How I Use Obsidian to Connect Ideas and Remember More of What I’ve Read

Using Markdown, note-taking, and regularly reviewing quotes and notes, I remember more of what I read

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Inevitably, when you start to read a lot of books and articles, you start to forget some of the things you’ve read before.

Maybe you remember there was a great quote about something and you can’t remember it when you need to. Or maybe you know you wrote about this subject and can’t remember where you published it or what exactly you said.

If you were smart, you kept all your articles and other published words somewhere so you could maybe scan them and find what you were looking for. But what a time-suck.

I’ve written before about how my memory is a sieve — things I’ve read go in, and then they fall right back out again.

I have a flexible system in place to combat this problem. It’s based on a loose combination of three different but similar concepts:

• the Zettelkasten system popularized by Niklas Luhmann,
• the Evergreen Notes concept by Andy Matuschak,
• and the idea of commonplace books, which have been in use for centuries. (I learned the most about starting my own from an older…