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Capture ideas & knowledge

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TL;DR​

The best time to use Heptabase's whiteboard is when you already have some information and a rough understanding of it. If you have a clear topic, start with one note card, break it into smaller cards, and visually organize them as your understanding grows. If you have scattered ideas without a specific topic, use the Journal feature to quickly capture them and later organize them on a whiteboard using methods like calendar creation, converting journal entries into note cards, or creating selective bidirectional links.

Foreword​

When beginning with Heptabase, you might feel inclined to extensively use the whiteboard feature, as it's one of the tool's most powerful features. However, you might wonder: what's the "correct" way to use a whiteboard for capturing knowledge?

Our answer: there isn't a single "correct" method to use a whiteboard, but there certainly is correct "timing." Once you understand the correct timing, you’ll naturally discover the best ways to utilize it.

The correct timing occurs when you already have some existing information and a rough understanding of it. Below, we’ll explore two scenarios illustrating the optimal timing for whiteboard use.

If You Already Have a Clear Topic​

When learning or researching a new topic, we suggest creating a whiteboard for it and adding a single note card as your "starting point." If the topic involves insights from a book, continually add key points from your reading into this card. If the topic covers knowledge of a specific domain, consistently include new learnings there.

As your note card expands, you’ll notice some contents relate to a particular concept, while others relate to different concepts. You’ll also begin identifying relationships among these concepts. Recognizing these relationships is the optimal moment to start utilizing the whiteboard. At this point, you can break down the note card into multiple smaller cards and visually structure them on the whiteboard, enhancing clarity and depth of understanding. A good visual structure significantly deepens your comprehension of the topic.

In the future, when adding new notes to this whiteboard, you have two options:

  1. If new notes directly relate to an existing card, add them to that card.

  2. If there's no clear connection, repeat the initial process by creating a new note card, adding content, and later breaking it down visually on the whiteboard once you've accumulated more content and a clearer understanding of the concept relationships.

In summary, the whiteboard is a tool designed to help make sense of information, ideally used when you already have some information and a rough understanding of it. If you have many notes from other applications, web articles, or research literature, you can directly add them to a whiteboard, break them down, and visually rearrange them. However, when starting with a completely new topic, we recommend beginning with just one note card.

Using whiteboards to organize visual card notes not only helps you better understand the topic you're learning or researching at the moment, but also greatly aids future review. In traditional note-taking apps like Apple Notes, we often unintentionally accumulate too many notes without remembering why we initially wrote them. However, with Heptabase, you can use the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + O to instantly search through over 100,000 cards, open the results in new tabs, and use the info panel of each card to see which whiteboards they appear on. Additionally, you can open the whiteboard tool on the right sidebar of each card to view its exact position across different whiteboards, identify nearby cards, and see the relationships between them. Humans have exceptionally strong visual comprehension skills, and this practice of reviewing cards in their original whiteboard context can significantly enhance your memory and understanding of the entire topic.

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If You Don't Have a Specific Topic Yet​

Often, you might have scattered ideas or thoughts you'd like to revisit or organize in the future—these might just be a few sentences or screenshots that don't fit neatly into a particular topic. For these types of ideas, we recommend capturing them using the Journal feature.

The primary purpose of Heptabase's Journal is to help you quickly capture fleeting ideas without worrying about where exactly to store them. On Heptabase's desktop app, simply click "Journal" in the left sidebar to start adding entries for the day.

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On Heptabase's mobile app, you can tap the calendar button at the bottom to directly access and start typing in the day's Journal. If typing feels cumbersome, you can tap the plus button in the bottom-right corner of the mobile app, select the "Voice Note" option, and record your ideas directly. We will save your recording as an audio file in your day's Journal and automatically transcribe it to text using AI—this works effectively for most languages.

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How can you review your journal entries later? Here are three recommended methods; choose whichever suits you best:

Method 1: Add Your Journal Directly onto a Whiteboard​

Many Heptabase users like to do periodic global reviews and reflections on their journals from the past week, month, quarter, or even year to improve self-awareness. To do this easily, simply right-click on an empty space on the whiteboard and select "Calendar." This places all your journal cards from the selected time period onto the whiteboard, arranged neatly in a calendar layout, allowing you to easily see what you've written.

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Method 2: Convert Journal Content into Note Cards on a Whiteboard​

If you've been journaling for a while and realize many entries relate to a specific topic, we recommend creating a dedicated whiteboard for that topic. When you have enough time, you can transfer relevant journal content onto note cards within that whiteboard.

Doing this is straightforward: open the whiteboard, click the calendar button at the top right to open your journal on the right side, then select important content by dragging a selection box around it and drag it onto the whiteboard. The content will automatically convert into note cards!

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Because journal content is typically fragmented, you might sometimes prefer adding it directly into existing note cards rather than creating new ones. To do this, simply drag your selected content onto an existing card on the whiteboard.

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Of course, you can also directly select important thoughts within your Journal and use the block menu to choose "Turn into new card," then move this card onto your whiteboard later.

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If you've previously used other "networked-note-taking" apps, you might consider using Heptabase's bidirectional linking and tagging features while writing your journal entries.

For example, you may have a tag called #friend, with cards for "Friend A," "Friend B," etc. While journaling, you can mention these cards by typing @ to link them. Later, when reviewing your interactions with Friend A, simply open the "Friend A" card and use the backlinks to find journal entries where you mentioned them.

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If you use this bidirectional linking method, you won't necessarily need to convert journal entries into note cards. However, there's an important consideration: while bidirectional linking initially appears very useful and appealing, excessive use (linking everywhere possible) might obscure genuinely important connections. Thus, we generally recommend using methods 1 or 2 to review journal content. Only consider method 3 if you're confident about correctly using bidirectional links.