Capturing notes efficiently with org roam

A good capture workflow is the first part of The ZettelKasten Method. It prevents a digital graveyard of saved links and half-finished notes. A good wokrflow forces you to process the information.

Templates enforce consistency and structure. Lets create a template to capture literature notes, but this time lets add prompts for details we want to fill in like the author and the year the book was published

 ("b" "book notes" plain
"\n* Source\n\nAuthor: %^{Author}\nTitle: ${title}\nYear: %^{Year}\n\n* Summary\n\n%?"
:if-new (file+head "%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-${slug}.org" "#+title: ${title}\n")
:unnarrowed t)

With this prompt we will be prompted for the author and year which will be automatically inserted in the capture buffer. Of course, this is only the start, we can do more interesting things with template expansion.