Konik Method for Making Useful Notes

Summary

An overview of her input and knowledge management process

Notes

Useful notes are messy, and time is valuable. A sense of completionism is nice for some things but mostly just gets in the way when it comes to learning. I read about 10% of the articles that show up in my feed. I take highlight about 50% of those, and affirmatively take notes on about 10% of those. This doesn’t mean I wasted my time reading, or that I failed at notetaking because I should have done a better job of taking comprehensive notes. It means I used judgment, and used my time wisely, and focused on things that were worthwhile from a return on investment perspective.

What kind of inputs do we consume?

• For pleasure
  • Fiction
• Solving a problem
  • Note making, for a project
• Serendipity
  • When away from desk and we have time to kill, for exploration

What to do with incoming things

• Add to pre-existing note
  • Logs and Indexes
    • Store resources/links until you finally need to use it, to which you can easily search
  • Claim / Evidence / Explanation
    • Claim is title
    • Leave breadcrumb to main source by copying a quote, easy retrieval
• Create a new note
  • Source notes
    • For each quote, have a header that includes annotation/summary of the quote
      • Treat quotes as evidence for a claim
      • Only turn into own note if you want to expand on it
      • Keep original format of book notes to make them shareable
    • When you want to reference, just link to the header/block
  • Claim notes into a note
• Send to readwise to indirectly deal with it
  • Automatically imports into Obsidian
    • Review highlights
      • Make sure annotations are still valid
      • Linked with relevant notes

Ideas

You shouldn’t paraphrase everything

• Give people a chance to explore the sources themselves

no concrete way to highlight

• just keep iterating on your own systems
• Reflect on your highlights after you read an article and iterate

Actionable

• QuickAdd + JavaScript macro to turn all headings into new notes