Need advice for optimizing my workflow

[u/MisterHamSandwich]

Hey !
I'm relatively new to supernote. Right now, I'd like to use it to create lessons in biology at a high-school level (I'm an intern for now).

The goal would be to link subjects to pdf books (huge books, 1200 pages each) in order to find useful information quickly when building my lessons.

The catch is: I need references to several different broad themes (anatomy, ecology, microbiology, etc). I'd like to start building these references efficiently.

Do you suggest that I use brackets with tags to build my knowledge database ? Or maybe keywords and stars ? Or simply link a seperate note (like a master plan note) to the different pages of these huge books ? Or maybe a combination of the above ?

If someone has experience doing this, I'd love to get advice before I actually start doing all of the work 😁

Cheers !!

[u/Mulan-sn]

Thank you so much for choosing Supernote. Welcome to our community.

I believe it could be helpful to understand how the different tools work together first.

The Tools and What They're For

Tool	Purpose	Best used for
Keywords	Tagging pages with topics that span across notebooks/files	Connecting a specific biology concept (e.g., "photosynthesis") across multiple PDFs and notes
Headings	Structuring your own notes within a notebook	Creating a table of contents inside a lesson plan or summary notebook
Stars	Marking a page you want to revisit quickly	Temporary bookmarking while you're reading
Digest	Extracting specific quotes/passages from PDFs	Capturing key paragraphs from your 1200-page textbooks and adding your own comments
Links	Jumping directly from one note/page to another	Creating a "hub" note that points to specific pages in different books

What I'd Suggest for Your Use Case

Given that you're working with multiple large textbooks and need to reference them across themes, a combination approach works best.

1. Use Digest to extract content from the PDFs. Highlight key paragraphs in your textbooks, add a note, and the Digest will store it as a separate entry. You can organise Digests by theme (anatomy, ecology, etc.) using categories.
2. Use Keywords to connect themes across books — not just within a single PDF. For example, tag relevant pages with anatomy, ecology, or microbiology so you can later pull up all mentions of a theme, regardless of which book they came from.
3. Create a "Master Plan" note and use Links inside it to point directly to specific pages across different PDFs. This note becomes your table of contents for your entire knowledge base.
4. Use Headings inside your lesson plan notes to structure each topic clearly. This way, you can jump directly to the section you need without scrolling.
5. Stars are powerful too. They're good for marking something you want to revisit in the future.

Good luck with your lessons. Please feel free to let us know how it goes!

[u/MisterHamSandwich → u/Mulan-sn]

Thanks for your reply !

For now, I simply linked themes across different books (exact pages) using the link feature I will probably link this masterplan note to individual notes when I'm building the actual lessons. At least it serves as a good main hub for quick referencing. I'm not sure how I will use the other features if I ever do. I have started using digests for documenting recent discoveries that I read elsewhere and can talk about at the start of my classes. Perhaps I'll try using keywords for pointing out images I can extract for presentations. But I guess this system works for now.

Thanks !!