What if college essays didn't have to be the result of a five-hour caffeine high burst?

Using my Obsidian Zettelkasten, I will show you how you can write a reasonable college essay in just 1 hour. Without the caffeine. All you need is a collection of Obsidian notes and this simple three-step process:

1. Dump

2. Lump

3. Jump

Let's go over each step.

The Three Step Essay Process:

The process I use to write college essays in 1 hour is called dump, lump, jump.

Essentially it works by taking an essay prompt, dumping all of your ideas with relevant Obsidian notes down, lumping them together under themed points, and then taking the contents of your Obsidian notes into the page and connecting them together into a cohesive narrative.

Let's see how to do it through this essay prompt I recently got for one of my essays:

Take your greatest insights from Daniele Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness and analyze they have changed your life in some way.

Dump:

In the dump stage, you take all of your ideas from the essay prompt and dump them into a new note for the essay.

Everything. Every quote, Obsidian note, and anything relevant to your given argument. Use your Zettelkasten like it's meant to be used. Follow the connections you made while making your notes for your Zettelkasten and dump them into your essay note.

This gives you a foundation for what you're working with.

As you get more and more information into the note, you might get ideas for what to write about. If you feel like it, go ahead and title the essay. Or write a short introduction.

Here is the result of five minutes of dumping for the essay:

Lump:

In the lump stage you take all of your dumpings--you better thank me for not making a poop joke--and lump them together based on theme.

This becomes the outline for your essay. In may case lumping led me to realize I wanted to structure my lessons around the three main insights of the book, our memories of the past are inaccurate, our perceptions of the present are skewed, and our imaginations of the future are often wrong.

This was the result of five minutes in the lump stage:

Jump:

In the jump stage you take the content inside of the Obsidian notes and bring it into the essay.

Then comes the major fun work. Taking all the writing and connecting it together into a seamless narrative. And finding any holes in your argumentation where you must write entirely new sections or do more research.

Here's what a part of my essay looked like before connecting the pasted Obsidian notes together:

All in all writing this 2000 word essay took me around an hour.

That's the power of a Zettelkasten in for College Essay writing. Most of the work comes in taking the notes themselves. So when you actually get to the point where you are writing an essay, it's more a matter of connecting together what you already have.