Part of the conversations in the Micro.blog Republic of Readers group, are about what we do with what we read. I was invited to share a bit about how I (try to) process what I’m reading into something I can re-use over time in last weekend’s meeting. I couldn’t make it, but will do so in the next meet-up early April. As a first step I made a sketch of what my current flow and set-up looks like.

That’s not to say this is frictionless, and I’m not making claims as to its effectiveness. It’s what it is, warts and all. Also, any way you approach it, processing what I read, finding the bits that provide informational surprise, tying it to things I’ve written earlier, connecting it to the things currently relevant to me and hence to outputs, is intensive work. It is the work, and while I can strive to reduce friction on the interfaces between steps in my workflow, that work will always remain. Only through the work does reading gain meaning at all, because it is how you think things through.

Reading processing flow sketch. Click to enlarge. Image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY NC SA

Most of the removable friction in the reading-to-used-notes process is towards the left in the image. I use multiple devices, and getting notes in and out of them requires some jumping through hoops. It all ends up in Obsidian as my current note making tool of choice.

Only there the actual work starts: adding associations to highlights, lifting out bits and pieces from source texts and rephrasing them, creating the jumping off points for newly resulting notions. This is never a smooth process, and I usually struggle to allocate time for myself to think and write.

Output is a recombination of those notions into something that can be shared again, and if I have my notes in order it is a step that is less daunting than writing something from scratch. In the past months I have created several tools to make publishing something from my notes as frictionless as possible again.