Digital Notes Processing

Last week, I processed some of my book notes. Today, I’ll tackle my digital notes.

My workflow involves two tools*:

1. Readwise
2. Obsidian

Thanks to the Readwise plug-in for Obsidian, I can easily funnel all of my highlights on the web directly into my Obsidian vault.

Obsidian also launched a web clipper that lets you clip articles and highlights and send them to your vault. It’s great and I use it, but I prefer to pay for Readwise because I don’t usually read articles on the web.

Whenever I highlight something, Readwise will determine the source of the highlight, and drop it into the corresponding folder. If it’s a book note (from Kindle, for example), it will go into the books folder. If it’s an article, into the articles folder, and so on.

Then all I have to do is go through them.

So let’s do it.

It looks like I saved an article on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, a project founded in 1894 by a Swiss philologist named Eduard Wölfflin. It was originally only supposed to take about 20 years, but researchers now estimate that it won’t be completed until 2050 – at the earliest.

If you’re interested, you can visit the TLL library in Munich, where you’ll find stacks of boxes housing over 10 million slips of paper (zettels) which contain “every surviving piece of writing from the classical period”.

Since all of this is very interesting (to me) I will share some of the stats with you:

• Contains 55,000+ Latin words
• On 10M+ slips of paper
• In over 6,500 boxes of 1,500 slips each
• Includes content from over 32,000 volumes
• Put together by over 375 scholars from 20 countries
• Current progress: 70%

So, now that I’ve “done something” with this information, I can archive the article and move on to the next thing.

Next on the list is some research data on how coffee might lower the risk of cancer. I love any excuse to drink more coffee so this is relevant to my interests.

I don’t really need to do anything with this information, but it’s a good reminder to make more coffee.

Next.

My next note is a series of links shared by Austin Kleon that I highlighted so I’d remember to check them out later. For this type of note, I’ll just click on the links and then decide what I want to do with that content. Is it something I want to read later? Then it goes to my RSS reader.

The next note is a quote about boredom that contains an additional note from me.

For this kind of note, the first thing I’m going to do is check my zettelkasten (index card box) to see if I have a section on boredom.

I do not.

But I do have lots on creativity, which is where I’m most likely to find other cards on the subject of boredom and creativity. So I get out an index card, and write out my question about boredom and creativity.

As for the original quote, I like this part: “Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life.”

Do I have a section in my ZK about attention?

I sure do.

So, that quote gets a card. I also put a note at the bottom of it that points to “boredom, creativity” as I think I’ll want to make a section on that at some point.

I feel like the more distracted we allow ourselves to be, the less creative we become and that is something I think about a lot.

But anyway.

Next.

Kakizome is actually about calligraphy. I highlighted this section because I'm always interested in new ways of thinking about other things. The reference points to this video.

I’m not planning to watch it now, so I’m going to create a to-do item in Todoist and remind myself to watch it at some point. I can also send it to Readwise's Reader which will transcribe the video for me and then I can just skim through the contents without watching the video if I just want a general idea of what it says.

Done.

I still have a lot to process:

I’m not going to go through all of them here as that would take forever, but hopefully that gives you an idea of what I do with my digital content.