My Note-Taking Workflow Aug 2023

I have previously written a couple of lengthy articles about how I read and took notes for my masters. My process honestly worked perfectly well and I loved the experience.. but I quit my masters in June and I’m now just focusing on personal interests, so how am I taking notes? What practices have I kept?

A tenet of my system is that the tool I am using tells me the status of the knowledge. For the masters, it was fleeting notes in Apple Notes, literature notes in Logseq, and permanent notes in Capacities. Working this out was a game-changer for me, as it felt like everything fell into place. I loved it. I felt I need the separation for clarity. I knew what needed to be done to the notes to move them to the next level.

Here’s a quick review of the whole workflow:

It’s important to know why this worked:

I had referenced, summarised knowledge to hand in Capacities, an app that allowed me to link and interact with information the way that made sense to me, and then if I needed to go back to the original source to find specific quotes or check something, I just had to go to Logseq where I had annotations, summaries and the reference information right there.

In Capacities, I focused on breaking knowledge out of the original context and developing it alongside other sources that talk about the same thing. This was a lesson I learned after my undergrad degree where I had countless lecture notes trapped in folders on Onedrive, that talked about the same people, places, and events in French and German history and culture and I condemned that knowledge to a sad existence of being trapped in a folder.

The things we read or get taught about do not just exist inside the context in which we first heard them. Break those things out of context, classify them into types, develop them, knit ideas back together in new contexts…that’s what I do in Capacities.

Now I’ve left my masters, I still want to work with knowledge in this way because it made sense to my brain, but the need for such deep reading has gone. I just want to go with the flow of what I’m interested in at a given time. I also don’t need full academic resources, just an author/link to source is ok.

This means I no longer use Zotero or Logseq that often. This makes me quite sad. Their partnership is genius and I’d recommend it to any student, but it’s just not necessary for my day to day. Now, I just use it for deep reading which I do irregularly.

So what do I do now?

Now Readwise is just magnificent. I use it to about 2% of it’s power but the ability to annotate the web and import highlights to other apps is wonderful. I can upload PDFs and annotate in there, add comments when needed, and then the highlights and source information are imported to Notion.

I choose to import to Notion because I realised that I actually just love structure and databases. My brain craves that structure more than I crave the block based approach of Logseq, which you can also export Readwise highlights to. The Readwise Notion database automatically tracks some really useful metadata and I can add my own properties too. This is so much more useful to my workflows than Logseq’s linear options.

Some properties I’ve added include relations to my media database, relations to my knowledge database (post on that is coming.. knowledge in Notion?!). This means my knowledge work is integrated into my lifeOS and this just makes utter sense to me.

I do still summarise these literature notes though. Mostly, I tend to write that summary directly into Capacities. Then I’ll open Capacities in full screen and synthesise that summary until I’m happy with it. I also like to add TL;DRs where I can if it’s a super long note.

Then I extract what’s interesting to me from the source (people, historical events, locations etc) and create entries for them in their own objects. The more I read, the more inputs I have for these entries and this allows me to create permanent notes, as I synthesise what several sources have said about it into one coherent permanent note.

The end result is the same as my masters workflow really. I have referenced (to an extent), summarised inputs to my Media object in Capacities, and then I can use magical Capacities to develop what I’ve learned further. This just feels more realistic for my day to day learning and I’m loving the process.

What do my notes look like in Capacities?

I always make use of headings (thank you automatic Table of Contents), and I love to use the different embed views and columns to use the whole page, to arrange information more engagingly than just a list of bullet points.

I don’t really follow a formula, I just do what I want to do/have time to do. PKM is a life practice, so I can hop back into any note whenever I like.

So that is how I’m currently taking notes as a lifelong learner and Capacities fan. It’s a lot of fun! I have much more content planned about these workflows but do let me know if there’s something specific you want to see!

Thanks for reading :)

*Disclaimer: I work for Capacities but this content is my own and not created as part of our work together