JordanM's recent activity
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Comment on How do you take notes while reading? Do you have a “marginalia” process? What has helped you learn better and retain new knowledge? in ~creative
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Comment on What watch do you wear daily? in ~hobbies
JordanM LinkI use a 1st gen Pixel Watch. No particular desire for it over any other smart watches. I had just been looking for one as a self-birthday present around when it came out and went for it. It's nice...I use a 1st gen Pixel Watch. No particular desire for it over any other smart watches. I had just been looking for one as a self-birthday present around when it came out and went for it. It's nice though and does what I was wanting. Had a simple look, let me interact with phone notifications, and also had NFC if I wanted to do payments.
I've been focusing more on taking notes in the last year or so and I use Obsidian for the actual interface. Syncthing for syncing notes between devices. I don't care for the hardcore productivity second-brain world some people get into as far as chasing the perfect system. I firmly believe that the best system is whatever serves one's actual day-to-day needs with the least friction. That being said, I do much prefer working in plaintext as a means of avoiding software vendor lock-in. My markdown notes are gonna be openable by any computer I use for the rest of my life and I can say that with 99% certainty.
I haven't started taking many notes on books yet, but generally what I like to do for a given piece of media is to create a canonical note for the media itself, as well as one for the creator or any real-life people that come up in the process of writing about the thing. So I'll make a note called "The Lighthouse (2019)" in my Movies folder. That has top-level info like a short summary of what the thing is, a brief review once I've watched/read/played the thing, as well as any links to other reviews, analyses, articles, etc on the thing. I also will create a canonical note whenever I mention a person while writing about the piece of media. Its creator, notable actors if about a movie. So whenever I'm writing I just link to that Person note. I do that so I can easily see other times I've mentioned the same person across multiple notes. Any time I found an actor's performance notable enough that I mentioned them specifically in a review of a movie. Or see other movies by a director I've written about.
If I were writing notes on a book, other than my final overall review thoughts, I would probably just have a list of random thoughts that came to me as I was reading that I thought might be useful later, alongside a chapter/page number if it was about a particular section. Generally no highlights because of that. Only original thoughts that came from me. I also don't really summarize for the sake of summarizing. I find that for me it's just wasted effort. Something I'm never going to bother looking at later. I like to focus on things that are either actionable or are in some way interesting.