The Weekly Review: Vol VI Issue 25
Happy New Year, friends! I hope you enjoy this, the last newsletter of 2019. Yes, it’s technically 2020 already. But this was written almost entirely in 2019 and I’m including it in the previous volume before moving on to the next year.
However you slice it, I hope you enjoy it. The idea of a personal knowledge base is a topic a lot of you seem interested in, so please let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions.
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A system for making the most of what I read (part II)
In issue 24, I shared some of the details of how I’ve wanted to improve how I save information that comes my way. For review, here’s how the system looks overall.
This reminds me of Christian Tietze’s sketch of how he pictures the building blocks of the Zettelkasten method.
Here’s how I put all the pieces together.
- As I do my devotional time, I write down questions or thoughts that come to mind in my paper journal. When I want to make those a permanent thought to review in the future, I simply open Ulysses on my phone, open the passage in question, and create a note (using the annotation feature of the app). I add relevant tags in the annotation itself (depicted with a # before the word)
- When I’m reading a book on my Kindle and find a passage I like, I highlight it. From there, I use the share feature to send an email to Things. In the same vein, if I want to add a thought of my own, I create a note on the Kindle and share that in the same manner. The key with this is that I have work left to do — but that work comes later when I’m at my desk, not during my reading time.
- When I’m reading articles in Instapaper, highlighted passages and liked articles are automatically sent to Pinboard via IFTTT.
- When reading a paper book, if there’s a passage I want to highlight or comment on, I’ll do one of two things: mark it in the book on one of the last pages, or grab my phone and capture the text with Scanner Pro. If I choose not the capture it immediately, I just do the same process with Scanner Pro at a later time. But when ready, I scan the page, save the item and then use Scanner Pro’s OCR functionality to view the image as text. I then copy it to the clipboard, switch over to Things, and create a new task in the inbox.
- When reading an article online, but not in Instapaper, I can use the Pinboard bookmarklet to highlight a passage I want to refer to or comment on. It’s very similar to using Instapaper: both activities result in a new saved link in Pinboard. And every item in Pinboard results in a new task in Things (using the Pinboard and email to Things functionality in IFTTT).
The key with all of the items (apart from my Bible study/reading where action happens immediately) is that I have only taken the first step of collection. The critical work of a useful personal knowledge base is processing that content and adding my own thoughts.
That all happens at some point when I’m at my desk. I’ve slowly improved my shutdown ritual over the past couple of years to include cleaning out my Things inbox. This process will often include adding several new notes to Ulysses that include quotes from the various sources I’ve mentioned here, along with a reference link to Pinboard, then my own thoughts.
Why Pinboard?
As far as internet services go, Pinboard is not the nicest to look at. But in terms of doing the job you hire it for, it excels. And I prefer to spend my money on businesses that are going to be around for a while, where I know the money is going directly to the people who create the product.
Pinboard is accessible. I can use it via different apps (Pushpin on iOS, Readkit on macOS) when reading in a browser (via its bookmarklet), or automate actions with other internet services (IFTTT or Zapier).
It’s fast. And it allows me to back up content so that if a site or article is lost to the passage of time, I can refer back to it in Pinboard itself. Again, this is a service that never fails to deliver on the job I want it to do. While we’re all used to internet services simply being unavailable at some point, Pinboard (and the one man behind it) is the opposite.
It’s a reliable backup service for internet content.
Why Ulysses?
A lot of people have used Evernote in the past for this type of thing. I’ve never liked the product much myself. The new kid on the block is Notion, but I’m not crazy about tools that try to be everything for everybody. And I took a long look at Ulysses a while back and chose it as the place to store all my Bible Study notes, so it was already a leading candidate for my Zettelkasten-type of usage.
There are a few factors that make Ulysses a good choice. First, it feels and looks good to use. As a writing environment, it’s at the top of the list of good macOS apps. Second, it seems to handle a lot of content quite well. I have 2,016 notes containing hundreds of thousands of words, and it only rarely slows down for me.
Another great feature of Ulysses is the inclusion of callback URLs. These allow me to link between different notes and make use of the relations between different thoughts. And, of course, the tags in Ulysses also make searching for items and finding related content much easier.
Manual versus automated
You’ll note that a lot of the work of getting content into my system it manual. And while there are some instances where that is due to limitations, I’m not too concerned about it.
The most important aspect of the Zettelkasten method is taking the time to summarize what you read into your own words when you save a note (a settle). The manual aspect makes that more likely to happen.
However, I am happy to make use of automation where I can — and where it makes sense. Items like Instapaper highlights going straight to my Things inbox is far nicer than having to make a highlight on my Kindle and then remembering to share it via email (going to my Things email address).
There is always room for improvement. For example, with notes from paper books, it would be great if Scanner Pro added a way to share the text. As it is, you can share the scan as an image or PDF, but that doesn’t help much (and you can’t even use Things as one of the shareable apps). When you view the scan as text, all you can do is copy it to the clipboard.
Overall, this isn’t a huge problem as the number of times I do this is minimal. I’ve been reading most non-fiction digitally of late, so it’s infrequent. But this is a piece of my system that I will always look to improve.
Getting Kindle notes & highlights to your Mac
One specific piece of all this deserves a little more focus. Namely, getting highlights and notes you take on your Kindle is one of the touchier pieces of this whole practice. While it’s nice that Amazon integrated your Kindle activity with Good Reads and allows you to see your saved items, it would be far better if this were an open system.
Getting my Kindle notes and highlights is one of the more manual processes and it’s largely due to being a closed environment. I have to remember to send items as I create them. There are other ways to accomplish this. I could create a recurring task to review the page Amazon provides and manually copy things over. Or I could use a service like Readwise.
But it’s yet another subscription to pay for (and doesn’t look appealing enough to justify the cost). And I’ve found it’s easier to develop the habit of sharing the note/highlight at the moment of creation rather than doing multiple items later on.
Again, the real work happens when I process the notes. So while I’d like to see this improve, I can live with the additional friction at the point of collection.
My note template
I have a snippet saved in Launchbar that I use for creating a new note in Ulysses. It looks like this:
Using some of the automatic options (such as dates) in the Launchbar snippets, I can populate a unique ID based on the date and time. Note that this is separate from the title of the note, but it’s the unique ID that I use to create a link using the callback URLs in Ulysses. Using this, I can link to notes from within other notes.
The notes (indicated by the plus characters) remind me what to add to the note.
And that’s my system. Again, the purpose here is twofold. To reduce those moments of uncertainty trying to remember where I saw a piece of writing. And to make publishing content easier.
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I shared some of my favourite internet articles from 2019 last issue. Today I’ll finish off my annual review with a few other things I’ve enjoyed.
Album of the year
I didn’t find a lot of new artists this year, but some of my old favourites put out good music. Beck had a nice release late in the year, while Sleater-Kinney, Tycho, and The Mattson 2 all had super solid albums. But it was an old, old favourite that put out the album of the year for me: Fear Inoculum from Tool.
Not everyone likes this kind of music, I get that. And with each main song being over 10 minutes long, it’s not for everyone. But I grew up on loud guitars, and no one does it quite like Tool. It was over a decade since their last album and while this one didn’t hit me right away, it grew on me over time. It’s super tight, rocks hard, and is long enough that it fades into a nice background for the workday.
Honorable mentions: Outer Peace from Toro y Moi and Double Negative from Low.
Fiction of the year
I spent a good portion of this year on the Lightbringer series from Brent Weeks. And I considered calling it my favourite read of the year. It’s a very solid story with fun, likable characters who develop nicely over the series. But the colorful language and sexual content are enough to make me hesitate. And some parts of the story come across slightly too juvenile for me, with the narrative being a tad too choppy.
These are small complaints, and the series is worth the time. I would not quite put it on par with the Brandon Sanderson’s of the world, but it was the best series from an author that was new to me in quite some time.
If you enjoy theology, this story has some interesting moments to pore over.
Non-fiction of the year
None of the non-fiction books I read this year blew me away. Atomic Habits and Digital Minimalism were both good, but both were preaching things I’ve largely put into practice. So my choice for the year was How to Take Smart Notes.
Yeah, that may come across as the epitome of neediness. What can I say — I like information architecture.
This book simply walks a person through the concept of keeping a split box of notes (a Zettelkasten) and lists the many benefits of doing so.
Quote of the year
In reading Habits of Grace by David Mathis this year, I came across this very hard, challenging quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Half-eared listening, says Bonhoeffer, “despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person.” Poor listening rejects; good listening embraces. Poor listening diminishes others, while good listening invites them to exist, and to matter. Bonhoeffer writes, “Just as love to God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.” Good listening goes hand in hand with the mind-set of Christ (Phil. 2:5). It flows from a humble heart that counts others more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). It looks not only to its own interests, but also the interests of others (Phil. 2:4). It is patient and kind (1 Cor. 13:4).
And:
He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life. . . . Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.
As a father with four kids at home, all of whom hold their own opinions on a variety of topics, I’m continuously reminded that I’m not a great listener. And at the core of that lack is a belief that my own opinion is always the best one in the room — therefore, I always have an urge to make sure it’s the opinion that is heard most. And it gets the last word.
As they get older and improve their ability to articulate their own opinions, it’s helping me to learn to shut up. I have a long way to go, but Philippians is a book that I always go back to. If Christ did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, surely I can remember that my children (and all others I converse with) are equal to me. And their thoughts and opinions are valid and worthy of my attention.
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It has been a sincere pleasure to share my thinking with you this past year. To everyone who replied to an issue, thanks for reaching out and for sharing your feedback. Hearing from readers is the absolute best part of publishing your words. A big thanks to each of you for taking the time to read these irregular emails.
And all the best to you in 2020.