#1

copied from Discord

Hey all,
I’m interested to know - how do you handle information that you plan to revisit at another date - specifically articles, podcasts, or videos?

I’ve tried having an ‘Inbox’ page where I list links to this information, with the idea that I’ll some day revisit this page, pick something off of the list, and write its note/s into their own articles or existing articles/topics where necessary.

Right now, I’m trying out Pocket - which is basically a service for collating articles and links etc to revisit and breakdown.

I’ve also tried having separate obisidan pages for podcasts, videos, articles, etc.

Curious to know how you all approach this kind of thing?

My use cases are…

  • Taking notes on interesting youtube videos, associating concepts
  • Noting down articles I want to read later and associate
  • Noting interesting podcasts or ‘watch list/listen lists’ type things

Typically, I use the daily notes almost exclusively, but it’s harder to link and associate topics from daily notes, when it’s educational or ‘deeper’ material - that’s the workflow/mindset/pattern that I’m in, if it helps/gives context.

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#2

I’ve checked out the Workflow examples from the #knowledge-management section on Discord - these all look great, but are overkill for my purposes.

I don’t think any of them do what I’m trying to achieve here, either.

What I’m looking for is ideas or other workflows used to prepare lists of information you intend to expand upon

#3

@Bejasc, YMMV but I generally use a two-step process for things like this.

I save content (articles, videos, etc.) I haven’t consumed/taken notes on yet to Instapaper. I do a similar thing with podcasts: I add episodes I want to listen to to my podcast app’s queue when I come across them.

There are a couple of reasons I do it this way:

  1. With the amount of content we all come across, it’s unlikely that I’ll actually get around to consuming 100% of the things I make a note of, and

  2. Of the things I actually do consume, much of it won’t make enough of an impact to warrant referencing later (and it’s hard to verify the quality/usefulness of content before consuming it)

So by saving content elsewhere, I avoid clogging my Obsidian vault up with references to content I may never read or have any meaningful thoughts on.

Once saved, you can then take notes on the content that warrants it as you consume it, as follows:

  • For podcasts and videos, you can take notes directly in a Markdown file (with some basic metadata at the top of the note, to make referencing the episode/video later easier).

  • For articles, Instapaper is wonderful for highlighting/capturing initial thoughts as you read (once done, it exports notes and highlights directly to Markdown via the iOS share sheet, and can be saved directly to Obsidian). (If you use a 'droid, I know Readwise allows exporting Instapaper notes/highlights to Markdown as well.)

  • For books, I highlight/take notes on my Kindle and export to plain text (and then change the extension to Markdown) via a tool called Bookcision.

From there, you can expand on your notes and/or and link to other notes in your vault.

Hope that helps!

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#4

Thanks @Nadia, this is some great insight.

From a very quick read on Instapaper - it seems to be a very similar product to Pocket - but there are some great things that it offers over Pocket, so I’ll aim to check out Instapaper in the next few days.

As for podcasts specifically, my platform is Spotify (which has no queue system for Podcasts separate to the queue system for Music).
This is probably the most “in limbo” point of my workflow currently, as I can’t add these to Pocket or Obsidian super ‘seamlessly’.

What I would currently do is copy the Spotify link and insert it as a hyperlink into the podcasts.md file in Obsidian.

For an ideal solution - perhaps there is some podcast player that allows you to bookmark times, create notes, and even export them to markdown, which could then be imported into Obsidian?

I’m a bit fresh in the realm of podcasts, I’ve never used anything outside of Spotify - is there any service similar to the above description you could recommend?

#5

If you’re an IOS user, Overcast has a nice “clip sharing” feature which lets you snip out sections of audio in a shareable form - not text notes, but it could be part of the capture process. https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing

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#6

Pocket is better than Instapaper on Android. Instapaper have abandoned development for the Android platform.

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#7

hello Bejasc,

I’ve been thinking this also, do you put everything in obsidian like Evernote? or do you pick only specific topics?

#8

I’m an Android user - so perhaps I should stick with Pocket.

#9

I’m a software developer / team leader / project manager, and I’m often pulled in different directions very sporadically.

For larger projects and planning, I use other tools like Jira, Confluence, Trello, Miro, GitHub Issues, etc.

For my usage of Obsidian, it’s usually ‘Transactional’ (for lack of a better term). I’ll mainly use daily notes to write down what my goals are, or pieces of a conversation or meeting I’ve had, or thoughts and ideas or other circumstantial info on projects, etc - so that the information doesn’t get pushed from my brain, as I’m very prone to that.

The other way that I use obsidian, is taking notes on particular topics, where I’m trying to pull things out at a conceptual or understanding level. As an example, I have a page/pages dedicated to SOLID principles working with code - which is something I’m trying to understand and apply.

So I guess, I don’t have everything in Obsidian, but notes, thoughts, anything that I need to remember or potentially reflect on - generally does. In saying that, I don’t sit down and write into it for hours linking knowledge - just have it open on a separate monitor all through my day to add to when I need to in the moment. For all of this, I use Daily Notes almost exclusively.

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#10

thank you @Bejasc for the great share. I think I won’t enter everything in obsidian also, maybe only my personal projects and areas of responsibility.

#11

My solution to this problem is three-pronged.

First, everything I’m working ends up either on, linked or backlinked to my daily note. I created a section called Work Log where I outline all the things I’m working on that day. If it’s short and easy to understand in a couple of sentences, I just enter it as a bullet item under that section.

If what I’m working on requires more thought or a lot more notes, I created a specific note for it and link it directly in my daily note under the Work Log

Lastly, if what I’m doing is only tangentially related to what I’m working on, I’ll create a note for it and backlink it to the daily note. That way it’s not interfering with the content of the daily note, but is still related to it in time. This is how I handle my Resonance Calendar, which contains articles, podcasts and videos that I absorb throughout the day.

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#12

I extract annotations from the articles I read using various plugins
PDF - Zotero
Webpages- Roam Highlighter

The annotation are copied into Obsidian with Date and timestamps and a liberal amount of hashtags.
As I re-read the annotations, I would take down notes in a separate page, often compressing and rewording ideas and creating separate page links for them. Thinking of putting out a video on how I do this in Obsidian because I’ve done it for 2 books so far.

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#13

Yes please!

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#14

Whenever I come across some interesting piece of information (article, research paper), I just create a page for it on Obsidian and add the tag #toRead or #toResearch
Along with this tag, I add multiple other tags and links so that I can find it easily later on.

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#15

Super late reply here, but I’m in almost exactly the same kind of role as you and starting out with Obsidian in attempt to manage my professional and personal life. I’d love to hear how (if) your Obsidian use has evolved since your above post.

#16

@Nadia I can’t figure out how to export highlights from the Instapaper iOS share sheet. How do you do this? Curious what your exact workflow is to get highlights/notes from Instapaper to Obsidian.