[Productivity] Webinar note-taking with Slid and Notion

As the era of webinars has opened due to the pandemic, I take at least one webinar a week from multiple institutions and centers of my interest. The webinar is also a networking opportunity and it’s so nice to hear about why the authors of the papers chose this topic and what realistic limitations/reasons they used the methodological approaches 🙂

The problem is that you listen to the webinar and don’t take notes, so you get the feeling that the information just disappears. Of course, the information will remain in the corner of the brain, but I thought archiving would be much better in the long run. In this post, I would love to introduce two tools (Slid and Notion) to take notes on webinars!

Step 1: Capture with Slid + Take Notes

• A Slid is a note-taking tool that allows you to capture video and take notes simultaneously. Watch the video above to understand how it works/is used easily!
• Both Chrome extension and Desktop program (still only Windows) are provided. I use the Chrome extension when viewing on a web browser such as YouTube and the Desktop program when listening to a webinar with Zoom.

How to use Slid

Even though Slid is an intuitive application, so you would be okay to use it, here is the how-to-guide for someone unfamiliar with it.

• This tool helps with the automation of capture. In other words, Slid is a tool that simplifies this capture + copy-paste with a single click.
• When the Slid is turned on, a small handwriting screen appears on the right side and a zoom screen is placed on the left side. done automatically. Adjusting the screen is up to you.

• Afterwards, if you click the capture button (center button), the capture is automatically inserted, and you can write down the corresponding content below!
• For reference, you need to set the area on the left so that the entire screen is not captured and only the desired area (PPT screen) can be captured neatly.
• On the note-taking side, the markdown shortcuts I often use for note-taking also work, although I’m not perfect yet. (###: heading, Ctrl+B: bold, -: bullet point, etc.)

Step 2: Save it to Notion Database

• After capturing the webinar PPT slides and taking notes of them, it is good to organize the notes in Notion Database for future reference.
• I created a Webinar notes page as above and made a DB of the webinar date / title / tag / summary. It’s not a time-consuming task if you do it every time you take it.

• The following is how to import notes on Slid -> Notion DB. First, you need to import the notes written in the Slid into Notion. If you click Download at the bottom of the Slid, you will be given four options as shown above, among which you can choose the Markdown option.

• Then, click import at the top of the Notion Webinar notes page! Then import options appear as above, and you can click Text & Markdown to import the file exported from Slide above.

• All you have to do is insert the note into the DB and designate a tag 🙂 You can simply just drag and drop it into the Database.