5 Steps to Get Started with Excalidraw & Note MAKING
There is always a different way to do something, to express ourselves better, and make it easier for those around us to “Listen To Us”. What can be a better way than to give them something to “Intensely Consume”. There has to be something that “Others” want or like in the notes, or the presentation to consume. That's where the well thought out diagram comes into flow. Well, there is nothing much to write now, everything is spoken by the Diagram. Diagram makes it possible for the reader to map their own “Imagination” to the notes. The above figure can be visualized as a “Mural” on a ceiling, with 4 corner “rectangle pillars”. “Concentric circles of Arts” give the analogy of planets revolving around the sun. The imagination will remind you of the ancient temples you visited, or the visit to a Planetarium on a weekend.
Now that we have covered the power of making visual notes, let's jump into the matter at hand. Whether it is your smartphone, tablet, Mac or your PC, Excalidraw interface is the same. The tool is built with Javascript with love and affection than any other tool out there. On top of it, it is Open Source and Free to download and use at plus.excalidraw.com. There is an online website where the drawings can be instantly drawn, without even requiring to download the tool. The list of benefits for this tool is endless… which leads us to How to Start Visualising Notes.
The above steps look simple, but the key point is to learn about the various ways we can map the information we learn. There are some 15 to 18 different ways, and we will dive deeper into the use case of these maps. In this post itself, I have used some of these maps to convey the concepts. Writing is the easiest and least resistant way of “taking” notes. So continue writing the notes. After you have taken the notes, then think about how you can map those notes onto the “Above Maps”.
If you are getting a thought that this is all “Double work”, I beg you to look at it from the angle of “Investing Time” in making the notes. You can easily convert the notes into Blogs, Youtube Videos, office presentations and on top of all this “Get New Insights”. That is how I made this post to begin with.
The above post is made possible by PKM movement that I came across when exploring Obsidian, and stumbled upon Zsolt’s YT channel at www.youtube.com. It is a treasure trove of information on Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Visualising information and ways to automate Excalidraw with the plugins. Zsolt is a phenomenal programmer and has many plugins written for Excalidraw. Do browse his channel, I am sure you will get more information.
I believe you have learned about an important skill that will change how you collect and curate information going forward. Share your thoughts and ideas, and how you visualized within the comments. Thanks for reading, and until the next post… Practice, Practice, Keep Practicing.
