I finally get fleeting notes

I spend more time than most on creating small systems to support my work and creativity. My systems develop and improve over time (some even become redundant) and I have a good sense of when and how to much to improve them. I have learned to listen to my systems.

Last Friday I was converting book notes from my Kindle Scribe when I heard loud and clear the indication I was wasting my time and change was needed. Zettelkasten is a note-taking method with many variations and interpretations on how to proceed. I thought I had it “correct” until realising I’d wasted the last half hour of my life. I’ll argue now it wasn’t a true waste because what I learned from that time will save me time in the future, letting me become more Productively lazy.

My process was:

1. Highlight and take handwritten notes on my Kindle Scribe.
2. Export the notes to PDF (sent to from the Kindle to my email account).
3. Transfer the book notes (a.k.a. Fleeting notes) into the book page I’d created in Obsidian. For every note in the PDF version,
   1. Create a heading for the location or page number reference
   2. Copy and paste the highlighted text
   3. Type my handwritten notes¹
4. Revisit each of the Fleeting notes and integrate them into the broader note base as Permanent notes (also considered by many to be Literature notes because a piece of literature is the source).

Step 3 took 90 minutes of focussed work, and it was only half of the notes I’d taken. My understanding of how my reading notes integrate into Permanent notes grew as I worked. I regularly found myself mentally adding to existing notes. Eventually I realised the copying of notes from PDF didn’t add any value as once integrated I would have no need for the Fleeting notes.² Why was I not working directly from the original PDF?

Today I changed my approach for the first round of notes from Parrish (2024), The Great Mental Models (General Thinking Concepts). I eliminated completely step 3 and instead of working from a copy in Obsidian, I created notes directly from the exported PDF. I’m glad I didn’t pre-copy everything as some of the Fleeting notes weren’t even required.

Listening to my systems early in their life when I’m actively learning helps me improve them intuitively and quickly. My systems evolve alongside my changing needs.

Footnotes

1. I ended up taking a screen grab of the longer notes and asking Microsoft Copilot to convert to text which I then copied and pasted. ↩

2. The clue is in the name. ↩