The Art of Note-Making, Syncing Book Highlights with Obsidian, and More

June 4, 2021

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The Art of Note-Making »

I’ve been thinking a lot about Personal Knowledge Management lately and the path information takes as it enters and exits my PKM system, and I’ve noticed that information tends to fall into one of three buckets:

Things I may need to reference
Tasks I will need to do
Ideas I want to develop

The first two are pretty straightforward — I simply capture those into the appropriate bucket. For a long time, I used Evernote as my reference file and OmniFocus as my task list. When COVID-19 happened and I reworked my system, I found a lot of value in having everything in one place. So now, I keep reference material and tasks in the same bucket as the ideas I want to develop. This has a lot of benefits, but I’ve also discovered I can’t treat all my notes the same. I have a separate, more active system for developing my ideas. It’s quite a bit more involved, but I believe it’s worth it.

In this article, I want to consider the difference between my old note-taking workflow and the note-making that helps me so much in the creative process.

Syncing Digital Highlights from Readwise to Obsidian »

Readwise is a (subscription-based) web service that lets you save highlighted text from digital books, web articles, and even Read-It-Later services like Instapaper and Pocket. You can review your notes and highlights inside of the Readwise service, but you can also connect your Readwise account to PKM apps like Roam and Obsidian.

In Obsidian, the connection to Readwise is handled through a Community Plugin called Readwise Community. Read on to see how it works and how to set it up for yourself.

Timery is Now on the Mac, and It’s Awesome »

Timery (our pick for the best time tracking app) was just updated to version 1.2. The iOS version received some nice additions, like time entry suggestions, global keyboard shortcuts to start and stop timers, multi-window support, duration rounding, and a sidebar on the iPad. But the real star of the show in our opinion is the new Mac version and its incredible support for keyboard shortcuts.

CalDigit “TS3 Plus” Thunderbolt 3 Dock »

If you’ve ever felt limited by the number of ports on your MacBook Pro or other device, worry no more because the [TS3 Plus dock by CalDigit][1] gives you 15 ways to connect all your favorite stuff together, all from a single Thunderbolt 3 connection.

Voice Memo Apps: A Roundup and Overview of the Best »

Capturing notes and ideas when you have them is important so that they don’t fall through the cracks, but sometimes having to type out your note takes too long. You need something quick — a way to just offload what is currently on your mind so you can focus on what’s in front of you. Voice memos are great for this, allowing you to speak your thoughts faster than you could ever type them.

But which app do you use?

In this roundup, we share some of our experiences with several popular voice memo apps and the workflows where they fit best.

Interesting Links From Our Friends and Around the Web »

Meet Pincone, the perfect bookmarking tool for teams (Sponsor) »

Pincone is an intuitive and well-designed bookmarking tool that makes sharing content with others easy.

With Pincone you can save, organize, label, and easily search for links you bookmark. This means all your content is stored in a personalized way and easy to find when you need it.

Along with organizing it, Pincone helps you discover new content with its feeds feature. Add any feed you want into Pincone and keep track of all your favorite sources across the web.

Create teams for your coworkers, friends, family, or anyone else you want to share information with, comment on the links your teammates add, or create a private profile and enjoy all the benefits and functionality of Pincone alone.

Our thanks to Pincone for sponsoring the site this week!