%% Related: - %% # How to process notes in Obsidian - Readwise Official Obsidian plugin ## The video <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/https://youtu.be/Rw1L5sxlnuU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ## Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:43 Main sources of content and my use case for Readwise 2:05 How to install and setup the Readwise Official plugin 5:35 From an ebook or Twitter to Obsidian 8:09 Making permanent notes in Obsidian 12:12 Readwise pricing ## Transcript - I have mixed feelings about the Zettelkasten methodology. I like the idea, but the methodology itself is rigid, it's old fashioned and it over complicates a simple concept. And the concept is this: it is unrealistic to expect yourself to read something once and retain it forever. In this video, I'm gonna talk about how I learn and retain information in a more modern approach to Zettelkasten. Hi, I'm Nicole van der Hoeven, I'm a Developer Advocate by profession. And on this channel, I like to talk about various ways that I try to min/max my life. And a lot of that has to do with the tools that I use. Learning starts by consuming some sort of content. For me, my main sources of content are: YouTube videos, books, web articles, tweets, and also PDFs. And my desired end state is to somehow distill all my learnings from these into my note taking tool, which is Obsidian. So the question is, how do I get from the raw materials to my distilled learnings in Obsidian? And my answer right now is a service called Readwise. Readwise acts a bit like middleware. You can think of it as this layer between the raw information and what you've learned out of that information that you probably keep in your Obsidian vault. So you might be wondering why I even need a middle layer. Couldn't I just read a blog post and while I'm reading it, take notes in Obsidian? And I definitely could do it that way, but sometimes I'm not reading at my desktop, I might be doing it on my phone or on my tablet. Sometimes I might just not be in the mood to take notes. And I also don't want to just put absolutely everything that I'm learning, that I'm reading or consuming, into Obsidian because honestly not everything is that important to me. So I need some sort of way to reduce the amount of noise that I have before it goes into the rest of the process. Let me take you through the whole process which begins with installing the Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian. So this is a brand new vault that I've created just to demonstrate this, because I already have this integration set up. But if you don't, you can go into settings here go to Community plugins, turn this off if you haven't already. Of course, that's at your own risk. But then you can go into Community plugins and then look for Readwise. Now, you are going to find a few things here, and that's because before Readwise came out with their official plugin, there were already unofficial solutions. But in this case, we're going to go with Readwise Official here. And it should say Official Readwise to Obsidian integration. Click Install and a few seconds later, you should see this sign that says, successfully installed. Hit Enable, and then go ahead into Options so we can see what we're dealing with. You'll see a connect button here that'll allow this Readwise plugin to talk to your Readwise account. Sign up with the link to Readwise in the description below if you haven't already done that and then click Connect. This has opened up something on my browser here. Now, I already have a Readwise account and I've already gotten it set up but let me run you through what this is. In this page, you'll see a bunch of options for Obsidian exports in particular. This is one of the coolest things about Readwise is that for every import or for every source that you get that comes into Readwise and then gets exported to wherever, you can select how that's going to look like. In this case, the exported file is to be a markdown file. And this first part is asking where we want the books, articles, tweets or podcasts to be. I like this approach of having them in different folders because sometimes you might have something that is both a book and an article, perhaps, that's similarly named, so it's good to have that separation. I've selected to have custom formatting. Of course, you can turn that off, if you'd prefer, but there are a few things that I've changed about this. This on the right is an example of what things look like when they're imported into Obsidian for me. I've been able to select parameters that I usually use in my vault. And for example, this tag is very me, this means Te Verzetteln which is kind of like an inbox tag for me, it lets me know, that this is something that I still need to process. There's a lot here that you can change but if you don't wanna mess with any of it, you can disable it here to use the automatic Readwise Obsidian settings. And it's also saying "Return to the Obsidian app to initiate a sync." So let's do that now. At this point, let's switch to my actual Obsidian vault so that you can see what it's like when it's already set up. This is what my Readwise Official settings look like. And you can go in here, and click Initiate Sync and that'll sync all of the things that you hadn't already synced from your Readwise account to your Obsidian vault. Looks like mine's just done it already. So it didn't have that much to sync this time but I would also go into the configure re-sync frequency. I've got mine set to every hour, but I believe it defaults to manual which I don't think is that useful. So that's a bit of a gotcha that you do have to go in here and make it automatic. I think that's the best way to do it so you don't even have to think about it. You can also change the folder that these highlights are going to come into. I like to set it to Readwise. Now, let's see what it looks like when it comes in. I read most of my books on Kindle these days. So I have a few Kindle e-readers, as well as the Kindle app on my tablet and on my mobile phone, they all kind of just sync. And while I'm reading on any of those devices, I can go ahead and highlight and even add notes. And all of those highlights and notes are pulled into Readwise and then now through to Obsidian. So this is a book called "Klara and the Sun," by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I really enjoyed actually. It's like about artificial intelligence and its sort of dystopian, it was really interesting. Here's what the highlights look like. There's just some things that I found interesting. So every day that you add highlights it's just going to add to the end of the file rather than overwriting them, which is really nice. Another source that I use for learning new things is Twitter. Let's say there's a tweet like this excellent one by Erin Moore, which compiles a bunch of women and non-binary content creators in the PKM space. So let's say that I want to save this to Readwise. So then I can just click here, sorry, this is in Dutch right now, but I'm just clicking on the "Share this" and then "Send as a private message." And then I'll click Readwise-- that's @readwise.io. I don't have to put any message actually, I'm just going to send it and it'll say that the message was sent. And if we go back to Readwise, we'll see that that tweet is now there. It's not immediate, but it is within a few minutes of it. And normally, when I go to the trouble of saving it to Readwise, I don't intend to read it and process it right then. So that's what it looks like in Readwise, I'm just opening it here. And that's the whole thing, I can still go to the original source of the tweet. And then I can go back to Obsidian, and let's say, I don't wanna wait until Readwise does the automatic once an hour thing. So I'm just going to do an Initiate Sync here, and let's hope that that tweet is pulled in. Readwise sync completed, and now we can do a search for it. Now, I know that that was from Erin Moore and I think this is it. That is Erin, yep, and that was the tweet that we were just looking at. There's still the link here if we want to go to it. And in this case it was just matter of marking like, kind of like bookmarking the tweet so that I would remember to go back and look at it rather than highlighting anything in the text itself. So that's what it looks like when it gets into my Obsidian vault. But the learning doesn't stop there, because at this point I've only really highlighted sections that I've found interesting. The real difficulty in this entire process is sitting down and going through all of those collected notes and trying to process it into something else. Every day at 9:00 pm (I chose that, because that's a time that I personally feel the most alert in the entire day), I sit down and go through everything I've tagged or that Readwise has tagged with a TVZ tag. It can really be any tag that you want but that's what I use. And then I go through what I've highlighted and think about what ideas I can pull out of that. In this case, this is a fiction book. So I actually created another note for it, also called "Klara and the Sun," same title but it's not in the Readwise folder. And what I did was in this page I started going through, like the themes of this work there's hope and loneliness and superstition. So I talk little bit about what it says about that theme and then supporting scenes or character developments in the book that reinforced that theme. So the idea is that I'm now starting to step back and look at the book in general, and see what I can pick up from it rather than the specific passages. So this isn't about quotes, this is about my general thoughts of what the author was trying to say. This is an example of a paper that's actually coming out like it's a book, but it's really an academic paper. And it's about Kubedim, which is sort of like a proxy that allows you to use control theory to improve application performance in microservices-based systems. So same thing; I had highlights here. I was also able to highlight from the PDF which is kind of cool. And after that, I take this further by creating another page, which is outside of Readwise. These are quotes that are directly from the author so they're in the author's words. But just to create that separation between what's my words and what somebody else's words, I usually like to create another note where I step back and look at it from, still from the perspective of the author but I'm trying to understand what he's trying to say. So I might also add other things that the author has created like this video in this case, where the author was defending his thesis. And then I also start to look at what other theories the author has mentioned that I can relate to my work. So in this case, I looked at the circuit breaker pattern. So if I go there, then I have a page just on the circuit breaker pattern which is no longer in the author's words and also no longer strictly about the work. This is my understanding of the concept based on several things you see, I have some diagrams here from other sources where I was trying to understand it but I'm still linking to it from this Kubedim page. I might also decide that dimming as a concept, or brownout, is also something that I might want to look into. I guess the question here is when do you stop? Because as you can see, I could just keep going here. You know, Kubedim led me to create this new page, on Kubedim that's in my words. And then that led me to create something on Circuit Breaker Pattern and Dimming. And I could go back to Site Reliability Engineering. And the answer is that it doesn't really have a clear end. And I think that's the point. I think it's very easy to get caught up in the cycle wanting to completely finish it, but it never actually finishes. So I don't really have a quantitative way of saying when you should stop processing. I think it's a much better idea to just go as deep as you feel like going, as deep as is relevant at the time that you create these notes and they're still going to be in the vault for later. So it's not like they're completely lost. So that it's my system. I do have to mention here that Readwise Official as in the Obsidian plugin is free, but Readwise the service is not. Readwise light is $4.49 US a month and it's enough for most use cases. But if you wanna go further, the Readwise plan is $7.99 US a month and adds a lot of cool extra features, like space repetition for your highlights which is pretty cool. I use the full Readwise plan because aside from the extra features, I think that the folks at Readwise are awesome and they're doing amazing things in the space and planning even more. So I definitely want to support them. You do get a free trial which I would recommend you starting with. And if you click on the referral link, my referral link in the description below then you'll get double the amount of time that you would normally get. It is an affiliate link but you can check out my ethics statement. If you're curious about my standards for products and services that I recommend. Readwise has been an essential part of how I learn. And I would happily pay for a tool that I can say that about. Readwise Official is an Obsidian plugin. And if you wanna know more about other Obsidian plugins I find essential to my usage of Obsidian, check out this video where I go over just that. Thanks for watching. And as they say in Vulcan, dif-tor heh smusma, live long and prosper.