This type of post is my absolute favorite! I'll never be thankful enough that you introduced me to Obsidian back in the day :))
It's entirely amazing to me that, while we are using the same tools, for the same goals, with very similar materials (books about humanities stuff), our processes are complete opposites. I could never keep up with such an organized and refined level of notes, but i've found ai to be helpful in dealing with my 100000 words of much more loosely organized notes.
haha I would not necessarily say that I "keep up" with all the notes I make, but for the most part they are there when I need them to be, and help me say what I want to say, and that's all I really want from them.
The best systems are always the ones we Frankenstein together. Back when was first exposed to PKM people and all the pettifoggery of zettelkasen stuff, I thought 90% of it sounded too tedious and rigid for me, but it introduced me to Obsidian and got me into the habit of making a daily note where I can ramble about whatever big-brain concept I'm stuck on, which has been a big help for trying to research and write with greater consistency despite being a terminally silly person.
Yeah I am pretty allergic to tedious rigid habits (and rarely manage a consistent daily note, for that matter), but having a big pile of all the stuff I read makes it a lot easier for me to cope with all my ideas without having to go searching in the wild world of the open internet too often.
Heartily agree. In the last year, I've finally reached the point where I can search my Obsidian file for what I need for most everything besides the pithy memes I steal.
I love reading about other peoples workflows, so this was a gem in my inbox. Thanks.
It’s interesting to see the unique tags that you came up with. When I was first starting out, I just randomly use tags until I got to the point where I had about two years worth of notes and then I begin checking through and analysing what kind of notes I actually had, in order to create a tagging system for myself. Fully documented in a reference page so I don’t have many tags that mean the same thing(I did write about it, but it’s buried under my posts).
Nowadays, I have got away from such a strict tagging system. I don’t track status anymore and I only track topic tags in my zettelkasten.
I definitely feel pretty strongly that the best tagging system is one that emerges organically from how you actually use your notes... and that I have no business telling other people what tags or folders they "should" be using. #bmf is a lot of fun tho, I love connecting my fiction and nonfiction reading.
I have a tag #spark for anything that kind of catches my attention in a way where I’m like , maybe I could write a story about that. Most of them go no where, but they are always fun to look through.
So interesting! I’ve been trying to figure out my own process and how I want to bring Readwise notes into obsidian. I think I’ve landed on keeping the highlights themselves in Readwise and just linking from the vault.
I kept having the issue of adding notes during my Readwise Daily reviews that would never make it into Obsidian because I’d already imported the highlight.
I just need to figure out how I want to keep track of like a to-do section of things I want to bring in or connections that I’ve noted in Readwise but aren’t in my vault yet.
It’s a more manual process, but these days I find myself seeing the value in friction
I'm a big fan of manual processes for a lot of things, which is one reason I take a lot of analog notes. For me the primary advantage of Obsidian is that it has EVERYTHING, and the search is comprehensive and blazing-fast. I keep my Readwise stuff in a dedicated folder in its "unchanged" form, and periodically do a bulk resync, then make extra copies of things I've changed myself. It ends up making the vault bigger, but I can always filter out different folders if I don't want to see duplicate content.
I'm never "up to date" with getting all the notes I made in Readwise cleaned up and tidy in Obsidian, but they're still useful even in their raw form, and I'm generally okay with reading more than I end up creating with. Everything in its proper season, etc. Sometimes I go months without manually *making* any notes in Obsidian, but the vault is still useful.
Write everything in analog notebook. Audio record it read it aloud and comment on them (like new findings ect). Upload audio to LLM (I use Gemini) and ask for transcript. Reading it aloud helps you to develop your thoughts. Edit transcript as needed. Upload it to notebookLM and NEVER organise anything. Ever. Just open your notebookLM and ask questions about anything you ever wrote. Done.
I also like to make my notes within Zotero and connect them with my daily thoughts in Anytype.
Thanks for your inspiring approach.
I really wish I'd known about Zotero when I was still in gras school ðŸ˜
This type of post is my absolute favorite! I'll never be thankful enough that you introduced me to Obsidian back in the day :))
It's entirely amazing to me that, while we are using the same tools, for the same goals, with very similar materials (books about humanities stuff), our processes are complete opposites. I could never keep up with such an organized and refined level of notes, but i've found ai to be helpful in dealing with my 100000 words of much more loosely organized notes.
haha I would not necessarily say that I "keep up" with all the notes I make, but for the most part they are there when I need them to be, and help me say what I want to say, and that's all I really want from them.
The best systems are always the ones we Frankenstein together. Back when was first exposed to PKM people and all the pettifoggery of zettelkasen stuff, I thought 90% of it sounded too tedious and rigid for me, but it introduced me to Obsidian and got me into the habit of making a daily note where I can ramble about whatever big-brain concept I'm stuck on, which has been a big help for trying to research and write with greater consistency despite being a terminally silly person.
Yeah I am pretty allergic to tedious rigid habits (and rarely manage a consistent daily note, for that matter), but having a big pile of all the stuff I read makes it a lot easier for me to cope with all my ideas without having to go searching in the wild world of the open internet too often.
Heartily agree. In the last year, I've finally reached the point where I can search my Obsidian file for what I need for most everything besides the pithy memes I steal.
I love reading about other peoples workflows, so this was a gem in my inbox. Thanks.
It’s interesting to see the unique tags that you came up with. When I was first starting out, I just randomly use tags until I got to the point where I had about two years worth of notes and then I begin checking through and analysing what kind of notes I actually had, in order to create a tagging system for myself. Fully documented in a reference page so I don’t have many tags that mean the same thing(I did write about it, but it’s buried under my posts).
Nowadays, I have got away from such a strict tagging system. I don’t track status anymore and I only track topic tags in my zettelkasten.
I definitely feel pretty strongly that the best tagging system is one that emerges organically from how you actually use your notes... and that I have no business telling other people what tags or folders they "should" be using. #bmf is a lot of fun tho, I love connecting my fiction and nonfiction reading.
I have a tag #spark for anything that kind of catches my attention in a way where I’m like , maybe I could write a story about that. Most of them go no where, but they are always fun to look through.
So interesting! I’ve been trying to figure out my own process and how I want to bring Readwise notes into obsidian. I think I’ve landed on keeping the highlights themselves in Readwise and just linking from the vault.
I kept having the issue of adding notes during my Readwise Daily reviews that would never make it into Obsidian because I’d already imported the highlight.
I just need to figure out how I want to keep track of like a to-do section of things I want to bring in or connections that I’ve noted in Readwise but aren’t in my vault yet.
It’s a more manual process, but these days I find myself seeing the value in friction
I'm a big fan of manual processes for a lot of things, which is one reason I take a lot of analog notes. For me the primary advantage of Obsidian is that it has EVERYTHING, and the search is comprehensive and blazing-fast. I keep my Readwise stuff in a dedicated folder in its "unchanged" form, and periodically do a bulk resync, then make extra copies of things I've changed myself. It ends up making the vault bigger, but I can always filter out different folders if I don't want to see duplicate content.
I'm never "up to date" with getting all the notes I made in Readwise cleaned up and tidy in Obsidian, but they're still useful even in their raw form, and I'm generally okay with reading more than I end up creating with. Everything in its proper season, etc. Sometimes I go months without manually *making* any notes in Obsidian, but the vault is still useful.
What style / plugin are you using to get that appearance in the screen shot? (the last one with the callouts). I like that coffee color.
It's the Primary theme :)
!!!
What?
!!!
I didn't realize. :/
I've been using AnuPpuccin for so long...that I didn't even realize there were decent included themes. Oops.
Thanks for the quick reply.
AnuPpuccin is another great one!
Write everything in analog notebook. Audio record it read it aloud and comment on them (like new findings ect). Upload audio to LLM (I use Gemini) and ask for transcript. Reading it aloud helps you to develop your thoughts. Edit transcript as needed. Upload it to notebookLM and NEVER organise anything. Ever. Just open your notebookLM and ask questions about anything you ever wrote. Done.