When I read from an article, PDF, or any text-based resource, I follow the following rules:
- Use two highlightning colors (orange and green) and alternate between them to separate ideas.
- After reading for sometime or feel that I have lost or might lose track of what I have read before, I come back and write marginal notes (in red) to describe the general idea for each highlighted section.
- After completing reading the content, I revisit my notes and try to have a solid understanding of the content and add more marginal notes with a different color (blue).
- Re-write my notes and general ideas into a piece of paper to understand the flow of ideas (just focus on important things and ignore details that aren't important)
After I complete consuming the content, I move my notes to Obsidian to have them backed-up in Markdown and organized for future referencing. I try to refactor my notes every month or so.
The connection between different markdown notes in Obsidian.
I use my iPad to write notes by hand and read PDF. However, I have different setup to organize my workflow:
- GoodNotes: to write notes from scratch.
- I use dark, square-style sheet
- I use three colors (yellow=main content, red and blue=side notes)
- Notability: to read and highlight on PDF.
- I use three highlighting colors (orange and green = highlighting ideas, and blue = for exteremly important things or weird stuff that I want to look into later)
- I use two colors for marginal notes(red = during reading, and blue = after reading)
Both of them are synced to Google Drive and I use insync to sync the documents created in both GoodNotes and Notability to my PC/Laptop.
In addition, I use the following to do certain things:
- Mathpix: take a screenshot on pdf or hand-written equations to turn them to LaTeX equations (basically to be added to LaTeX or Markdown document)
- Google Drive: for cloud storage
- insync: to automatically backup my stuff between different machines
- Zotero: to manage pdf files
- Todoist: to manage tasks and reading content
- raindrop.io: to manage online content (smart bookmarks)
- Super Simple Highlighter: to highlight on the web
Thank you so much brother!