Creating (Trash) Notes in Obsidian
As most of you might know, I love working with Obsidian and using Readwise as the backbone of my PKM system. One of the most powerful tweaks I´ve implemented on the go was using the official Readwise plugin for Obsidian. This way all of my highlights from my Kindle, blog posts, and whatever are added to Obsidian seamlessly.
But there is one major weakness of the official plugin: You can´t delete notes. Or change the titles. If you do so, the original note will reappear during the next sync. Which is when you open Obsidian again while connected to the internet.
This sucks, to be honest.
But: you can edit your note. You can change everything EXCEPT the title.
And I make use of that. A typical note created by Readwise includes a header image, some data like the author, the link sometimes a summary (generated by AI), and your highlights below.
What I am doing is extracting all the highlights into a new note and naming it “trash xxx” with xxx being a few words from the original title. This note goes directly into my archive folder.
Thereafter I add a link to the daily note into the original Readwise note with a few words like “useless”, “duplicate” or “not applicable”. And that´s it.
I prefer to keep the empty edited Readwise notes instead of reworking them or ignoring the useless stuff. In case I would become interested in recycling / trash science I would need to find a workaround. But every method has its limits, so I am comfortable with that risk.
As I´ve been going through 10–20 random notes every day for like two weeks so far I am starting to get an impression concerning how much repetitive stuff I´ve been collecting in my 23k highlights within Readwise. Shame on me, but that´s life. My interests at the beginning of reading non-fiction books in the summer of 2018 weren´t the same as now, in February 2024. So far I am guessing that at least 20% of the original Readwise notes are noise, but not signal. So I´ll keep going with this process.
The general process is almost the same if I like something from a Readwise note. I extract a phrase or paragraph into a new note. Both notes get a link to the daily note and at least one related phrase or linked note.
As knowledge and ideas develop over time, I am using the random note plugin for the process of opening random notes.
Sometimes it hits notes from the archive, templates, life admin notes, daily notes, or something related to blogging. I don´t care if these are linked or not, so I move on if the content doesn´t create curiosity instantly.
Sometimes it hits an extracted note, which is located in my thoughts folder. In this case, I add a link to the daily note and add a few phrases or link some notes that seem to be useful. I try to limit myself to no more than 7–10 at once.
I hope this is something useful to you. Do you have this problem with Readwise integrations to other note-taking apps as well? How do you handle it?
