Aim

My aim as a part-time MA International Relations student, who works full time and has side hustles, is to take away as much friction as I can in literally everything I do. Part of this is leveraging digital tools to make my life easier, one of which is Logseq.

Tool

I have used Logseq every day since Sept 2021. My use cases have evolved over time but they can now be summarised as the following: it’s my daily journal and where I take (my version of) literature notes.

I did this before starting my masters, but now I’m back in education, Logseq has indeed consolidated itself as a tool I think every student needs in 2023. Here’s why.

Features

Logseq has many great features. The ones that make being a student reading in Logseq so wonderful are its PDF reader (enhanced by its Zotero integration), block references and block embeds. I actually chose Logseq over Obsidian for the latter.

Zotero

I wrote about this last week, so for now I’ll just say that for me, the usefulness of importing all reference information to Logseq, with the PDF asset, cannot be overstated.

I feel like it lets me do each task once: find the article, find the reference info, save the PDF. In fact the Zotero connector does that mainly in one click. My course is online, so everything we read is digital, so I absolutely need an efficient way to deal with this.

This connection saves me time and brain space.

It’s an outliner

Bullet points and indenting below them has always been my preferred method of organising notes. In Logseq speak, bullet points are blocks. You can create as many indentations as you like, you can toggle away what you don’t want to see, or zoom in on a specific block to work on it more closely.

This works for my brain and allows me to keep focus and follow hierachies.

Block References, block embeds

The outliner format also allows you to use block references and embeds.

Have you ever taken notes by hand and drawn lines down to connect paragraphs? I used to do that a lot. I wanted to show the connection between two pieces of information on the same page.

That’s the basic idea of block references/embeds, except you can take any block from any page and make it show up where you’re currently working.

A block reference is a hyperlink to another block that reads exactly how the block does:

You can then take block references further, and actually edit it and any child blocks with a block embed. These edits affect the original block, it really is like a little portal that you jump through to adjust your notes without having to change windows or pages, which allows you to stay focused.

PDF Reader

So the set up is great. But the actual experience of reading is even better.

Opening a PDF and its highlight page is like opening a focus window. You have the unread PDF on the left side, and a blank page for notes on the right, and you can just read, think, write and connect without leaving that window. This is a great way of combining reading, highlighting and note taking. The highlighting that you do in the PDF reader is directly accessible in your notes. In fact they become notes, with just a couple of clicks. This is special.

Previously I highlighted PDFs in GoodNotes and then took notes in Notion. They were not remotely connected. PDF in one unfindable folder, and Notes in an unfindable Notion page nested in databases. Whereas Logseq lets you connect them- after all, they live in the same place.

Combine this focus window, with the block structure and the ability to pull in information from anywhere else in your database… reading in Logseq is very special.

Workflow

Let’s get into the reading workflow.

Capture

EVERYTHING I read goes through the Zotero connector via Arc browser. I have so many notes in Logseq that can’t possibly be mine, because they’re really clever thoughts, but I didn’t reference them, so it’s unusable information. I’m not doing that ever again, so everything goes through Zotero, in normally just one click.

Pull it into Logseq

As mentioned above: type ‘/Zotero’, search for the source I’ve already saved, press enter. PDF and reference information imported.

Author Research

If the author is super well known in the field (e.g. Morgenthau), I will do a quick ChatGPT request for a summary of their work and opinions to put into Capacities. IR theory is hard and I will take all the help I can get. This is only a guide and I can’t reference it, but it means I don’t start at 0, which I did for the first four weeks and I hated it.

Open the highlights page

Start reading- “literature notes”

The next task is to start reading.

I highlight any key points, or anything I am going to have to dig deeper into because I don’t understand it (very likely at this point of my journey).

This is my literature note portion of my note-taking workflow. The true Zettlekasten definition of that seems to be only writing in your own words, but I don’t like doing that straight away with academic sources. So my definition seems to me “this has directly come from the literature”, not “my writing here has been inspired by the literature”. It’s just a habit calling it that now!

Engaging with what I’m reading

I am absolutely the type of person to highlight and think I’m understanding. I am not. So I’ve had to retrain myself and I’m having success so far.

To engage with these highlights, I create a child block (enter, tab), and just write. This is very much a scratch pad, things won’t make sense and they certainly won’t be spelled correctly but it’s a way to actively think and engage with what I’ve highlighted.

The PDF reader really helps you out here. Your cursor automatically moves to the end of the highlighted text so you can just engage with it directly in the outliner way.

• I ask myself questions and wrap them in {} to signal this knowledge gap

• I paraphrase to make sure I understand, wrapping it in () to show me it’s my summary of their words

• I add thoughts: what does this remind me of? How does it make me feel? Do I agree?

• I also link blocks from earlier if the highlight is building on a previous point via block references

• I can embed them too if needed

The idea of using brackets stemmed from this tweet:

I used to use different colours in Notion to determine what was a direct quote and what was paraphrased, but colour text isn’t in markdown so I tried the brackets technique and it really worked. I don’t need to leave the keyboard- less friction!

I can use other keyboard shortcuts too: if I know I’m reading something really good, I can embolden it (Cmd + B) or highlight the highlight (wrap text with two ‘=’), but I try to keep this to a minimum.

Summarising

Once I have gone through the whole article, I’m left with a messy collection of highlights, indentations, references, questions and mini-summaries. The goal is to take those and turn them into a cohesive summary that I can use to answer questions and build knowledge.

I don’t do this in the highlights page, I go back to the Zot page where the reference info and abstract are. For me it makes sense that the processed notes are in there too.

Some summaries come together easier than others so I might be able to just summarise all at once, or I might take it section by section, or I might summarise once, then summarise again.

Importantly, this summary is in a collapsed block above the literature notes, a system taken from Beau Haan, so I can see directly on which information the summary was built.

So each page will end up looking like this:

Once I have this, I know I have engaged with the reading and I can take what I have learned and work with it to answer questions and do assignments. I also have all the reference information available to me. It’s brilliant!

What next

This is the end of the road for Logseq here, the next step is to take the information and put them into topic notes in Capacities. I make the change because Capacities doesn’t force the outline structure, which I find better for longer paragraphs of text, I love the different page layouts. The visual aids there really help me and it’s a joy to use. I will write about that in the future, but I did this in Logseq for about a year before I found Capacities and it worked well.

One thing I learned from Logseq though, which I have taken onto Capacities is the advice of only making backlinks from the the summary section. I did the exact opposite of this for nearly a year and my graph got clogged up with meaningless links, but I just found the growing graph so thrilling.

Only linking the summary is a more considered approach and I know what (new) links I do have are backed up in literature.

The only exception to the rule here is sometimes when reading complex work, there are some definitions that keep coming up yet that I cannot commit to memory, especially a lot of the philosophical words that are present in this introductory module.

Because Logseq lets you hover over a page and see the contents, occasionally I create a page in Logseq for the definition, knowing I’m not going to take it further, but it gives me a quick reminder, with just hovering over the word.

At first I worried that this was inefficient and will clog up my system, which does seem true, however I realised that in the moment, it’s actually more efficient to have this information to hand in the page I’m working on. This whole system is about reducing friction, it’s not about maintaining a perfect PKM app: the net benefit of this minor page with one block on is noticeable enough for me to want to break my “only-linking-in-the-summary” rule.

What could be better

Whilst superficial, two ways the friction would be further reduced would be

• having an automatic link from the highlights page to the Zotero page. The PDFs are never called the same as the Zot file, so it’s a bit annoying, but not remotely enough to stop me using it.

• the ability to choose your default highlighting colour once and thus be able to highlight just by selecting text, no more clicks. This was a function on Sunday 22nd Jan, but it had gone by Monday morning! Hopefully it will be back one day.

What about when things aren’t on PDFs

As I mentioned above, my masters is online. All the reading they give us is available online, but I’m sure there will be a time where there isn’t an electronic version of the source. For this, I will have to go back to typing up notes by hand, but this will definitely go into Logseq and I will still connect the reference info in Zotero.

This way, the tool becomes the status. Notes in Logseq are connected to a source which I can evaluate, critically analyse and compare to others. But I I know it needs to go further, which I do in Capacities. When I open Capacities, I know that this is synthesised knowledge, though knowledge that will evolve as I read more, and I know there are academic references behind it.

Conclusion

For so long I tried to make everything work in Notion, then in Logseq, and honestly when I started using Capacities I wanted everything in there too. That is not the way to go.

No digital tool will ever the perfect fit to you and every aspect of life, but what we can do is customise and develop workflows that get you close to it, using lessons learned in one app to inform you on how to use others.

There will always be a trade off in certain areas where you have to ask yourself if the net benefit is there. For me, 100 times over, this system works, and I am so thankful to have such incredible tools to help make my life easier.