In Consume less create more Pt1, I described my goals around content consumption and creation. But to show a little more of an example, I want to show how I’m using other tools that help me make sense of the highlights I collect and consolidating my thoughts on them.
One Funnel via Readwise
To make it even more concrete: recently, I’ve been exploring the mental load of parents and how AI can alleviate it (by now my interests should be quite obvious.) I’ve explored various online tools for parents, read academic papers, numerous articles and blog posts, listened to several podcasts, and read books. Anything I find interesting in a browser, I save to Readwise. I read books using Kindle on my Boox, and listen to podcasts via Snipd. All of these platforms can sync to Readwise to create a single, streamlined collection point.
If anyone knows of an efficient "Blinkist to Readwise" workflow, please share your insights.
Using the official Readwise plugin, everything is synced into Obsidian. Each item from Readwise is transformed into a note that incorporates all the highlights I’ve made. While this setup may sound complex, it works really well for me as it requires no more manual involvement. Ultimately, everything ends up in Obsidian, where it’s indexed and searchable, and I no longer need to jump between different tools just to organize my thoughts.
Handy shortcut for less screen time:
AirPod Triple-Press. You can set this up as a shortcut to make highlights in Reader by Readwise and in Snipd. This offers a direct, screen-free route from listening to having my highlights ready in Obsidian.
Enzyme Energy
This is where another tool from another amazing former co-worker, Josh Pham, comes into play. Josh developed a plugin called Enzyme for Obsidian that enables the use of LLMs directly within your notes. This plugin can be used right within the text of your notes, which I find incredibly convenient for writing. There’s no need to toggle between a writing tool and a browser anymore, and depending on my needs, I don’t even have to switch between notes or different views in Obsidian.
To reconnect this to my current focus on the mental load of parenting and the use of AI to assist with it, I asked Enzyme to reflect on my thinking and help me identify common themes. Everybody might have a different way to tag highlights, but I typically only use per-document tags, such asmentalload andparenting.
Let’s say I want to figure out the general themes of the related content I’ve recently read and understand how they might connect. In that case, I can ask Enzyme to “Identify and explain three common themes betweenmentalload andparenting,” and it provides an answer directly in the same note, as shown in this screenshot:
Now I can just pull out anything that seems useful in the output, as it’s simply text in my note. I can also highlight parts that resonate with me and ask Enzyme to expand on it (was so close to using ‘delve into’ here, but didn’t want to sound like your average ChatGPT) as illustrated in this screenshot:
While it may seem a bit meta to ask an LLM to write about a dystopian versus utopian vision of how technologies “like itself” might be used in the context of parenting, I hope this brings back the point of how valuable it can be to have access to a tool that’s aware of all my highlights and helps me organize them across various areas of interest.
Inspiration from You
I love learning from others and am a big fan of people sharing their workflows, tips, and tricks. If you’ve put LLMs to creative use that helps you “think better,” I’d love to hear about it via Twitter