Hello again,
I try and do as much in Obsidian as possible. It’s also where I manage my daily tasks, meeting notes, and where I develop lectures and tutorial content for my teaching too. The final version of my work depends on what I’m writing. If it’s a journal article/chapter, I’ll do the final edit in Word. If it’s a Tweet, I typically use the Twitter website or Typefully.
Really the key to my workflow is getting the best bits of what I read into my vault as efficiently as possible and in a way that makes them easily retrievable when I need them. I don’t write my own summaries of what I read before putting the highlights into my vault because this takes a long time. I need to read multiple papers each day in my job (if possible), so spending a whole day or longer on one reference is a poor use of time when I may not even end up using that reference in my own writing. I do summarise and recontextualise what others have written into my own words, but not until I know I want to use their specific points in my outputs.
I’ve used Obsidian for 12 months now, and in that time, I’ve read and processed 235 articles/book chapters. My outputs have increased considerably too, which I put down to the system. In the past, I found it a real chore to read any academic articles. In fact, I’d only ever do so as I was writing because I needed to find a quote to support what I was already arguing. This obviously limited my writing to my own ideas, whereas now, I’m reading, learning, and thinking every day, I’m reading widely in my own field and into other fields, and all these practices are improving my writing.
There are many PKM workflows you can try with a tool like Obsidian, and different workflows suit different people and needs. If anyone wants to increase the amount of reading they do and have more to write about when they need it, the workflow I’ve developed seems like a good way to go.
Good luck!
Damon
