The core of the system is highlighting.
Anything that I find that’s important, I’ll highlight on my Kindle. All of those highlights automatically go to my Readwise where I can add them to my learning system. Readwise is fantastic because it automatically scrapes all of my Kindle highlights and puts them into one place for me where I can search, tag, and review them.
My learning system itself has two components: a flashcard system and a custom-built note repository inspired by the Zettelkasten — which is a note-taking system developed by the social scientist Niklas Luhmann. The Zettelkasten is where I spend time processing, categorizing, and connecting what I read.
When I come across something in a book that seems useful to understand and remember, I will highlight it on my Kindle and add a note to it with the text: “.flash”.
All notes with “.flash” in them are then automatically loaded into Readwise and organized under a “flash” tag.
Zettelkasten system
When I highlight something from a book that contains an idea, concept, metaphor, or generally something more abstract, I’ll put it into my Zettelkasten instead of my flashcard system. These highlights aren’t to be remembered, they are to be connected.
Zettelkasten is German for “slip box” and is a method to manage knowledge. Basically, you take ideas from books, articles or conversations and write those ideas on note cards, collect them in a central database, and link them together so that you can start to find larger relationships between concepts you’re learning.
In the beginning, I would actually use physical note cards that I would hand-write and keep on my desk as my Zettelkasten.
Keeping a physical system started to get out of hand, so I tried a bunch of software solutions — Workflowy, Dynalist, Notion — but they were all too slow, didn’t have the features I wanted, and I worried about how they’d age. I wanted a system that I could use for life.
It’s just text files on my computer written in Markdown, and edited using a plaintext editor. I’ve also written a lot of small, auxiliary tooling for searching, browsing related notes, editor integration, and so on. The main repo where I keep all of it is on Github.
Notes get into my Zettelkasten from the highlights in my Readwise. Readwise has a feature called Daily Review which shows me about 15 of my book highlights every day.
If I think a highlight is important, I’ll create a new note in my Zettelkasten and start connecting it with others. For example this is a note about the controversy zippers created when they first came into use:
You’ll see in my Zettelkasten I put in the original quote, then the source, and then write a small commentary on it.
Then I’ll start connecting this to other notes. One way to do that is with tags, and you’ll see that I added a #pessimism tag to the note.
But my system also lets me create links directly to other notes as well.
You’ll see on the right-hand side I have a full-text search prompt. To find other notes to connect it to, I might start by searching “pessimism”:
I have three main areas I throw tasks into:
Growth (a list of personal projects)
Life (chores)
Work
In the Growth section, I keep track of all of my personal projects
I have a lot of personal projects, and I work on them whenever I have the time.
For example, I have a project called “Napkin Math” where I’m working to improve my order-of-magnitude calculations when it comes to system design.
But I have many other projects like reviewing the Vital Articles on Wikipedia, the periodic elements (and their primary uses and sources), blog posts, and a million different things I’d like to learn.
I expect most of these projects to take years, decades, and some of them I’ll be working on for the rest of my life. I run a script when I have a few minutes that helps make little bursts of progress by choosing a random one of these areas.
Tags: favorite
He uses a reMarkable tablet to read long documents and emails
Over the years, I’ve found that reading dense PDFs or Google Docs isn’t very good on a laptop or on a Kindle.
Most of the Google Docs and longer emails I review, I send to my reMarkable and process there.
The reMarkable gives great space to think, but because of its limitations I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. It’s for a very particular workflow. It can easily end up as another expensive shelf gadget.
Surprisingly, I’ve also found that it works very well for making presentations with. Drawing slides is much more fun — I get frustrated when I’m in Keynote for too long.
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. This book is studded with good observations by someone who has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about scientific history. As an engineer — and fellow student of science — I loved it. I wrote a short review here.