How to Process Notes in Obsidian Readwise Official Obsidian Plugin

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Hi, I'm Nicole van der Hoeven,I'm a Developer Advocate by profession.And on this channel, I like
to talk about various waysthat I try to min/max my life.And a lot of that has to do
with the tools that I use.Learning starts by consuming
some sort of content.For me, my main sources of content are:YouTube videos, books, web
articles, tweets, and also PDFs.And my desired end stateis to somehow distill all
my learnings from theseinto my note taking
tool, which is Obsidian.

So the question is, how do
I get from the raw materialsto my distilled learnings in Obsidian?And my answer right now is
a service called Readwise.Readwise acts a bit like middleware.You can think of it as this layerbetween the raw informationand what you've learned
out of that informationthat you probably keep
in your Obsidian vault.So you might be wondering why
I even need a middle layer.Couldn't I just read a blog postand while I'm reading it,
take notes in Obsidian?And I definitely could do it that way,

but sometimes I'm not
reading at my desktop,I might be doing it on
my phone or on my tablet.Sometimes I might just not
be in the mood to take notes.And I also don't want to just
put absolutely everythingthat I'm learning,that I'm reading or
consuming, into Obsidianbecause honestly not everything
is that important to me.So I need some sort of wayto reduce the amount of noisethat I have before it goes
into the rest of the process.Let me take you through the whole process

which begins with installingthe Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian.So this is a brand new
vault that I've createdjust to demonstrate this,because I already have
this integration set up.But if you don't, you
can go into settings herego to Community plugins,turn this off if you haven't already.Of course, that's at your own risk.But then you can go into Community pluginsand then look for Readwise.Now, you are going to
find a few things here,and that's because before Readwise

came out with their official plugin,there were already unofficial solutions.But in this case,we're going to go with
Readwise Official here.And it should say Official
Readwise to Obsidian integration.Click Install and a few seconds later,you should see this sign that says,successfully installed.Hit Enable, and then go ahead into Optionsso we can see what we're dealing with.You'll see a connect button herethat'll allow this Readwise pluginto talk to your Readwise account.

Sign up with the link to
Readwise in the description belowif you haven't already done
that and then click Connect.This has opened up something
on my browser here.Now, I already have a Readwise accountand I've already gotten it set upbut let me run you through what this is.In this page, you'll
see a bunch of optionsfor Obsidian exports in particular.This is one of the coolest
things about Readwiseis that for every import or
for every source that you get

that comes into Readwise and
then gets exported to wherever,you can select how that's
going to look like.In this case, the exported
file is to be a markdown file.And this first part is askingwhere we want the books, articles,
tweets or podcasts to be.I like this approach of having
them in different foldersbecause sometimes you might havesomething that is both a
book and an article, perhaps,that's similarly named,
so it's good to havethat separation.

I've selected to have custom formatting.Of course, you can turn
that off, if you'd prefer,but there are a few things
that I've changed about this.This on the right is an example
of what things look likewhen they're imported
into Obsidian for me.I've been able to select parametersthat I usually use in my vault.And for example, this tag
is very me, this meansTe Verzettelnwhich is kind of like an inbox
tag for me, it lets me know,that this is something that
I still need to process.There's a lot here that you can change

but if you don't wanna
mess with any of it,you can disable it hereto use the automatic
Readwise Obsidian settings.And it's also saying
"Return to the Obsidian appto initiate a sync."So let's do that now.At this point, let's switch
to my actual Obsidian vaultso that you can see what it's
like when it's already set up.This is what my Readwise
Official settings look like.And you can go in here,
and click Initiate Syncand that'll syncall of the things that
you hadn't already synced

from your Readwise account
to your Obsidian vault.Looks like mine's just done it already.So it didn't have that
much to sync this timebut I would also go into the
configure re-sync frequency.I've got mine set to every hour,but I believe it defaults to manualwhich I don't think is that useful.So that's a bit of a gotchathat you do have to go in
here and make it automatic.I think that's the best way to do itso you don't even have to think about it.You can also change the folderthat these highlights
are going to come into.

I like to set it to Readwise.Now, let's see what it
looks like when it comes in.I read most of my books
on Kindle these days.So I have a few Kindle e-readers,as well as the Kindle app on my tabletand on my mobile phone,
they all kind of just sync.And while I'm reading
on any of those devices,I can go ahead and highlight
and even add notes.And all of those highlights and notesare pulled into Readwise and
then now through to Obsidian.

So this is a book called
"Klara and the Sun,"by Kazuo Ishiguro, which
I really enjoyed actually.It's like about artificial intelligenceand its sort of dystopian,
it was really interesting.Here's what the highlights look like.There's just some things
that I found interesting.So every day that you add highlightsit's just going to add
to the end of the filerather than overwriting
them, which is really nice.Another source that I usefor learning new things is Twitter.

Let's say there's a tweet
like this excellent oneby Erin Moore, which
compiles a bunch of womenand non-binary content
creators in the PKM space.So let's say that I want
to save this to Readwise.So then I can just click here,sorry, this is in Dutch right now,but I'm just clicking on the "Share this"and then "Send as a private message."And then I'll click Readwise--
that's @readwise.io.I don't have to put any message actually,

I'm just going to send itand it'll say that the message was sent.And if we go back to Readwise,we'll see that that tweet is now there.It's not immediate, but it is
within a few minutes of it.And normally, when I go to
the trouble of saving itto Readwise, I don't intend to read itand process it right then.So that's what it looks like in Readwise,I'm just opening it here.And that's the whole thing,I can still go to the
original source of the tweet.And then I can go back to Obsidian,

and let's say, I don't
wanna wait until Readwisedoes the automatic once an hour thing.So I'm just going to do
an Initiate Sync here,and let's hope that
that tweet is pulled in.Readwise sync completed,and now we can do a search for it.Now, I know that that was from Erin Mooreand I think this is it.That is Erin, yep,and that was the tweet that
we were just looking at.There's still the link here
if we want to go to it.And in this case it was
just matter of marking

like, kind of like bookmarking the tweetso that I would remember
to go back and look at itrather than highlighting
anything in the text itself.So that's what it looks likewhen it gets into my Obsidian vault.But the learning doesn't stop there,because at this point I've only
really highlighted sectionsthat I've found interesting.The real difficulty in this
entire process is sitting downand going through all
of those collected notesand trying to process
it into something else.

Every day at 9:00 pm (I chose that,because that's a time that I
personally feel the most alertin the entire day),I sit down and go through
everything I've taggedor that Readwise has
tagged with a TVZ tag.It can really be any tag that you wantbut that's what I use.And then I go through
what I've highlightedand think about what ideas
I can pull out of that.In this case, this is a fiction book.So I actually created another note for it,also called "Klara and
the Sun," same title

but it's not in the Readwise folder.And what I did was in this
page I started going through,like the themes of this work there's hopeand loneliness and superstition.So I talk little bit about
what it says about that themeand then supporting scenes
or character developmentsin the book that reinforced that theme.So the idea is that I'm
now starting to step backand look at the book in general,and see what I can pick up from itrather than the specific passages.

So this isn't about quotes,this is about my general thoughtsof what the author was trying to say.This is an example of a paper
that's actually coming outlike it's a book, but it's
really an academic paper.And it's about Kubedim,
which is sort of like a proxythat allows you to use control theoryto improve application performancein microservices-based systems.So same thing; I had highlights here.I was also able to highlight from the PDF

which is kind of cool.And after that,I take this further by
creating another page,which is outside of Readwise.These are quotes that are
directly from the authorso they're in the author's words.But just to create that separationbetween what's my words and
what somebody else's words,I usually like to create another notewhere I step back and look at it from,still from the perspective of the authorbut I'm trying to understand
what he's trying to say.So I might also add other things
that the author has created

like this video in this case,where the author was defending his thesis.And then I also start to
look at what other theoriesthe author has mentioned
that I can relate to my work.So in this case, I looked at
the circuit breaker pattern.So if I go there,then I have a page just on
the circuit breaker patternwhich is no longer in the author's wordsand also no longer
strictly about the work.This is my understanding of the concept

based on several things you
see, I have some diagrams herefrom other sources where I
was trying to understand itbut I'm still linking to
it from this Kubedim page.I might also decide that dimming
as a concept, or brownout,is also something that I
might want to look into.I guess the question
here is when do you stop?Because as you can see, I
could just keep going here.You know, Kubedim led me
to create this new page,

on Kubedim that's in my words.And then that led me to createsomething on Circuit
Breaker Pattern and Dimming.And I could go back to Site
Reliability Engineering.And the answer is that it
doesn't really have a clear end.And I think that's the point.I think it's very easy to
get caught up in the cyclewanting to completely finish it,but it never actually finishes.So I don't really have a quantitative wayof saying when you should stop processing.I think it's a much better idea

to just go as deep as you feel like going,as deep as is relevantat the time that you create these notesand they're still going to
be in the vault for later.So it's not like they're completely lost.So that it's my system.I do have to mention here
that Readwise Officialas in the Obsidian plugin is free,but Readwise the service is not.Readwise light is $4.49 US a monthand it's enough for most use cases.But if you wanna go further,the Readwise plan is $7.99 US a month

and adds a lot of cool extra features,like space repetition for your highlightswhich is pretty cool.I use the full Readwise planbecause aside from the extra features,I think that the folks
at Readwise are awesomeand they're doing amazing
things in the spaceand planning even more.So I definitely want to support them.You do get a free trialwhich I would recommend you starting with.And if you click on the referral link,my referral link in the description belowthen you'll get double the amount of time

that you would normally get.It is an affiliate linkbut you can check out my ethics statement.If you're curious about my standardsfor products and services
that I recommend.Readwise has been an
essential part of how I learn.And I would happily pay for a toolthat I can say that about.Readwise Official is an Obsidian plugin.And if you wanna know more
about other Obsidian pluginsI find essential to my usage of Obsidian,check out this video
where I go over just that.Thanks for watching.And as they say in Vulcan,
dif-tor heh smusma,

live long and prosper.