That is just taking the author’s words verbatim without translating them into a common language that you would use in your own writing. We must avoid too much highlighting, as this can present an issue in noting what the main points the author is trying to raise are, versus just the underlying points that the author is using to support their claims and facts in the work. Keeping the highlighting to no more than three points in each section is the most effective way to get something useful from the work.

Recite

We scan the paraphrases one more time and put away all of the notes that we took while reading the article. This part of the process is when we bring out the questions that we wrote in the questions section of the SQ3R process and attempt to answer them. Reciting should happen immediately after reading. Successful answers to the questions are useful to add to the literature notes. The inability to answer a question means that we need to reread the appropriate sections and take notes. It is vitally important that we take the time during this section of the process to recall whatever we can and recite the answer, as it will help us remember what we read.

Review

The last part of this process is reading the article or chapter one more time within 24 hours of completing the reciting section of the process, and confirming the following four things:

1. Confirm that the structural elements that you picked in the surveying section of the article were in fact the most important elements of the chapter or article,
2. Confirm that the questions that were written in the questions section of this process were the most reasonable questions to ask based on the nature of the article,
3. Confirm that what was written as the highlights in the reading section of the process were the most accurate representation of the materials present in the article or chapter, and
4. Confirm that the answers given in the recite section of the process are the ones that are the most logical to give, given the nature of the article or chapter.

These parts should form the foundation of what will be written in the literature note.

Literature Note Template

Unique Id: {{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Knowledge: There is a specific way to read literary and academic works called “gut reading,” where you strip down a book/article and break it down to the most essential parts and look for the topic sentence, the thesis, and the title meaning, and determine what the author’s argument is and whether they proved their argument well.

Breakdown: This would be where I would add a 100-word description of how I would explain it to my high school self so that they would have clarity on the subject matter.

Potential: This is the section where I would add another 100 words of either how this concept fits into my dissertation or why I should care about this concept.

Citation: 
Title:
Author:
Publication Date:
Editors:
Source:
Volume:
Number of Issue:
Printer Location:
Publishers:
In-text Pages:
Full Citation Pages:
URL:
DOI:
Original Place of Discovery:
Keywords:
Project:
Starting Point:
Zettel Type:

Third Step: Permanent Note

This section forms the basement or skeleton of something that in the future could become a presentation, article, posting, or be useful in some other non-tangible manner. It would be an incorporation of the first two types of notes that I would write based on the previous two steps. It is fair to argue that this whole page is a fine example of a permanent note. I could take some of the things that I wrote here and transform them into a posting for my website. The key part of this step is linking the permanent note to the fleeting and literature notes I wrote earlier by incorporating the Unique IDs of each of the pages that I pull from to create this note.

The note would also incorporate the hexcode that places the notes within the structure of the system. The system structure is defined in The Hexcodes for My Personal Zettelkasten KOS and is consistently being updated and redefined as newer notes are being written and expanded on throughout the course of its development. It is fair to note that the design of these hexcodes as a full Professor of Art & Communication at a liberal arts school in the Midwestern part of the United States would look completely different than when I was a high school student, undergraduate, or grad student. Therefore, there is a sense that this code is less of a firm standard of what I believe is the structure of my thinking and more of a sense of placement that is useful at a given moment in time. (I realized as I was writing this that I was falling into the “Antithesis trap” of writing that AI promotes, and I also just realized that “Antithesis Trap” would be a great name for an article that focuses on AI and what it does to our writing).

Permanent Note Template

Hexcode: The hexcode from the current system, which can be adjusted when it fits into a new location within the system.
Unique Id: {{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Body Text: This would be written as a quasi-rough posting on the website that would just appear within this system. There might also be footnotes incorporated into this body text, or embedded links to the other two sets of notes to craft this note.

References: A list of sources that I am pulling from, in the form of Unique IDs that link this note with the other notes in this system.

Fourth Step: Structure Note

This part of the process is just setting up the tables within the system to see where individual notes would live. Structure notes are first and foremost the foundations of the system, but they can only be built once there are enough notes to warrant such a system and a reasonable understanding of how to organize it. I tend to lean on two practices from the past: the Dewey Decimal System and the hexadecimal system of numbers. The Dewey Decimal System is a great set of numbers that has a horrible history associated with cultural bias (mainly with an extremely problematic overview of religions) and the practical structural flaws of an outdated system that came from the 19th century and attempts to adapt itself to a 21st-century world. Therefore, this is my spin on the system. The second part of the system is the hexadecimal number system, which allows for the effective use of binary coding. It gives 16 locations for information, and each increase based on place values (ones, “tens,” “hundreds”) adds one to the exponent value of the number of information locations (one place value is 16 to the first power, two place values is 16 squared or 256, three place values is 16 cubed or 4,096). There should be enough spaces for everything, due to the system giving 16 to the fifth power plus potential flags at the end of the hexcode (like the first two letters of the author’s name, as they do for the Dewey Decimal System in libraries).

Structure Note Template

Before the decimal point

Header: Topic or Subject Name 
First/Second Digit: X….

Second/Third Digit	Topic
0	The second or third level topic name
1	The second or third level topic name
2	The second or third level topic name
3	The second or third level topic name
4	The second or third level topic name
5	The second or third level topic name
6	The second or third level topic name
7	The second or third level topic name
8	The second or third level topic name
9	The second or third level topic name
A	The second or third level topic name
B	The second or third level topic name
C	The second or third level topic name
D	The second or third level topic name
E	The second or third level topic name
F	The second or third level topic name

After the decimal point

Hexcode: XYZ.00 // Structure notes always have a 00 after the decimal point to indicate it is a structure note. 
Unique Id:{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Hexcode	Title	Unique ID	Keywords	Comments
XYZ.01	Real File Name in double brackets	{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}} of the real file	tags associated with the file	Any additional information that might be useful
XYZ.02	Real File Name in double brackets	{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}} of the real file	tags associated with the file	Any additional information that might be useful
XYZ.03	Real File Name in double brackets	{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}} of the real file	tags associated with the file	Any additional information that might be useful
….	Real File Name in double brackets	{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}} of the real file	tags associated with the file	Any additional information that might be useful

Fifth Step: Project Note

Unlike a permanent note’s focus on fleshing out general concepts for the purpose of some type of distribution, project notes are designed to be the containers for a specific final deliverable that is meant to be received by a given audience. These notes are the “sandboxes for synthesis,” as they are a checkpoint/temporary holding space until the work can be transformed into a specific output (like an article, paper, or book). The reason that project notes take up a separate category is that a project note is meant to be a bridge between interconnected permanent notes for the purpose of drafting up a proposal or attempting to nail down key requirements and parameters. Often these notes will act as an outline that allows me to form the to-do lists needed to complete this type of work. Like the previous steps, any files referenced in the project are noted in this document with the Unique ID.

This construct was similar to the sandbox pages on the wiki sites that I used to edit. Project notes are treated as “work-in-progress” and are constantly in a state of flux until they are locked down and ready to leave the Zettelkasten system. We start a single dynamic file that acts as the master note. I will borrow from the executive summary practices of the past to develop the groupings and clusters for this work. Mostly, I focus on these five parts:

Purpose

The purpose section of the proposal must clearly define the expected objectives of the project. We start with the elevator pitch, which is a one-minute description of your project for somebody not familiar with your work or skills. You should follow the elevator pitch with what you think generally and specifically defines your content (goals and objectives) and how you generally and specifically plan on creating your content (strategy and tactics). Think GOST Framework for this section. The next step is explaining how the medium, format, organization, and other external factors you have selected for your project will fulfill those objectives and goals described earlier, in a way that matches your elevator pitch. Finally, we tie the previous three parts to the outcomes that will happen when the project is completed. The key question that needs to be addressed is “what does success look like for this project?”

Audience

The audience section of the proposal must have a general definition of who would be interested in the proposed project. This should provide a simple understanding of the basic demographic characteristics (age, gender, class, race, occupation, hometown, income, etc.) using descriptions like “more likely to be” to explain who they are. The psychographic characteristics (beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, lifestyle, hobbies, and interests) of your audience will get to why your audience will like your project. A good audience section of an executive summary finishes up by describing the one “ideal” person that would be interested in looking at, listening to, or reading your project. Businesspeople are familiar with constructing a detailed persona. The difference is that we are not worried about sales. The focus is having a receiver as part of the communication process that is a by-product of crafting a piece of media.

Resources

The resources section of the proposal must have a general description of what will be needed in order to start up this project (content, money, time, staff, etc.). We tend to start out with the schedule, because time is the most pressing of all of the resources you will deal with. The second focus point tends to be an inventory of assets (both physical and electronic) of what we have that we can access at any given point during the project. Budgets are next on the list, once we know the time we have and the resources we need to have access to. This part is the area that most executives will study the longest, as it is the aspect of production that informs you what you don’t have and what you need.

Transportation / Transmission

The transport (physical media) or transmission (digital media) section focuses on a general description of what will be needed in order to maintain this project (CMS, publishing schedule, time, staff, etc.). For transmission, we are focusing on describing when and where the content should be released (and comparing those dates to the final version deadlines in post-production), explaining what amount of organizational support is needed from the distribution company (e.g., CMS access), and following up with marketers to promote the project (i.e., creating a marketing campaign). For transportation, we describe when the physical content is going to be published and/or produced (and compare those dates to the final version deadlines in post-production), explain what amount of logistics is needed from the distribution company (e.g., access to the printer, warehousing), and follow up with marketers to promote the project (i.e., creating a marketing campaign).

Summary

Finally, a summary is a series of bullet points and short narratives that an executive can review at their leisure. More often than not, this section is the first one that media company executives will read. Well-written summaries give executives confidence that the content creators have narrowed their focus for this pitch. These summaries must clearly state the three most important takeaways from this pitch that are most significant and meaningful about your project.

Project Note Template

Name of Project: A two- to four-word title for the project. If I can not write one, the project is probably not yet focused enough to start. 
Hexcode: VWX.YZ // Project notes take a filed instance number, not the .00 reserved for structure notes.
Unique Id: {{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Purpose: Answer all of the purpose questions in around 250 to 500 words.

Audience: Answer all of the audience questions in around 250 to 500 words.

Resources: Answer all of the resources questions in around 250 to 500 words.

Transmission or Transportation: Answer all of the related questions in around 250 to 500 words.

Summary: Write out the three to five bullet points that highlight the key parts of the project.

Additional Information: Sometimes, this includes:

1. who am I accountable to for completing this project,
2. what is the deadline for this project,
3. where will this be used,
4. when have similar works been produced and/or used,
5. how this will be different than other works of a similar nature, and/or
6. why anybody should care about the work you are proposing.

Extended Outline: Once the PARTS of the executive summary are completed, we start with the standard outline that is streamlined pieces of information. This can be summaries of the pieces to this work or other structural elements that can be fleshed out in this process.

References: The Unique IDs for any notes that are referenced in this note, to preserve the connections between the notes in the project.

Sixth Step: Status Note

This type of note was the one I developed after seeing my friends in grad school and in the academy have to share updates with their advisor or chair during their meetings. I also used what I learned from Jorge Cham’s amazing comic series, Ph.D. Comics. It was clear from my experiences as a grad student and now as a full professor that supervisors are busy. Structuring any form of communication requires being clear, concise, and concrete (the 3Cs of Communication).

I also used, and still use, the Inigo Montoya email meme as a model for emailing others (especially supervisors). Inigo’s Guide to Networking Success starts with his catchphrase from the comedy The Princess Bride: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” This phrase highlights the four points of effective communication:

1. Polite Greeting (first sentence)
2. Who You Are (first sentence)
3. Relevant Personal Link (second sentence)
4. Manage Expectations (third sentence)

Therefore, the focus of this type of note is leading with the bottom line. What is the most pressing point that we will need to deal with? I have used successes in my research, things that are holding me up, concerns about what is happening in the academy, and/or connections I need help making. It would need to be in two sentences at the most.

I would also need to be specific in what I did and/or what I need. “Wrote 2,500 words in the third chapter of my dissertation with two revisions of the writing” was what my advisor would be looking for. “I am looking for someone who could help me with my SPSS analysis of my latest dataset, specifically whether I did my ANOVA analysis correctly” was another example.

The last thing that I try to build into this structure is a proposal for the solutions to my problems. I didn’t want to count on others to do all of the heavy lifting in terms of my issues. What I found was that giving two to three sentences of how I thought I could solve my problem, or what steps I took over the week, month, or year to deal with it, was useful.

A final point worth noting is that I use this system regardless of whether I am the advisee or the advisor. It has weight either way.

Status Note Template

Status Report Name: Date and Period (e.g., Bimonthly for March and April 2026) 
Hexcode: Unique Id:{{date:YYYYMMDDHHmmss}}

Discussion Point: The overall status (On Track / Delayed / Completed) of the current core focus: a one-sentence description of the main objective right now.

Achievements: Describing, with the 3Cs of Communication, what I’ve done with my research, writing, teaching, service work, and personal projects designed to help with my academic work.

Challenges: Describing, with the 3Cs of Communication, the technical concerns (bottlenecks in my research or confusion in using a methodology), conceptual struggles (mainly with communication theories), logistical constraints (mainly some bureaucratic paperwork), or something associated with mental health.

Next Action Items: The three bullet points that follow the 3Cs of Communication of things that can reasonably be done before the end of the given time period (week, month, quarter, year, or contract-term). These items should be things that I can put at the top of a to-do list or break apart into different tasks (with some advice on how to do that from my supervisor).

Agenda for Next Meeting: Start with when and where we will meet (including online/Zoom meetings). This section is partially an accountability check to make sure that the next action items listed above get done. The other reason this section is vital is that we know what we are going to talk about and not simply meet for the sake of meeting. There need to be three bullet points that we both can focus on within the time period allotted. If there are not three bullet points that can be done within the time period, extend out the time period (week becomes month, month becomes quarter, quarter becomes year, year extends out).

Extended Outline: This section can be used as a way of formalizing the agenda so that it looks like an agenda one would get during a normal business meeting. It is an optional section to the note, but can be useful from time to time.

References: The Unique IDs for any notes that are referenced in this note, to preserve the connections between the accountability check for my work and this system of notes.

Conclusion

In the spirit of reflection, it seems important to note that this article is primarily my way of making sure this system is out of my brain and into some form in the real world (going back to the “mind is not a computer” discussion). Therefore, this writing might be only useful to me. Those who are not me (a.k.a. everyone else reading this work) should be aware that I apologize if there are elements that are not clear in this work. I just needed a reference point to come back to when I decide to restart this system after a long break. I am not sure how long it can be maintained. As mentioned before, it takes some energy and focus to do this system well. Use this system at your own peril.

Have fun!