Readwise on Nicole van der Hoeven

Top 10 Ways I Learn in Public

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 18:00:50 +0200

In this video, I talk about the different ways that I learn in public, including how I use Obsidian, Readwise, social networks like Mastodon, YouTube, and Buttondown to do so. I also announce my new in-progress book, Doing It in Public.

Learning new things in Obsidian: in defense of remembering

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 12:01:34 +0100

Here’s how I’m learning things in Obsidian in 2024, and the tools I use in my information processing pipeline to read, listen, and watch content and turn that into ideas and output. I also talk about why it’s important to remember what you’ve consumed, and the value of writing stuff down to help you do so.

Taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 15:55:33 +0200

In this video, I show you my favorite method for taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian: three tools that work very well together. Snipd is a mobile podcast player app for iOS and Android that integrates with Readwise. With the Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian, that means my highlights and notes from podcasts end up automatically in my Obsidian vault, tagged appropriately.

RESOURCES

Snipd AI Podcast Notes wishlist
Snipd
Readwise
Sample AI podcast notes
@CalNewportMedia - Deep Questions - The Failure of Cybernetic Productivity
@CalNewportMedia - Deep Questions - Decoding Overhead
@masteringdungeons - Mike Shea on Organized Play vs Home Games
The Informed Life - Andy Polaine on Service Design

AI tools for PKM and Obsidian

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 16:39:00 +0100

Here are some AI tools for learning and taking notes that I’ve incorporated into my processes. AI is a controversial topic, but it’s important to remember it’s just like any other technology: it’s only as good as the people that wield it. In this video, I show some ways I use artificial intelligence to improve my learning and note-taking rather than to replace them.

Taking Notes From Youtube Videos in Obsidian

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 11:30:38 +0000

In this video, I talk about five different ways to take notes on YouTube videos in Obsidian, for those (like me) who love learning things on YouTube and want a way to capture new thoughts in Obsidian. I mention a few community plugins, a browser extension, and a separate service as well as my workflow for just using vanilla Obsidian, so you can take your pick!

Mastobot: a Mastodon Bot for Readwise and Obsidian

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:31:28 +0000

I’ve had a love affair with Readwise for a while, enough to write some code to extend it. I wrote a Python script to save Readwise highlights to my Obsidian vault, switched to the Readwise Official plugin when they released it, wrote another script sending Shortform highlights to Readwise, and then was happy when the two companies established an official integration thanks to me introducing them.

Maybe I should have learned to just be patient and wait for the awesome Readwise team to build integrations I want, but remembered I’m not that patient. This is about how I created a Mastodon bot to send Mastodon posts I like to my Readwise account, and, by extension, to my Obsidian vault.

You might say there’s a pattern here.

The problem

I’ve been dabbling in Mastodon for a while, but only recently got extremely involved with it when I decided to start and maintain a Mastodon server, pkm.social, for the personal knowledge management community.

Readwise already has an awesome Twitter integration that I really enjoyed. Basically, once you’ve set it up, sending any tweet to @readwise adds it to your Readwise account. This means that whenever someone says something actually meaningful or interesting on Twitter, I can make sure it gets sent to Readwise, and then from there to my notes in Obsidian.

I wanted the same setup for Mastodon.

The result

First, the end result: I managed to get Mastodon posts I send to my bot to be sent to my Readwise account. Here are some early posts in the “Tweets” section of my Readwise Library:

And here are the resulting notes in Obsidian, also automatically synced and formatted:

The solution

Next, here’s how to set it up.

Pre-requisites

You’ll need a few things to get started:

A Mastodon account (I use and co-host pkm.social for free)
A Readwise account (Here’s an affiliate link)
Familiarity with GitHub, the command line, Node.js (although I’m not a Node.js developer, so you don’t have to be, either)
The willingness/ability to leave a Node.js script running on a server somewhere

Setup

Clone my Mastobot repository.
In your Mastodon account settings, go to the Development section for your Mastodon server (e.g. https://pkm.social/settings/applications) and click New Application.
Fill in the application name (this can be anything you want), leave everything else the same, and then click Save Changes.
Click on the application you just created, and note your client key, client secret, and access token. You’ll need these later.
In this repository, copy the contents of .env.sample to a new file called .env.

It should look like this:

ACCESS_TOKEN=
CLIENT_SECRET=
CLIENT_KEY=
READWISE_TOKEN=
DOMAIN=

Fill out the fields in .env with the information you just obtained from your Mastodon account.
For the READWISE_TOKEN field, enter your Readwise access token.
For the DOMAIN field, enter your Mastodon server’s domain (e.g. https://pkm.social).
Run npm install to install the dependencies.
Run node bot.js to start the bot.
In Mastodon, find a post you like and reply to it with @accountname Your comment here. Within a few minutes, the original post you replied to will be sent to your Readwise account as a highlight and your comment as a note.

Limitations

This workflow is not without its limitations:

You need to keep the script running somewhere to be able to use it. I considered using a polling approach, but decided I wanted to experiment with Mastodon’t streaming API, which would also be more responsive, so I went with that.
Right now, because the bot takes environment variables about your particular setup, it’s not as versatile as the official Twitter implementation. As it is, it’s for one person’s use only.
It uses the “Tweets” category in Readwise, which is not ideal, but I can’t really do anything about that until they give Mastodon its own category. This isn’t really a big deal.
Right now, the bot doesn’t support images or other media embedded to posts.

I may address some of these issues, but for now, I’m just happy with the result. I fully expect that the Readwise team will eventually be able to flesh this out into a more robust integration, so I’m hesitant to spend too much more effort now that I’ve got it doing the minimum of what I wanted.

Resources

If you’re interested in doing this for yourself, here are some resources that might be useful:

Mastobot on GitHub
Mastodon API client for NodeJS
Mastodon official API
Great video tutorial series by The Coding Train on creating a Mastodon bot

Note: I’ve included affiliate links for Readwise in this post, in accordance with my Ethics Statement.

Reading and Taking Notes on Kindle and Obsidian

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 16:28:29 +0000

Reading on a Kindle can be more convenient than reading paperbacks because you can import your Kindle highlights and notes into Obsidian or your note-taking app of choice. Here are some tips for making the most out of every book you read.

Taking Better Notes From Books: Shortform-Readwise-Obsidian

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 16:00:34 +0200

I’ve been using Shortform for over a year. I’ve written some code for it and I’ve also written a blog post about it. It’s an essential part of my workflow for taking better notes from books, particularly in conjunction with Readwise and my current note-taking tool of choice, Obsidian. Here’s what you need to know!

What is Shortform?

Shortform is a service that creates book summaries out of popular books, but it’s also so much more than that! They’re like Netflix but for books, if you can imagine that. The summaries that Shortform gives you are not just your typical high school level summaries of a book report that we used to do when we were younger.

Sound familiar?

What makes Shortform different?

Here are things that differentiate Shortform from other book summary services.

Researched commentary

Shortform has really thoughtful and nuanced commentary that place it firmly head and shoulders above other services.

Here’s a screenshot of some Shortform commentary from the book Why We Sleep, taken on the Shortform mobile app.

The highlighted section is a Shortform note– additional commentary that the Shortform team added. In this case, they are fact-checking the author, citing sources that prove a statement the author made to be false.

When I was reading this book, I didn’t really think about questioning those claims. But Shortform thoroughly goes over every claim that Walker, the author, made in thsi book.

Reading with Shortform is like having somebody else read a book with you– a more critical and more well-informed someone who has the time to fact-check statements. It’s a bit like having your own personal book club.

Shortform vs. Blinkist

Another service in this vein that I’ve used is Blinkist. Let’s look at the same book in Shortform and Blinkist to figure out why I like Shortform so much better.

This is what the Blinkist summary for the book Indistractable looks like.

Blinkist is based on the idea that every book can be distilled into these blinks: very short summaries of every idea. For this book it has eight. Each of these blinks is a few paragraphs long. Here’s what the first looks like.

A blink is a straight summary. There’s no commentary. There’s no research or anything like that. It seems like the whole focus of this is to be able to distill exactly what the author has said and let other people do the work of trying to figure out for themselves whether something is true or not. There’s really not much more than just these blinks.

In contrast, if we look at the one on Shortform, this is the same book and it also has like a one page summary like Blinkist did.

But then it also has a full book guide, which goes through every single chapter or part and adds more detail into it.

As you can see, Shortform takes a different approach: instead of just summarizing the book, they’re truly trying to explain it in their own unique way, providing examples and making it more readable using bullet points.

Action-oriented exercises

Shortform also has these exercises based on the things that the author has said in the book. These exercises are peppered throughout and between these chapters, and they really force you to put things into practice right away as soon as you learn them, which is another element of learning.

Critical thinking: comparisons to other ideas

Shortform tries to examine ideas in the context of other books they’ve made summaries for. Here’s an example of a Shortform note where Shortform suggests the summary of the book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

Fans of the Zettelkasten method will be happy to see this, because Shortform often prompts me to consider the differences or similarities between ideas from different authors. It helps me see connections I might not have considered. Incidentally, I’ve also found many good books this way!

How to use Shortform with Obsidian

The other thing that really sells it for me is the integration. Because I don’t want that learning to stop in the Shortform app. You know me, and I want everything in Obsidian. And Shortform has an integration that Blinkist does not.

I actually tried to solve this problem myself a year ago, because no integration existed. I wrote a Python script that would take the Shortform highlights, because it has an API, and then call the Readwise API and kind of string them together. Now, that still works as far as I know, but that’s not what I recommend anymore. I talked to the Readwise founders and suggested to them that Shortform was a great company to partner with. Not too long after that, they came out with an awesome integration!

First, sign up to both Shortform and Readwise. They both have free trials, so you don’t have to commit to anything just yet.
Then, click on this link to connect your Readwise account to Shortform.
(optional) If you use Obsidian like I do, follow these instructions to install the Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian.

That’s pretty much it!

From now on, here’s how things will work:

You make highlights on books on Shortform.
Those highlights are sent to Readwise automatically.
Through the Readwise official plugin, those highlights get synced into your Obsidian vault.

The result: Shortform highlights in Obsidian

Here’s what my Shortform highlights look like in Obsidian. Note that after setting this up, all I had to do was make highlights on Shortform– it’s quite low-touch after that.

I tweaked the export settings in Readwise to set the format I want the note to have in Obsidian. You don’t have to do this, but if you want to, you can change those settings here.

My Shortform workflow for taking notes on books

This is pretty much how a lot of my book-buying and -reading goes:

I start by browsing books on Shortform and read the one-page summaries.
If I find one I like, I buy the book on Kindle.
I make highlights on the Kindle version. (Those are synced to Obsidian too!)
If I really like the book, I flip back to the Shortform detailed chapter summaries as I finish each chapter, because they provide more context. I make highlights and notes from Shortform here sometimes.
Sometimes I do the Shortform exercises too.
After I finish the book, I go back to the Shortform summary and make more highlights/notes.
After I’ve read my fill of both the Shortform summary and the book itself, I go back to Obsidian and write my own notes that combine what I’ve learned.

If that sounds like a lot, it is! But keep in mind that I don’t do this for every book. At every step of the way, Shortform helps me filter out books that I don’t want to read, or don’t want to finish.

Shortform definitely saves me money: it costs less than a book a month and it stops me from reading more than one book a month. From that perspective, it’s already worth it.

But more than that, the thoughtfulness of the summaries and the research that goes into those commentaries save me more than just money: they save me time. And that’s really what I keep coming back for.

Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. Click here to check out my ethics statement and see how I decide what to promote in this way.

I can finally tell you about Readwise Reader

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:01:12 +0200

Readwise Reader is the latest read-it-later app, except not just for books. Reader brings in your highlights from books, articles, tweets, PDFs, epubs, emails, and even newsletters! While it’s not yet officially launched, it’s now in public beta and you can sign up to be put on a wait list to try out this awesome product that’s been so essential to my workflows.

Note: I do have an affiliate link of Readwise, but this video was not sponsored. They know I’m making this video, because I had to reach out to get permission to post the screenshot of a private email, but they did not review this video and had no idea what I was going to say. :)

How to Take Notes from a book with Obsidian (The Culture Map)

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:58:52 +0200

I demonstrate how to take notes from a book (The Culture Map) using Obsidian. In the process of taking notes, I also create learning exhaust in the form of notes, an atomic essay to go on Twitter, a visual that summarises a concept, and a video presentation. Taking notes from books is more than just understanding what the author wanted to say; it should also involve consolidation and interrogation of the book’s ideas into our personal knowledge management systems.

How I Learn in Obsidian - Keeping up with tech trends

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 16:17:11 +0100

Here’s how I learn in Obsidian by processing articles I’ve read into consolidated notes that help me understand technical concepts. I also show how I improve my learning by incorporating visual elements using Obsidian Excalidraw, Excalibrain, and Advanced Slides.

Use It or Lose It - Linking Your Thinking Conference

Thu, 19 May 2022 14:03:13 +0200

Today I spoke at the Linking Your Thinking conference about what I do with notes I take, and how I manage to use them to actually create stuff.

If you’d like to see the result for yourself, here are the slides!

How Real People Process Notes

Thu, 12 May 2022 17:00:49 +0200

There’s a glaring gap in most productivity systems: time. How do REAL people, with real jobs and obligations, find the time to process notes? Is Inbox Zero an achievable and sustainable goal? I think the answer is no. In this video, I talk about what to do instead, and what is a healthier way to look at productivity.

How to Process Notes in Obsidian // Readwise Official Obsidian plugin

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:00:28 +0100

How do you process notes in Obsidian? I demonstrate how to use the Readwise Official Obsidian plugin to go from raw content to notes in a Zettelkasten-like Obsidian vault. Sign up for Readwise using my link and get double the trial period.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link for Readwise. Clicking on that link will give you a two-month trial of Readwise, double the usual amount, and they give me a small percentage if you sign up for a plan. Check out My Ethics Statement to see my standards for promotions.

How to import Shortform highlights to Obsidian via Readwise

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 21:40:16 +0200

I’ve always been dubious of those book summary apps. You know the ones– they tend to have obnoxious ads that promise to help you “read 5 books a day” or learn the world’s secrets in 15 minutes. Having tried a few of them, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of their summaries (or lack thereof). They attempt to distill the message of a 300+ page book into a handful of bullet points, which I’ve found neither accurate nor useful. Recently, though, I found myself happily subscribing to one, and here’s why.

What’s Shortform and why is it awesome?

Shortform really took me aback because it isn’t just a book summary. I should mention here that I’m not affiliated with Shortform and gain nothing by recommending them. I’m just a happy subscriber.

When I read their guide for the book Why We Sleep, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Shortform not only summarized it succinctly, but they also added intelligent counterarguments to the author’s points. In some cases, when the author made a false claim, there were Shortform notes that linked to studies that showed why the claim was false. In other cases, Shortform mentioned related concepts proposed in other books that strengthened the author’s viewpoint. I found myself looking up their guides of books I’d already read, just because I was curious to see if I had missed anything. And I had!

In short, Shortform is the only book summary reader I’ve found that goes beyond summarizing and actually adds value to the reading experience, even if you’ve read the book.

They also have a one-page summary of the book AND a summary per chapter, so information is presented at different levels of detail. In my time with it, my most frequent workflow with it has involved reading the one-page summary of a book, buying it if it was interestering enough, reading the book, and then going back to Shortform to go read the chapter summaries. And both the one-page and detailed chapter summaries, including Shortform notes, can be highlighted!

Naturally I wanted to take it further than that. I already sync my Kindle highlights to Obsidian automatically and incrementally process them in Obsidian, so I wrote a script to have my Shortform highlights going to Readwise as well.

My Shortform highlights for the book Mindset, in my Obsidian vault.

The screenshot above shows the final result: highlights I made in the Shortform web or mobile app that have been synced to a page in my Obsidian vault. Here’s how I did that.

Note: Since this article was published, Shortform and Readwise have created an integration, so the script I mention here is no longer necessary. Click here to see what I’d recommend doing today.

What you need

A Shortform account. (affiliate link)
A Readwise account. (This is an affiliate link. If you sign up with this link, you’ll get a two-month free trial instead of one, and I get a small percentage if you sign up for a plan.)
A tool that Readwise can export to, such as Obsidian, Roam Research, Notion, or Evernote. You can also use their CSV and Markdown exports.
A local installation of Python 3, which you can download here.

Obsidian is my Personal Knowledge Management tool of choice, and I use the Readwise Official community plugin to get Readwise to send highlights to Obsidian. However, using Obsidian is not necessary as my script connects only Shortform to Readwise.

The setup

Clone my Shortform-to-Readwise repository on GitHub or download it to your computer.

Enter your tokens

The file variables.py requires two tokens: one from your Shortform account and another from your Readwise account:

# Your authorization token for Shortform
authToken = ''

# Your Readwise API token
# Retrieve this token from https://readwise.io/access_token
readwiseToken = ''

Getting your Shortform token

This is a little hacky, because Shortform doesn’t expose an API token in their web app. So you’ll need to log in to your Shortform account and open up DevTools in your browser. In Chrome, go to Options > More Tools > Developer Tools (or, on Mac, hit CMD+OPTION+I). Click on the Network panel.

You should now see Shortform on one side, and DevTools on another in the same browser window.

Then, go to your Highlights page. Doing so will populate the Network panel with a bunch of requests that look like this:

DevTools open in Chrome, showing requests from Shortform.

Click on the request with the name ?sort=date, highlighted above. That’ll open another side panel that will show Headers. Scroll down to the section marked “Request Headers”, and look for where it says Authorization: Basic followed by a bunch of characters.

Authorization headers for Shortform, in DevTools.

I’ve removed my personal authorization token from the screenshot above, but it’s a long series of characters that comes after Authorization: Basic . Go ahead and right click on it and click Copy Value. Paste it into variables.py as the value for authToken, and then _remove Basic (including the space after it) so that you’re saving only everything that comes afterwards.

Getting your Readwise token

Thankfully, this one’s a little easier. Go to this page on Readwise after logging in. Click “Get Token”, click “Copy to clipboard”, and then paste it into variables.py.

Save variables.py.

Note: Don’t share either of these tokens with anyone else, as they will then be able to access your Shortform or Readwise accounts.

Run the script

Open up your terminal, and cd into the /shortform-to-readwise repository. Then, run:

python3 getHighlights.py

It should finish in a few seconds (depending on how many Shortform highlights you have), and then you can verify that it worked by going to your Readwise library.

Shortform exports showing up in your Readwise library.

You should see books that have the Shortform- prefix. If you do, then you’re done! If you’ve got your Readwise account set up to push your highlights elsewhere (such as Obsidian), then you’re all set!

In case you’re wondering why I added the Shortform- prefix, it’s because I often read the Shortform guide, and then read the book itself. Rather than end up in a sticky situation where the Shortform guide highlights might override the actual book highlights, I titled it differently so that I get two pages for the two sets of highlights.

What about running the script regularly?

The whole point of this, at least for me, was to set it up so that I’ve got highlights going to Obsidian automatically, without needing my intervention. What I did was to use crontab on macOS to run the script every 30 minutes, but you can set up your own schedule.

Give cron full system access

Cron needs to have the right permissions to run scripts on your behalf, so you may have to go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Full Disk Access on your laptop and add /usr/bin/cron to the “allowed” list.

Find the path for your python3 installation

In your terminal, run:

which python3

This will give you a path. For me, it was /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin/python3. Copy this.

Open crontab

Then, from your terminal, run the command env EDITOR=nano crontab -e to open up a list of cronjobs. If you don’t have any other jobs, this will be blank.

Set a schedule

Add a line to crontab for the schedule you want to create. This line has to be in the format

* * * * * command

where the five asterisks correspond to:

minute
hour
day of the month
month
day of the week

In my case, I wanted it to run every 30 minutes, so here’s what my schedule looks like:

*/30 * * * * /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin/python3 /Users/nic/python/shortform-to-readwise/gethighlights.py

Make sure you change /Users/nic/python/ to the path where you put the repository and your python3 path instead of /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin/python3. Now exit out of it and save it (CTRL+X, and yes). The Python script should automatically run every 30 minutes.

That’s it!

I consume a lot of content daily, but without systems in place to capture insights from that content and process it, it all just gets forgotten eventually. That’s why I love services like Shortform and Readwise– they let me get what I’ve read/watched/heard out of my head and into Obsidian, where I can review them more critically and truly learn the important parts.

Both are paid services (which I paid for out of my own money), but I really think they’re worth it.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Check out My Ethics Statement to see my standards for promotions.

The easiest way to sync Kindle highlights to Obsidian: Readwise to Obsidian Redux

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 19:50:40 +0200

Almost exactly six months ago, I wrote a blog post detailing my workflow for processing content. Specifically, I wrote about how I used a python script to take my highlights from Instapaper, Kindle, Twitter, and Airr and automatically put them into Obsidian.

That method worked, and you can read the original article in the link above. However, today, Readwise announced that they now have an official Obsidian community plugin, and I disabled my trusty old python script for good.

You see, although my old script worked, there were quirks– not the least of which was that making changes to it meant programming in Python. I’m not a developer, so while I made do, it was never a painless experience. I also ran into issues with time zones and invalid characters being used in titles. So I’m thrilled to have something significantly better from Readwise itself! Here’s a video from the Readwise team, or read on for instructions on how to get started.

From Readwise on YouTube

Install the Obsidian plugin.

In your Obsidian vault, go to Settings > Community plugins. You’ll need to turn Safe mode off for community plugins if you haven’t already.

Then, click Browse and search for Readwise Official.

Install it, and then enable it.

Connect your Readwise account to the Obsidian plugin

Head back to the Settings menu and scroll down to the “Plugin Options” section, and then click Readwise Official.

Click connect as highlighted in orange above, and a browser window will open, showing the Obsidian Export options. You’ll need to sign into your Readwise account if you haven’t already.

At this point, your Readwise account will have been connected to the Readwise Official plugin, but you won’t have triggered any syncs yet. If you don’t want to change any of the configuration settings, you can then skip ahead to triggering the sync on Obsidian, but let’s run through the options anyway.

Modifying configuration settings

On the Obsidian Exports page, you’ll be presented with a few options.

Group Files in Category Folders

By default, this will be enabled. When enabled, Readwise will put your highlights in different folders depending on its source. For example, Kindle highlights will appear in the folder Books. Disabling this option means all new notes will be created in the directory specified in the Obsidian plugin settings, which we’ll cover later. I left this enabled in case I read a book that has the same name as a blog post about the book, for example.

Use Custom Formatting

Custom formatting is disabled by default, and lets you choose how the final note looks. Here are the things you can change in this section

Page title
Page metadata
Highlights header
Highlight
YAML front matter
Sync notification

I did make some changes in this section just to tweak how I want information to be displayed.

Page metadata

I don’t see the need for Page metadata since this is what I use YAML front matter for, so I removed the matadata section and the document tags (I never use those either). So my Page metadata section looks like this:

{% if image_url -%}
![rw-book-cover]({{image_url}})
{% endif -%}
{% if url -%}
URL: {{url}}
{% endif -%}

Highlight

By default, highlights are entered in bullet-point form. That’s fine when I’m taking notes, but when I’m highlighting someone else’s words, I like to be very careful to use blockquotes. I frequently do block searches in Obsidian, and I do NOT want to accidentally pass off a quote as something I said.

To this end, I added a > before each highlight and two newlines (carriage returns) at the end to delineate each highlight. That way, I can quote just one highlight at a time.

> {{ highlight_text }}{% if highlight_location and highlight_location_url %} ([{{highlight_location}}]({{highlight_location_url}})){% elif highlight_location %} ({{highlight_location}}){% endif %}{% if highlight_note %}
- Note: {{ highlight_note }}{% endif %}

As you can see above, I also removed highlight tags, which I never use.

YAML front matter

Metadata has to be quite specific, so I added parameters I already use for other notes in this section. The TVZ is a tag I use that means “To Verzettelen”, meaning pages that I need to process further.

Title: {{full_title}}
Author: {{author}}
Tags: TVZ, readwise, {{category}}
date: {{date}}

Sync notification

As someone who has worked on a syncing plugin for Readwise to Obsidian, I know that things go wrong sometimes. Enabling this outputs a synchronization log to a note, which has come in handy MANY times in the past. Has that book been synced, or did something go wrong? So I copied what the Readwise team suggested:

- [[{{date|date('Y-m-d')}}]] {{time}} — Synced {{num_highlights}} highlight{{num_highlights|pluralize}} from {{num_books}} document{{num_books|pluralize}}.
{% for book in books %} - {{ book.num_highlights_added}} highlights from {{ book.title }}
{%endfor %}

Select Items to be Exported

In this section, you can choose which books/podcasts/other content in Readwise you want to export. It is disabled by default. If you haven’t synced Readwise to Obsidian before, and you just want to pull in everything, leave it disabled.

In my case, I have already synchronized everything using the plugin I mentioned, and didn’t want to create another few hundred duplicate notes in my vault. So I enabled it and selected a few more recent books.

A weird thing about this Export settings page is that there is no saving– it just automatically saves it. Just a note, because I was scrolling up and down that page looking for an indication that it had been saved before I realized it is done automatically.

Initiate Sync from Obsidian

Head back to Obsidian and to the Readwise Official plugin options page. You should see a “Initiate Sync” button where the “Connect” one was before.

That’s a good sign - that means your Readwise account has been connected, and your configuration settings from the previous step will be fetched.

Before you click the button, note that the Customize base folder option is set to Readwise. This is the directory that all your Readwise notes will be created. So if you enabled Group Files in Category Folders earlier, your Kindle highlights will be saved in Readwise/Books/booktitle.md. You can change the base folder if you prefer, but I just kept the default.

Time to click the button!

You’ll see a few messages popping up on the upper right corner of your screen, and you’ll also see a Synced! message appear next to the button you just clicked.

Verifying results

In your Obsidian vault, search for one of the items you synced. Here’s what my note for Pat Flynn’s Superfans looks like:

Great! It looks exactly how I want it to look.

Set up automatic sync

If you leave it there, the plugin will only sync when you tell it to, so you’d need to go into the plugin options each time. That’s not particularly useful for me, because I want it to just happen.

If you feel similarly, head back into Plugin Options one more time and select your desired frequency in the Configure resync frequency dropdown menu. I chose 1 hour, the minimum. I also enabled the automatic sync when Obsidian opens.

Conclusion

I love this new plugin! It was very much needed, because existing options for accomplishing the same thing were flawed in some way, mainly because they were community-driven– meaning the people who created these workarounds (myself included) were “just” users who had other jobs. I’m grateful that the Readwise team has acknowledged the popularity of Obsidian and taken on the maintenance burden. I’ve experimented with the plugin quite a bit and haven’t found any major issues so far. It is a seamless way to get the best of the content I’ve consumed from various sources into one single source of truth: Obsidian. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to streamline content processing and creation processes.

Readwise to Obsidian

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 09:55:36 +0100

August 10th, 2021: Readwise just released their own Obsidian plugin, Readwise Official, which is available now! I now recommend this method over the one outlined in this article.

I’m about 9 months into heavily using Roam Research as my primary note-taking, task management, capture-everything system, and for the most part, that’s gone very well. Obsidian is another excellent personal knowledge management (PKM) system, though, and I’ve been curious about it for almost as long as I’ve been using Roam. I’ve had it installed for a while, but I never really seriously attempted to make the switch. Until now. I’ve decided to use Obsidian as my primary PKM and zettelkasten for the next month, to see if it’s something I can switch to.

Why I’m considering switching from Roam to Obsidian is another post, probably one I’ll write at the end of this experiment, when my thoughts and opinions are more solidified. For now, I want to address one of the things I struggled with when switching over: Readwise integration.

Readwise is an app that’s all about importing notes and highlights you’ve made from all over the internet and exporting them all into a single format. Readwise supports far more import sources than I use, but here are the ones I’ve got hooked up to it:

Instapaper (for highlights and notes on online articles)
Amazon Kindle (for highlights on ebooks)
Twitter (for interesting tweets)
(Readwise) Web highlighter (for straight highlights off any webpage)
Airr (for quotes and notes from audio podcasts)

Readwise collates my activity in all of these input sources and automatically sends them to my Roam Research account. Here’s what that looks like when it gets pulled into my Daily Note:

Readwise also pulls metadata into Roam, depending on the source. Here’s what the page for the book “Ready Player Two” looks like in Roam:

Readwise integration is an essential feature for me in any PKM, because I can take notes wherever I’m consuming my content and just have it automagically appear in my notes, tagged and ready for processing. So it’s absolutely something I need to have in my Obsidian workflow.

That’s where things get tricky, because Readwise doesn’t have an Obsidian integration.

Source: Readwise Exports

The closest thing is the Markdown export, but that’s not automatic. You can manually trigger an export, and then copy those exports over into your Obsidian vault, and thne make sure they’re in the right format with the right tags. I knew I was never going to do that, so I found a way to automate it.

readwise2directory

I discovered that Readwise has an API, and briefly thought about building my own integration. Happily, I found this Python project on GitHub by nicrivard, who had already done that! Why rebuild the wheel? His solution already did what I needed:

It connects to Readwise via your Readwise access token
Checks for new highlights or updated ones
Exports the new/updated highlights to a local folder of your choosing (presumably your Obsidian vault)

It even pulls in highlight tags from Readwise, if you’ve created any (which I haven’t).

I forked the project here to add just a few minor touches:

Changed date format of imported notes
Added a section to output the import date to a comment block (an Obsidian Insider build feature) rather than YAML frontmatter, so that the date would actually be linked and backlinked.
Customized tags and filename for my use
Sort imports into folders within my Obsidian vault depending on source (Article/, Tweet/, and so on).

This works out pretty well. Here’s an example of an import from the podcast app Airr into Obsidian, in Edit mode.

It’s placed within my Podcast folder inside my value, is tagged appropriately, and contains links to the source. Switching to Preview mode shows an imported cover photo and even a playable recorder for the part of the podcast that I snipped on Airr:

So that works out well, except for one thing: firing off the script that does all this is still manual.

Scheduling the script

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to schedule a Python script to run at certain intervals. I’m on macOS, so I used a built-in utility called cron.

Give cron full system access

Cron needs to have the right permissions to run scripts on my behalf, so I had to go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Full Disk Access on my laptop and add /usr/bin/cron to the “allowed” list.

Open crontab

Then, from my terminal, I ran the command env EDITOR=nano crontab -e to open up the list of cronjobs I had currently.

Set a schedule

I added a line to crontab for the schedule I wanted to create. This line has to be in the format

* * * * * command

where the five asterisks correspond to:

minute
hour
day of the month
month
day of the week

In my case, I wanted it to run every hour, so here’s what my schedule looks like:


0 * * * * cd /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/ && /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin/python3 /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/readwise-GET.py >> /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/readwiseGET.log

Python issues

I had some trouble getting cron to work until I realized it was because I had multiple versions of Python installed. I ran a which python3 to find the path to the version I wanted to use and added that path to the command. I also had to cd to the project directory, for some reason.

While I was troubleshooting, I found it really useful to output to a log so I could see what had gone wrong.

Once I added the schedule as in the example above, though, it worked a treat!

Conclusion

This solution did require some setup at the beginning, but doesn’t need any maintenance once it’s going. I’m pretty happy with it as it means I can keep taking notes on various places from anywhere, and it’ll all be waiting for me in my Obsidian vault whenever I’m ready to sit down and process them into my system. Thanks to nicrivard for the repo that made it possible!

Readwise on Nicole van der Hoeven

Top 10 Ways I Learn in Public

Learning new things in Obsidian: in defense of remembering

Links

Taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian

RESOURCES

AI tools for PKM and Obsidian

Taking Notes From Youtube Videos in Obsidian

Mastobot: a Mastodon Bot for Readwise and Obsidian

The problem

The result

The solution

Pre-requisites

Setup

Limitations

Resources

Reading and Taking Notes on Kindle and Obsidian

Taking Better Notes From Books: Shortform-Readwise-Obsidian

What is Shortform?

What makes Shortform different?

Researched commentary

Shortform vs. Blinkist

Action-oriented exercises

Critical thinking: comparisons to other ideas

How to use Shortform with Obsidian

The result: Shortform highlights in Obsidian

My Shortform workflow for taking notes on books

Related

I can finally tell you about Readwise Reader

How to Take Notes from a book with Obsidian (The Culture Map)

How I Learn in Obsidian - Keeping up with tech trends

Use It or Lose It - Linking Your Thinking Conference

How Real People Process Notes

How to Process Notes in Obsidian // Readwise Official Obsidian plugin

How to import Shortform highlights to Obsidian via Readwise

What’s Shortform and why is it awesome?

What you need

The setup

Enter your tokens

Getting your Shortform token

Getting your Readwise token

Run the script

What about running the script regularly?

Give cron full system access

Find the path for your python3 installation

Open crontab

Set a schedule

That’s it!

The easiest way to sync Kindle highlights to Obsidian: Readwise to Obsidian Redux

Install the Obsidian plugin.

Connect your Readwise account to the Obsidian plugin

Modifying configuration settings

Group Files in Category Folders

Use Custom Formatting

Page metadata

Highlight

YAML front matter

Sync notification

Select Items to be Exported

Initiate Sync from Obsidian

Verifying results

Set up automatic sync

Conclusion

Readwise to Obsidian

readwise2directory

Scheduling the script

Give cron full system access

Open crontab

Set a schedule

Python issues

Conclusion