Skip to main content

Use Case and Workflow

Use Case #1: You want to improve your learning in topics you care about.​

Target Audience​

  • You are a knowledge worker (e.g., product manager, engineer, designer, analyst, business manager) who wants to enhance your professional knowledge and improve your work performance.
  • You are a student (e.g., undergraduate, self-learner, career changer) who wants to better learn, understand, and review the knowledge from the courses you are studying.
  • You are a reader who wants to better synthesize the knowledge you've gained through extensive reading.

Workflow Overview​

  1. When you're reading a book, highlight important paragraphs and put them into a card. Then, place this book card on a whiteboard and break it down into multiple smaller concept cards. Use arrows and sections to connect and group these concept cards, establishing a vivid knowledge structure of the book.
  2. When you're researching a new topic in the future, create a new whiteboard and import concept cards from different books and sources related to this topic. Synthesize them so that you can apply what you've learned in the past to what you're working on in the future.

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."

You can only gain a deep understanding of the topics you care about through visual note-taking when you atomize your notes. 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. To ensure clarity, you should always describe the concept in one sentence and use that sentence as the title of the concept card.

Workflow Learning Material​

Use Case #2: You want to make sense of the data, literature, and ideas related to your project to better achieve your project goals.​

Target Audience​

  • You are an industry project leader (e.g., product manager, corporate executive, founder) who wants to synthesize your planning, research, ideas, and domain knowledge on your work project to make better work decisions.
  • You are an academic project leader (e.g., scholars, graduate students) who wants to make sense of academic literature and your research logs to produce better research outcomes.
  • You are a creative project leader (e.g., creators, teachers, consultants) who wants to synthesize your knowledge, creative ideas, and reference materials to produce better creative content.

Workflow Overview​

  1. Use the hierarchical structure of the nested whiteboards to manage different topics under your research project. Create research-oriented whiteboards to store data, literature, and ideas, and create learning-oriented whiteboards to store knowledge on certain topics.
  2. When you notice that certain knowledge you've learned could be useful for your project, you can import and reuse the card from your learning-oriented whiteboard to the research-oriented whiteboard to guide the project direction.
  3. Visual note-taking is not the goal itself, but a process to achieve your goal. It’s okay to have messy whiteboards at the beginning. As your cards start to accumulate on your whiteboards, allocate some afternoons to organize them into a structure that can best help you achieve your research goal. You'll find this process extremely beneficial for your research.

Workflow Learning Material​

Use Case 3: You want to plan and reflect on your life, sorting out your thoughts and emotions.​

Target Audience​

  • You are a person who wants to understand yourself better and have a better sense of control over your life.

Workflow Overview​

  1. When you have fleeting ideas that are hard to categorize, write them down in today's journal to reduce the friction of capturing ideas.
  2. If you often capture important ideas in your journal, make sure to allocate time once in a while to extract these ideas onto the whiteboard for deeper thinking. You can click the journal button on the top right of the whiteboard to open it, use the selection box to select the content of your journal, and drag them to the whiteboard to turn them into a note card. You can also drag this content to an existing card on the whiteboard.
  3. You can also simply use the journal to record your life and emotions without turning these contents into note cards. Instead, you can put all journal cards of the same month on the same whiteboard for a comprehensive review and reflection on this month.
  4. The journal app can also serve as a lightweight to-do management system for your life. You can add to-dos on different dates and assign incomplete to-dos to another date with one click.

Workflow Learning Material​