Dear Reader,

As a teenager, I loved educational magazines. My favourite was called Welt der Wunder (“World of Wonders”). More than 20 years later, I still remember an article asking: "What makes someone creative?"

Its answer was: Creativity grows when we read widely, including outside our field. New ideas come from noticing connections between things that do not seem related at first.

In research, we need notes to make those connections. There is simply too much to remember. Notes help us move useful information into working memory, where we can recognise how it relates to the problem in front of us.

To have creative ideas, you need to remember them. This memory comes from re-reading notes that you are able to find, and notes only happen if you have time to capture them.

Finding notes is mostly solved by AI and a good system of organising them.

The capture part is more problematic. Most people end up at one of two extremes: capturing everything but never revisiting it, or trying to extract every detail from every source.

I use a middle ground: The Delayed Action Method.

1. Delay the Capture:​
   If you read a paper or listen to a podcast, don't commit to creating a note until you encounter something truly valuable that you didn't know before. Only then take a note on this source. Automate with WebClipper. This filters out a lot of "interesting" papers that don't really matter.
2. Delay the Value:​
   ​Record what the source could help you understand and link it to relevant topics. A paper on elephant populations, for example, might connect to conservation efforts or rainfall patterns. Digital notes make these links quick to add, and an Obsidian base can help you rediscover them years later.
3. Delay the Extraction:​
   ​Don't force yourself to read an entire paper/podcast/article in one sitting. As long as you have recorded the topics it connects to, you can extract the value from this source much later, when you work on the related topic and re-read something.

This keeps your attention on sources that matter, at the time they become useful.

In this week's tutorial, you can learn how to automate the capture on your phone.

Wishing you my very best,
Ilya

EA Tutorial: Using Obsidian iOS capture & AI task list approach

Your best ideas rarely arrive at your desk. They appear on a walk, during a podcast, or halfway through a paper. By the time you open your note-taking app and find the right place to write them down, the thought may already be fading.

Obsidian’s new Quick Capture for iOS makes capturing faster: One tap from your Home Screen or Lock Screen opens a capture window where you can type or dictate an idea.

But my workflow only begins here. Instead of just collecting ideas, I record instructions for an AI agent to process these ideas later. A single entry can modify/add multiple notes, rename them, or add links.

Here is how it works:

1. Set up a one-tap Quick Capture button on your phone and a QuickAdd shortcut on your desktop.
2. Capture ideas, tasks, links, and instructions in one inbox note.
3. Run a special AI skill (download in post) that reads the inbox and processes each item using your vault’s templates and conventions, creates links, and asks for clarification if something is ambiguous.
4. Review the processing log and approve anything that needs your attention.
5. Use voice capture or a tool such as Wispr Flow for longer thoughts.

A typical instruction might be:

"Create a source note on the paper linked below, link it to {list of notes}, write into the source note that {messy ramble on my thoughts}. Add it to the project reading list and search my vault for related topics I haven't mentioned. Link them in the source notes. Link to paper: {paste link}".

This saves a lot of time and ensures your notes are well connected without introducing any AI-generated content.

(A video walkthrough is included in the post)

Upcoming: Project Management Course

I am excited to announce that I have finished recording the awaited new project management course, and half the videos are already edited! We plan to release the course in January 2027 as a small-group cohort, and then as a self-paced course.

The course first explains a structure for storing and organising projects, meetings, and academic tasks, then moves on to using AI to record your progress, synthesise insights, and challenge your ideas.

If you would like to be among the first to know about the release, get a founder discount, and possibly join for free as a tester, please sign up for the wait list.

Want to leave Effortless Academic forever? Unsubscribe from everything. I am sorry to see you go, and farewell. If you leave, I would be super grateful if you told me why (just reply).