

‘Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught.
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It is available on Amazon here and you can also download the first chapter, free, here and learn more about the book. For the title of the note, I try to separate my literature notes from my notes by denoting them with some symbol.This review relates to the book ‘How to Take Smart Notes’ by Sonke Ahrens. The author has automatically been pulled in from Readwise, along with the highlights and notes. Once I've clicked there, I'll have this new page in my vault. It always shows the most recently added book at the top. Then I select the book that I want to import my highlights for. The process is quite automatic - all I have to do is to select the 'Add book notes' option. Now, the question is, how do I get the notes into my Obsidian vault? For this, I have made a QuickAdd script which automatically fetches the notes from Readwise and formats them to my liking. I will have had time to ruminate on the ideas, which helps me to separate the important from the filler the signal from the noise. I do this because it allows me to easily format my notes and extract data about them easily.Īfter doing so, I try to wait a few days before processing the notes. Once I've read the book and finished taking notes, I'll send them from my iPad to a service called Readwise.

This is especially important later, when I'm processing my notes. It ensures that I don't shallowly process what I'm reading, and that I know why I highlighted it. I have one rule for highlighting: always explain why. The workflow starts on my iPad, which is where I read the books, make highlights, and write notes to those highlights. My workflow for taking smart book notesįirst why Obsidian? Because it enables two powerful aspects of the workflow linking and automation. The total value of my knowledge vault increased exponentially with each new note because it could be linked to existing notes. This is where I began seeing compound interest in my knowledge vault. Since I began separating the ideas from the books into atomic notes, I could relate these to other ideas that I've previously stumbled upon. However, that was not the biggest gain of all. I saw a massive increase in what I gained from each book.
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I happened to read How to Take Smart Notes, which allowed me to further refined my process. What comes next completely revolutionized how I process information and massively increase my ROI. While this gave me something to stick to - a structured approach to taking notes - it was still too much 'file and forget'. Later, I introduced a system for taking book notes, which brought much needed order to the chaos. I started writing down a few things here and there - but mostly, I was highlighting things that stood out.

I didn't take notes, I forgot a lot of ideas, and my return on investment (ROI) wasn't very high. In the beginning, I really struggled processing the amount of information in each book. Around 154, according to my Goodreads profile. Because I've been reading for such a long time, I have read a lot of books by now. Reading has been one of my favorite things to do for many years.
