How to create things with your notes

Notes only stay valuable when they stop being a storage problem and start feeding real output. Nicole van der Hoeven’s core message is that “use it or lose it” should apply to personal knowledge: turn highlights and ideas into publishable work, then route audience feedback back into the vault. The payoff isn’t just productivity—it’s learning in public, where unfinished work and visible process reduce fear and increase reach.

She starts with a diagnosis of why notes often fail. A snapshot of her Obsidian graph shows role-playing game notes, imported highlights, and everything else—an impressive-looking system that still risks becoming “hoarding information.” She points to the mismatch between effort and impact: she has produced 15 blog posts, spoken at 17 conferences, made 61 videos, and logged 6,393 GitHub commits (including vault content), yet insists she isn’t an expert—she’s someone who found a way to make notes useful.

Three common blockers keep people from publishing: imposter syndrome (“why would anyone listen?”), unclear purpose (“what is this for?”), and perfectionism (“it’s not polished enough”). Her remedy is learning in public—documenting the process rather than waiting for a finished product. She ties the approach to public-notes and creator advice from Andy Matuschak (“garage door up”), Gary Vaynerchuk (“Document, don’t create”), Austin Kleon (“Show Your Work”), and Shawn Wang (“learning exhaust”). The logic is practical: you don’t need to be an expert to guide others a few steps ahead; fear of looking silly is part of learning; and process is inherently compelling to audiences.

From there, she gives a concrete workflow built around Obsidian. First, capture only what interests you. In her vault, imported material flows in through Readwise using the Readwise official plugin, tagged with TVZ to mark items that still need processing. She then turns highlights into short “placeholder” notes—enough to preserve a thought and create a starting point. Examples include a Kanban note drawn from a highlighted article (including the Kanban idea of limiting work-in-progress to avoid overwhelm), and a “Direction is more important than destination” note inspired by a fictional book.

Next comes the key step: identifying “lightning rods of thought,” clusters of ideas that naturally attract related thinking. She offers four ways to find them: bottom-up (use Obsidian graph view, especially the local graph around a topic like productivity, to spot linked-but-unwritten gaps), top-down (start from a deadline or planned deliverable), outside-in (tag feedback from others and mine it for recurring questions), and chaos (use random-note plugins to force unexpected connections).

Finally, she turns ideas into output using a Kanban-style content board. Tasks move from “on deck” through stages like editing and captioning, with WIP limits to keep the pipeline realistic. Templates fill in structured metadata for each deliverable (title, hook, structure, outro, and production tasks). After publishing, she loops back: she enriches the original vault notes with the finished artifact (video, timestamps, transcript) and links related notes so the learning doesn’t stop at release. She frames the whole system as CI/CD for knowledge—done isn’t permanent; feedback should percolate back into the vault to improve future work.