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Physical Books + Obsidian
Dear Reader, I love reading physical books for my research, because they feel more purposeful than papers - deeper maybe. But I also avoid it because it is largely incompatible with a digital note-taking system I rely on.
The friction of getting them into my vault makes it infeasible.
Until now.
If you have a shelf of non-fiction books filled with insights you’ve never used, this post is for you. I’ve developed a simple, low-friction system to bridge the gap between paper and pixels. It has a few components:
Source Notes: Create a central note for each book, acting as an anchor for all your annotations.
Annotation Notes: Snap photos of pages (with highlights!) on your phone to create dedicated annotation notes.
QuickAdd Automation: Use the QuickAdd plugin with custom templates to automate creating and naming these annotation notes.
Custom Attachments: The Custom Attachments plugin renames your imported images automatically, making visual organisation a breeze.
Obsidian Bases: Collect and display all your annotations within a dynamic Obsidian base in your source note, allowing for easy access and categorisation.
Obsidian Sync: Connect your mobile and desktop vaults for effortless synchronisation, so your notes are always where you need them.
Once you set it up, you press a button on the phone, snap a picture, and thanks to Obsidian Sync, start taking notes either on the phone, iPad, or computer. Very efficient.
This workflow is best suited for dense academic books, which are likely to have many annotations and tables. If you are looking for something more lightweight to annotate essays, you can check the webclipper workflow instead. Most importantly, everything you produce will be compatible with the source-topic system that is the foundation of the Effortless Academic.
My friend Ana Pineda from IFocusAndWrite is organising a summit called "The Thriving PI Summit", it's free to join, and, like last year, I will be part of it. The speakers will share real-world strategies that help new PIs or scientists to:
Build sustainable systems to keep research flowing & avoid burnout
Lead the team's writing with confidence.
Win grants and boost visibility.
Balance work and well-being as an academic.
Reconnect with why you love your work.
...as the name suggests, "thrive" as a PI!
The event is free and 100% online. My talk will be titled: Digital Information Management: The Foundation for Academic AI Use I want to touch on the contents of the new Information Management Course and some brand-new AI integrations I am working on at the moment. The summit will last for 4 days and have 3-4 exciting 30-minute talks every day: Day 1: Focus, Flow, and Systems Day 2: Writing & Communication Day 3: Funding and Future-Ready Day 4: The Scientist and the Human
Please check out the information on speakers and topics on the website. Even if you're just interested in one or two talks, sign up, as it's free!
The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career. If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.
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Using Kindle/eBook highlights in Obsidian Dear Reader, Do you use e-books rather than PDFs in your academic or personal work? I do, and if I don't take notes, the memory of books lasts only about 6 months. That's a waste! A better way I developed over the last couple of years, is to import the book highlights into Obsidian. But stored highlights are just information. To go from information → knowledge, you need to connect the passages from the book with your own thinking. To help with this, I...
My First YouTube Video: PhD Story & System Dear Reader,Last week I recorded, animated and edited my first real YouTube video, which sums up everything you need to know to start using Obsidian efficiently for your research. Part 1: Obsidian for Academics in 15 minutes Part 2: Organising Ideas using the Source Topic Argument System Part 3: A live demo of how it works, which was the highlight of the last information management course. Despite my best efforts, it turned out to be 55 minutes long!...
