1/31/2024 0 Comments Using thebrain to write a book![]() I use Zotero for storing academic papers. To capture and store information you will need: I’ve documented it in some detail as people who have seen my system have asked for an explainer, but you may use it as inspiration for designing your own home-brew system. The rest of this post documents my home-brew information management ‘hooch’, with some links out to explanatory videos or articles. My system works on the principle that the original information is always ‘re-findable’ on the web, but the notes and highlights I make are irreplaceable and need careful storage. Pages are represented as nodes pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is ‘growing’:Īfter a bit of tinkering, I think I have a better system than my previous Evernote-dependant workflow. Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia. Obsidian makes your notes more useful by ‘linking your thinking’. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called Obsidian after recording an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast with my co-host Dr Jason Downs. I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. This approach is fine if you have the overall structure of the book hashed out, but a nightmare if you don’t. ![]() For the last four books at least, I gave up on the idea of having a notes warehouse and wrote them directly into my drafts instead. ![]() As my database got bigger and bigger, the search function didn’t work as efficiently. Endless ‘upgrades’ to the Evernote interface made it really cluttered, so it was not a nice place to write. I realised Evernote is more like an ideas deep freeze than a Second Brain. But when you write in chunks, you need a digital warehouse or ‘Second Brain’ to keep all the chunks while you decide where they fit in your draft.įorte’s book is great and helped me reassess my note taking strategies. Writing in chunks is a great way to beat perfectionism and avoid an enormous ‘write up’ at the end of a project. This is the ‘writing chunks, not chapters’ or ‘starting in the middle’ approach, advocated by Pat Thompson, Howard Becker and other writing gurus. I also write around data in the form of images and tables. I write around the quotes I extract, adding and extending the thoughts of others. When you think about it, this practice of annotating other people’s work is the essence of academic writing. It’s basically an online database that enables you to add your own notes to bits of text taken from other’s work. Other than being a subscription service, Evernote is a great tool. Although my system kind of worked (I’ve produced seven books in eight years), I’ve long been dissatisfied with Evernote as a solution because it’s a subscription service that can lock your notes away if you don’t keep paying. Last year I wrote a post inspired by the new book by Tiago Forte called Building a second brain for academic writing which, in part, documented the way I kept my writing notes tidy using Evernote. It’s not an easy task, so I’m always looking for ways to improve my systems, as I wrote about here. For years I’ve been using a combination of Zotero, Pocket, Evernote, and, more recently, a hand written Bullet Journal to organise and transform information and ideas from other people into my own words. I try to concentrate less on filing PDFs and books, and more on making and formatting my own notes. Just like hooch, the quality of the home-brew information management solutions can vary enormously – either bringing joy or slowly killing you.Īs Peg Boyle Single wisely said ‘Collect notes, not articles’. People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic information management problem. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don’t accidentally plagiarise other people. Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles.
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