How do you organize what you learn?

March 27, 2018 2:42 PM

I read a lot of nonfiction in different formats, including online publications, digital books (on Kindle and other devices), videos, online courses, conversations, and print media. I want to start to be more systematic about organizing this information. What's worked for you?

I have a paper notebook I keep, but I find it a bit hard to find things in it once I have written it down. Digitally, I use Bear as a notes app, but I'm not always at my computer and typing on my phone is difficult. I also have Scrivener.

I've used Evernote in the past but I'm not a big fan—I prefer Bear, but it doesn't allow me to capture webpages (for instance) easily. And it doesn't help much when I'm reading on my Kindle, say. I also have the Pocket app installed, but if I capture stuff in there I often forget it exists a few seconds later.

I gather there's not a single tool that will meet my needs, but I welcome suggestions of systems and workflows that might help.

posted by synecdoche to Education (6 answers total)

I use nvALT, which is a fork of Notational Velocity. It's a plain text editor that allows you to search and edit across an entire folder's worth of text files, so I have hundreds of notes about various research topics that are easily searchable by [keyword, hashtag, symbol, etc.].

Not sure if this will work for you, as it can only capture plain text. For me, the upside of plain text is that a lot of apps on the iPhone end of things can read and edit plain .txt files — I combine nvALT on my computer with 1Writer on my phone, for instance, and sync them both to the same folder of plain text content.

Anyway, my takeaway is: searchability is key (for me at least), since I jot down random bits all the time and never bother organize them.
posted by fire, water, earth, air at 3:22 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm going to suggest a couple of essays/blogs/interviews with people who read non-fiction for a living. They use a variety of approaches, some electronic, some not. I found all of these to be useful reads. While they focus on books, the techniques are very transferrable.

James Clear on How to Retain More of Every Book You Read. He uses a combination of Evernote and a Kindle, exporting highlights to Evernote.

Ryan Holiday's note taking method. Massive quantities of index cards.

Maria Popova discusses her note taking strategy with a certain polarizing podcaster. She reads mostly on Kindle and uses Evernote. Also gets into her strategy for reading print books. She also creates her own index for books she reads.

Cal Newport (author of Deep Work) talks about his idea index. He was inspired to write about this based on the Maria Popova interview linked above.

As to what has worked for me? I take a lot of notes when I read non-fiction, both in my leisure time and at work. I've vacillated between trying to get everything into Evernote (and then, OneNote, after making the switch a couple of years ago) and using paper. I've never managed to get everything into one format or the other. My current setup is a mix of things clipped into OneNote and curated into a collection of about 20 "notebooks"; the Send-to-Kindle plug-in for long form stuff on the internet; a large format moleskine notebook that I use as a commonplace book; and a collection of 3x5 notecards. I read a small number of paper books these days, but those I do read that are non-fiction, I use highlighters, a pencil for marginalia, and page flags. While it would be great to have one tool or one system for everything, I've given up on that. I think the most important thing isn't to have a single organizational system, but rather to be consistent in the several overlapping "small" systems I do use.
posted by kovacs at 6:12 PM on March 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

+1ing notational velocity; I loved it when I had a mac - search function was great, super simple interface. That said, I ported longer/more complex notes over to word docs organized just by applying header styles. Still the simplest, minimal-thought way to do it imo. If by webpages you mean hyperlinking (vs c+ping content), then it does take a little more effort to keep your notes neat.
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 7:25 PM on March 27, 2018

Workflow:

1) I dump ideas, links, etcs into a google doc or google keep or (when I had mac) nv, and then every month or so do a good sort + port into word docs or bookmarks as necessary. Long ago I did the groundwork for it by setting up the docs with the content tree that I wanted to use, and now it's just a matter of putting it in the right category.

2) the main conclusion I came to was that knowledge systems take work - you mention forgetting things exist; I find that I have to consciously go back and through all my data every few months to either prune or just refresh myself. Organizing it also takes time, just like maintaining a physical library would - but that is also a form of processing and answering the question "where does this fit into my existing store of knowledge?".
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 7:29 PM on March 27, 2018

I have been trying for years and my answer is nothing helps. Once I got that, I was able to go - okay, will I need to find it again, is there any reason I can't search for it the same way - if yes, what aspect of my life does it most apply to - fike it thusly. I used to check my RSS feeds (but after google reader quit, never been able to recreate same simplicity) and I saved thousands of images related to design in 100s of different files. Pinterest covers that for me now. Excel and Word formulas I look up repeatedly - it's faster than finding where I put it. I have boxes with instruction manuals (many belonging to appliances I don't own anymore) and still, I would look it up.

There's some nice quote about how our homes aren't meant to be museums (so don't hold onto magazines from the 90s), and I don't think our homes are meant to be libraries either - that's what libraries and google are for.

Only exception to this rule (for me) is a narrow focus research subject which I will put in word doc with TOC and yes, sadly, an index.
posted by b33j at 5:16 AM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

When I was working on a book and thesis I had to develop a method, but most readymade interfaces (like Evernote) made me crazy. I ended up creating a Notes template in Word and, as I read, I enter key phrases/ideas into the template, tagged with page number. AT the top of each summary I includ all the biblio information and wrote a 1-para summary of the whole book or article or video, including my assessment of its usefulness and any links to online content. Then I file the whole thing in a giant file called "Research Library." I can find anything in it by searching a keyword in the file search box. This system is flexible and lo-fi and resilient and has worked really well for me. In the case of PDFs or video I tend to archive a copy myself.

For biblio software, I tried a lot of things and Zotero didn't do it but the Mendeley interface was really good.
posted by Miko at 5:24 AM on March 28, 2018 [3 favorites]