Visualizing notes allows you to map out relationships between individual concepts, leading to a deeper understanding of the material. This process makes complex information more accessible and helps integrate new knowledge with what you already know.

Atomize your notes—this involves breaking down long notes into single, focused ideas, essential for comprehension and maximizing learning. By encapsulating each concept in its own note, you can clearly see how ideas connect across different sources. This method aligns with the principle that true understanding comes not from the relationship between entire books but from the connections between the granular concepts within them.

By utilizing these strategies. Modus AI empowers you to build a robust, interconnected knowledge base, enhancing retention and enabling you to apply what you've learned more effectively into you projects.

I do a lot of reading and writing in my spare time. One of the most frustrating challenges I face is digesting the volume of insights extracted from books, videos, articles, and other sources, and then transforming that knowledge into compelling long-form content. It's not just about absorbing new information; it's about integrating these diverse concepts with my existing understanding and creating a system where they can be revisited and recycled for future projects.

I've found that many people struggle with the same issue. While numerous note-taking and knowledge management tools aim to address this problem, they often focus too much on how notes are stored - whether in folders, graphs, or relational databases - and overlook the essential aspects of learning: acquiring a deep understanding, retaining knowledge effectively, and applying it creatively in real-world scenarios.

This realization led me to build Modus AI. I wanted to develop a tool that you can trust, a system that provides you with a good structure, relieving of the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything you are working on. This allows me to then focus on what is important: The content, the argument, and the ideas. With that being said, I decided to build platform that not only helps in capturing information but also enhances comprehension and facilitates the seamless integration of ideas over time.

In this article, I will share my journey in developing an effective method for acquiring, retaining, and applying knowledge using Modus AI. This workflow has significantly improved my ability to produce insightful long-form content and manage my knowledge more efficiently. I believe this approach can be transformative for anyone looking to deepen their learning and make the most of the information they encounter.

Acquiring a deep understanding of new knowledge requires more than passive reading; it demands active engagement and a structured approach. As physicist Richard Feynmann famously noted, "You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." To ensure genuine comprehension, one should be able to explain concepts clearly, as if teaching them to someone else in the form of an introductory lecture - a technique known as the Feynmann Technique.

Similarly, David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology emphasizes the importance of an overarching workflow to manage information overload. GTD advocates for collecting everything that requires attention in one place and processing it systematically. This approach frees your mind from holding onto loose ends, allowing you to achieve a "mind like water" - a state of clarity and focus without distraction.

Building upon these principles, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann developed the Zettelkasten method, which I have written about extensively already. Luhmann's system involved writing individual ideas on index cards and linking them based on their relationships. This external network of interconnected notes became his productivity engine, enabling him to produce an astounding amount of scholarly work.

Inspired by these methodologies, we've developed a four-step process to enhance learning and understanding through Modus AI:
• 1. Highlight all important paragraphs while reading
• 2. Dissect the content of a book into granular concepts
• 3. Map the relationships between these concepts
• 4. Group similar concepts together
• 5. Integrate these newly learned concepts with previously known concepts

The first step in the process is to actively engage with the material by highlighting important paragraphs from the book you are reading and organizing them by chapter. This practice is essential because, as Richard Feynman pointed out, merely re-reading can create a false sense of understanding due to the mere-exposure effect. By actively selecting key passages, you begin to process the information more deeply.

Depending on the medium you're using, the highlighting process will vary:
• Digital Reading: If you are using a desktop reader, you can simply copy and paste text into a Modus AI note.
• Kindle or iPad: Export all your highlights from the book into a Markdown file and then import it into Modus AI as a note.
• Physical Books: Underline or mark the sections you wish to extract. At the end of each chapter, review these markings and transcribe them into a Modus AI note.

The key is to consolidate all your highlights into one comprehensive note for the book, organized by chapters. This approach aligns with David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, which emphasizes capturing everything that needs attention in a trusted system to clear your mind for focused work. By doing so, you reduce cognitive load and avoid the illusion of understanding that can come from passive reading.

Once you have your book note ready, the next step is to dissect its content into granular concept - an approach known as atomization. This process involves breaking down the material into individual ideas, each captured in its own note.

Here's how to do it in Modus AI:

Once you have a book note ready, you can set up a new Module for the book. For example, create a sub-Module named "How to Take Smart Notes" under a parent Module like "Reading Notes" by right-clicking the canvas and pressing "Module".

Add your comprehensive book note into this Module by right-clicking on the canvas and selecting "Existing note". Expand the note so you can view the content chapter by chapter. Skim through to find key concepts that stand out or resonate with you. When you identify a concept, double-click on the canvas to create a new note. Highlight the related block in your original note and copy it into the new note.

Describe the concept in one clear, concise sentence and use that sentence as the title of the concept note. This practice aligns with John Searle's assertion: "If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself." Writing in your own words forces you to process the information deeply.

Reorganize the content within the new note to ensure it resonates with you. This might involve summarizing the idea in your own words, adding personal reflections, or noting how it connects to other concepts you've explored. By opening the right split panel in Modus AI, you'll access a suite of workspace components designed to enhance comprehension. Utilize the Summarize feature to leverage AI in breaking down the content further, providing a clearer understanding of the semantic value of the concepts you've just extracted. Additionally, engage with the AI Chat Agents to delve deeper into the material - ask questions, seek clarifications, or explore related ideas.

Moreover, make use of Socrates, our hybrid search AI agent that combines semantic and keyword search to query your knowledge base. Socrates helps you bring up similar concepts related to your new note or cluster together ideas that might be scattered across your knowledge base, enhancing your ability to see connections and deepen your understanding.

By atomizing your notes, you create a collection of focused ideas that are easier to manage, understand, and connect. This method reflects Niklas Luhmann's slip-box technique, where each note is an independent idea linked within a larger system.

With your collection of atomized concept notes in Modus AI, the next step is to map out the relationships between them - a crucial process for deepening your understanding and seeing how individual ideas fit within the larger context.

Begin by arranging your concept notes on the canvas to reflect their interconnections. Drag and position related notes near each other, and use arrows or lines to draw connections between them. This visual representation helps illustrate relationships such as causation, contrast, or reinforcement.

If you notice that two concept notes are about the same idea, consider merging them into one for clarity. To ensure these combined concepts can be reused in future projects, create a new note that consolidates them, and remove the original notes from the module canvas. Conversely, if a note contains multiple ideas, break it down into smaller notes to maintain granularity.

By mapping the relationships between concepts, you actively construct a networked understanding of the material. This step aligns with Richard Feynman's emphasis on explaining concepts clearly to achieve true comprehension. Manipulating information at a granular level mirrors the natural network of human thought, making it essential for truly understanding complex topics.

Keeping thoughts and ideas solely in your head isn't enough; writing them down is necessary, even if it's challenging. Good, productive writing is rooted in effective note-taking. This is why Modus AI is such a valuable solution - it combines visualization with a structured approach, making comprehension both efficient and enjoyable.

After extracting all the content from the original book note into individual concept notes, it's time to organize and group related ideas. Begin by arranging your concept notes on the canvas, positioning similar ones near each other. When you identify multiple notes related to the same sub-topic, group them into a section and assign a meaningful name to it. Naming sections thoughtfully is crucial because these titles will be what you recall first when revisiting your module in the future.

For example, if several notes pertain to "The Slip-Box Manual," group them under that heading. Carefully chosen section names enhance the navigability of your knowledge base. Rearranging your notes and sections on the canvas helps you visualize overarching themes and understand how individual concepts fit within them.

Completing steps two through four may take anywhere from an hour to a full day, depending on the length and complexity of the book. The true value lies not in the final module you produce but in the thought process invested while establishing the knowledge structure and titling each concept note and section. Deep understanding often emerges from deconstructing, reassembling, and articulating knowledge in your own words. Through this process, the knowledge truly becomes your own.

After finalizing your module layout, revisit each note to ensure clarity and consider adding personal reflections or additional insights. This step solidifies your understanding and encourages deeper engagement with the material. Utilize Socrates to identify and suggest additional groupings or connections you might have missed. Socrates can help cluster similar ideas, enhancing the cohesiveness of your knowledge base.

For example, suppose you create a concept note titled "Economic Growth." This vague title might make it difficult to recall the specific details later on. However, if you instead title it "Investing in Education Drives Sustainable Economic Growth by Enhancing Workforce Skills," you can immediately grasp the core concept of the note even months down the line.

Up to now, I have gained a deep understanding of the core concepts of the book How to take Smart Notes by breaking down and connect its core concepts on a whiteboard. But just understanding this book is not enough; I also want to truly integrate all the knowledge I have learned in the past, present, and future. In other words, I want to integrate the concept cards of this book with the concept cards I wrote for other books and lectures in the past.

Before doing this, I want to share an important learning mindset: You can only gain a deep understanding of the topics you care about through visual note-taking when you atomize your notes.

Many people, when first using an AI-powered visual note-taking app like Modus AI, continue to use the old way of note-taking and write one note for each book or lecture, resulting in very long notes that contain many concepts. When your notes are in this format, it's hard to gain value from visualization.

For instance, in the figure below, there are two book notes, each with a lot of content. Although the content of these two books is related, connecting these two book notes on a module does not provide any new value, as it is almost the same as putting them in the same folder.

The purpose of visualizing notes is to gain a deep understanding of what you've learned. If all of your notes are very long and you don't break down the knowledge into smaller parts, the understanding you can gain from visualization will be very limited. Real deep understanding doesn't come from the "relationship between two books" but from the "relationship between all the concepts in these two books." What you want to connect are not book cards, but individual concept cards that you extract from these books using the previous four steps.

For instance, I've recently been researching how to organize your digital life, and both books How to take Smart Notes and Building a Second Brain are highly relevant to this research topic. To better conduct this research, I created a module called Building a Second Brain and reused concept notes related to Building a Second Brain from these two books, organizing them using a mindmap to establish a unique understanding framework.

It's because I extracted and atomized the most important knowledge and ideas from these two books into reusable concept notes in the past when I read them, so that I can now easily apply my previous learning to new research topics. My past knowledge no longer sits uselessly in static folders, but instead becomes the foundation for my newest writing project!

P.S. Atomic note-taking does not mean you cannot have long notes. It means that each concept card should only contain one concept and be supported by its content. If the content is long but all of it can be used to support the concept in the title, then the card is still an atomic concept card.

After sharing how I implement the learning methodology in Modus AI, I would like to summarize the core ideas that underlie this methodology:

• I believe that the essence of learning and research is to break down and extract the important concepts from books, literature, lectures, and experiences. Then, one should connect, understand, and internalize these concepts in one's own way to build a deep understanding of what is known and unknown to humans.
• I believe all work plans and research papers are simply products of transforming this deep understanding into executable and communicable forms.

Under these core ideas, the processes of learning, research, planning, and output can be fully presented in the following diagram:

In this figure, on the left is source, which are the "literature notes" you wrote down while reading, attending lectures, or watching videos.

During my learning and research process, I extract useful concepts from these literature notes to create atomized "concept notes." Each concept note describes the concept in one sentence in the title and cites content from one or multiple pieces of literature to support this sentence. Every citation deepens my understanding and reflection of this concept.

As I learn and research, the original content of the literature notes will gradually be replaced by links to many concept notes. As I extract these concept notes from the literature notes step by step, I need to connect and fit them into a structure that makes sense to me. I can only truly understand and internalize a topic when I find such a structure for it.

In the future, whether I'm writing academic papers, work plans, or online articles, my process will involve linearly reassembling these concept cards into an "output note," which is an article meant for others to read. As I absorb and break down more and more "sources" during research, my "understanding" in the middle will deepen continuously, and the "output" on the right will naturally be of higher quality.

Although this article focuses on my method for acquiring, retaining, and applying knowledge, I want to emphasize the importance of choosing the right tool. The design of a tool can radically influence how we subconsciously approach learning, forming both good and bad habits. Software can make things considerably easier and it is exciting to explore these features. But it also brings the risk of losing sight of what is most important and drawing us into a game of catch-up with the latest development. Sometimes, simple the better. We keep this at the forefront of our minds when prioritizing product development at Modus AI.

Sonke Ahrens, one of the pioneers of nuanced and modern note-taking and the constructionist movement in education, discusses his thoughts on this in How to take Smart Notes:

Everybody writes. Especially in academia. Students write and professors write. And non-fiction writers, who are the third group of people this book is aiming to help, obviously write as well. And writing doesn't necessarily mean papers, articles or books, but everyday, basic writing. We write when we need to remember something, be it an idea, a quote or the outcomes of a study. We write when we want to organize our thoughts and when we want to exchange ideas with others. Students write when they takes an exam, but the first thing they do to prepare even for an oral examination is to grab pen and paper. We write down not only those things we fear we won't remember otherwise, but also the very things we try to memorize. Every intellectual endeavor starts with a note.

Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it. If writing is discussed, the focus lies almost always on the few exceptional moments where we write a lengthy piece, a book, an article or, as students, the essays and theses we have to hand in. At first glance, that makes sense: these are the tasks that cause the most anxiety and with which we struggle the longest. Consequently, these "written pieces" are also what most self-help books for academics or study guides focus on, but very few give guidance for the everyday note-taking that takes up the biggest chunk of our writing.

Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work.

At Modus AI, we set out to design an environment that empowers you to externalize the processes of identifying, dissecting, connecting, and grouping the concepts you've learned. To accomplish this, we've built features that allow you to dissect notes, move blocks across different notes, build relationships between notes within a module, and reuse notes across multiple modules. Moreover, our AI capabilities enable you to cluster thoughts and ideas you may have forgotten and to build upon your current thinking. This combination of AI and visual functionality creates an environment that leverages human visual comprehension and memory alongside the computer's strengths in data persistence and powerful retrieval. With continued use of Modus AI to deepen your understanding, you'll subconsciously adopt the learning methods described in this article. Ultimately, our goal isn't just to help you take notes but to assist you in becoming better at learning.