Blog post: author's personal book digestion process

Eurobubba

Possibly of interest:
How to read
Among other things, the author uses the flash card app Anki to drill himself on salient points from the non-fiction books he's read. Can't help but think the time and effort would be better spend building a nice robust Zettelkasten!

Sascha

Thanks for sharing. I agree generally. In addition, I think that with equally intense work with a Zettelkasten he would benefit from improved recall ability.

Kvant

Hello, sorry to revive an older thread.

I am struggling with figuring out what to use as a zettel and in researching I found this thread that I feel applies to my problem.

I do something similar to this blog post. I'm curious at what point does one separate these zettels from a book? One for the summary, separate ones for quotes, or one large one on the topic of the book with the quotes? I was using one large zettel but I now find several quotes and summaries with different topics/ideas in one zettel.

Anyway, I suppose I'm curious how others do it as I'm struggling somewhat at the moment.

newzettelkid

@Kvant I am also new to the system. What I found is effective so far is to have one zettel per idea. You reference the biblio using Zotero or whatever reference management system you have. For the purpose of linking all the relevant zettels to the source book, I have also started using the book name as a hashtag for every zettel that is based on that book, in addition to other topic hashtags. What is emerging (not there yet, still early days), is that when I select the book name hashtag I have a neat little list of all the thoughts and ideas from a given book in one place. From here I can choose to make a (or more than one) structural note of whatever outline suggests itself to me. To get more random insights I can use other hashtags to see what I learned from other books. Because I am taking time to capture each idea in my own words (painful in the beginning because I have not done much notetaking before), it is getting easier and easier for me to find the connections and "synergies". Also making structure notes intrabook and interbook is turning out to be a lot of fun. Hope this helps, good luck!

achamess

@newzettelkid said:
@Kvant I am also new to the system. What I found is effective so far is to have one zettel per idea. You reference the biblio using Zotero or whatever reference management system you have. For the purpose of linking all the relevant zettels to the source book, I have also started using the book name as a hashtag for every zettel that is based on that book, in addition to other topic hashtags. What is emerging (not there yet, still early days), is that when I select the book name hashtag I have a neat little list of all the thoughts and ideas from a given book in one place. From here I can choose to make a (or more than one) structural note of whatever outline suggests itself to me. To get more random insights I can use other hashtags to see what I learned from other books. Because I am taking time to capture each idea in my own words (painful in the beginning because I have not done much notetaking before), it is getting easier and easier for me to find the connections and "synergies". Also making structure notes intrabook and interbook is turning out to be a lot of fun. Hope this helps, good luck!

This is effectively what I do. I use Papers3 to make a citekey that has a hashtag in it. I then use this to collect all the notes. @rene 's Sublime Zettel has many features of compiling notes from tags and making lists, so it's easy to make outlines or structural notes. I make one note per idea.