Knowledge workflows

I have read a great many non-fiction books in my life, and I remember the details of heartbreakingly few of them. Over the last year or so, I have worked to change that pattern.

There are a number of modern tools that make it so much easier to take good notes and synthesize them into an accessible and fertile knowledge base. For the last year or so, I’ve been storing notes (and other information) into a Roam graph. I won’t dive too deep into how Roam works but this is a great overview - although it doesn’t even mention my favorite thing about Roam, which is block references (which make it super easy to include text in multiple locations while remaining one canonical version) or any of the cool new plugins like Smartblocks and themes. If you want to know more there are plenty of great videos or you can email me and I’ll talk your ear off about it.

Anyway, storing notes hasn’t been a problem for a while, but getting my notes into Roam has been. Today I finally solved that problem with Readwise. Readwise is kind of like a Zapier for notes and highlights (with a little bit of Anki - aka spaced repetition - along the way). I haven’t used any of the space repetition yet, but I have used it to move notes from Instapaper to Roam and it’s seamless.

What really blew me away is that Readwise lets you take photos of physical books and papers, and has a really easy and effective flow where it OCRs the text, lets you double check it for errors and clip only the bit you want, add a note and page number to the highlight, and saves it.  Today I read a chapter of a new book (Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina) and took a ton of notes this way - and with no additional work of my own they’re now sitting in their own page in Roam.

I’m just so happy to have found this set of tools, and to live in a time period where these tools can exist. Humanity is so inventive! I just wish we were better at other things, like trusting each other and caring about each other.