Long before I started creating, I was an information consumer — collecting thoughts and ideas, but not doing anything with them. This gave me a lot of experience when it comes to creating systems for information capture and synthesis. It’s only now that I have the proper means and audience to explain how I’ve been doing it…

This is a workflow that brings clarity in the midst of the unending noise that the internet makes. From books to videos, articles and podcasts, I’m going to show you how to steps to collect the most relevant ideas from every corner of the internet and synthesise them into personal notes that link all of your ideas together.

The workflow is formed of three stages:

  • Capture — the process of capturing sources of inspiration and information from our internet browsing
  • Extraction — identifying and collecting the most relevant parts of the captured sources
  • Synthesis — transforming these snippets into personal notes that relate to our own understanding, use and experience

Let’s get started with the capture stage…

Capture

There are two types of people in this world. Those who ‘read with a pen in hand’ and those who don’t. In other words, there are some people who are ready to capture information whenever and wherever they encounter it, and some people who aren’t.

There are obvious advantages to being one of the former category, so I’m going to reveal everything I do to make sure that interesting ideas and content don’t slip through my grasp.

There are different platforms that I use and recommend for capturing and consuming different content forms:

  • Kindle — books. Extensive library of fiction and non-fiction books. Can get books for very cheap through offers and discounts.
  • Snipd — podcasts. Uses AI to snip out the relevant section from the conversation when prompted. I can do this through touch controlling my headphones, making this a powerful and convenient option.
  • Readwise Reader — articles, emails, Twitter threads, YouTube videos and local files like PDFs and epubs. A one-size-fits-all read-it-later service for managing the highlighting of any written web content that isn’t a Kindle book…

On each of these platforms, I consume the collected content when I have time, highlighting the sections that I find interesting. I’m very selective with the content I highlight, so that I’m not overwhelmed when approaching the later stages of the workflow. It’s also convenient and organised to have everything in one place, so that I don’t have to switch between tasks and formats as often.

Once I have captured all the sources and highlighted the important sections of each one, it’s time to extract this information…

Extraction

My content capture and highlight workflow is based around the service Readwise. This service simply aggregates your content highlights from across different platforms (it integrates with all the above). It means you don’t have to manage the export to your note-taking app of choice (Obsidian for me) from each capture platform individually.

Readwise does cost, but as I’ve said before, the cost is very low, especially if you’re a student or you use the basic plan. It saves you lots of time by providing one simple export so that you can focus on the other, more important elements of the system — as I’ve always said, the middle stages of the workflow have a lower requirement for manual input, as you can automate them and simply control input and output.

Within Obsidian, I have to connect the Readwise Official plugin to import my highlights. This plugin allows me to customise the folder that the notes are imported to (the Resources/Highlights folder in keeping with PARA), as well as the format that the exported notes take.

I can add variables such as title, author and category, which is useful for viewing my resources based on their characteristics, using plugins such as Dataview and Supercharged Links.

Once I’ve imported and organised the highlights within my vault, it’s time for the most important stage of the process — synthesising your highlights to create value…

Synthesis

This step will take the most effort, but it’s worth it because of the value provided by the notes that it creates. Every part of synthesising my notes is done within my Obsidian vault now that the Readwise import has taken place.

The first step is to read through the notes full of highlights and, being even more selective than when you made them, highlight the most important quotes, ideas, facts and other knowledge that you want to turn into your own notes. This idea of highlighting highlights comes from Tiago Forte’s book Building a Second Brain, where he refers to the process as ‘progressive summarisation’.

Another tip I learned from Tiago’s book was to never start extracting value and creating notes from highlights until you have to. This way, you highlight and summarise the extracts in light of the output you want to produce, which is more relevant and valuable than doing it without a goal in mind.

Once you have distilled the content into the most concise form, you take each individual piece of knowledge that you have collected and transform it into a permanent note. There are a few rules I recommend following for the creation of these permanent notes:

  • Written in your own words — include your own ideas or perspectives that relate to the content of the note. This is the stage where you create value by sharing your own perspective, knowledge, or experience.
  • Atomic, or focusing on a single idea in each note. There isn’t a limit on the number of notes you can make. Creating a note per idea means that you can be accurate when linking your ideas. It also reduced ambiguity and confusion
  • Linked to other notes of the same type, i.e. atomic notes, as well as the notes containing the summarised highlights. You can enrich the value of these notes by linking them to other ideas, as well as their source. Follow the links between notes to discover connections between topics. You can do this by adding links inline and under a heading at the bottom of the note.
  • Written for yourself to understand. Nobody else is trying to use your second brain. The same as building your systems for yourself, you should write only what you need to gain an understanding of what the note’s written to explain.
  • Written so you can understand the note by itself. The notes are atomic. This means that you can read one note, and it makes sense. You don’t want your notes in your vault to start relying on each other.
  • The title should be self-explanatory, e.g. ‘How Feynman solved problems’ (an example from my vault). This also helps when adding inline links in other notes, because you can gain context just by seeing the link to the note.

These notes that contain your own ideas should be deeply connected to each other. They’re the same as notes within a system like Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.

Because of this, I like to contain these notes in a separate part of my vault. I said earlier that I use PARA — the Areas folder is the slip-box for all these atomic notes. This way I gain benefit from linked thinking, but also have a solid system for project management in Obsidian.

An additional stage for very influential books and other pieces is to make a literature note before making atomic notes — again from the Zettelkasten method, this is where you create a note that contains a succinct summary of all the sections of the piece that you have read.

I only do this for very important and value-filled pieces — Digital Minimalism and Building a Second Brain are examples. I store these literature notes in the folder Resources/Literature, next to the highlights, and link to them when I write a relevant note in the Areas folder.

Note — I create literature notes for the physical books that I read too, because there’s no way to get their highlights into Readwise.

Now you have a set of notes that you can use easily to inform the content you are making.

The better your idea capture and note-taking process is, the less work you will have to do when it’s time for content production. This is because you have already turned all the ideas and original content you need to produce engaging and unique work into notes in your vault!