Charanjit Singh says he has a hard time remembering what he reads. It’s a common enough problem and Singh has settled on a common solution: he takes notes on what he reads. There are lots of ways of doing that, of course, but this being Irreal, it’s not a hard guess that his note taking workflow revolves around Emacs.
His workflow involves three components:
Spookfox is Singh’s package for talking to Firefox.
He takes two types of notes:
- Reading notes
- These are notes he takes on what he reads, usually in Firefox, and
- Normal note
- These are notes that summarize and discuss his reading notes. They link back to the reading notes so that he can see the source.
You can get the details in his post but Singh’s workflow is pretty much like mine except that I use Org mode rather than Denote and talk to my browser (Safari) using some homegrown AppleScript and Elisp glue. It’s a great way of keeping tack of what you read, especially if you read a lot or have a hard time remembering what you read.
Using Org means that it’s easy for me to search my journal—where all these notes go—for a topic or tag. Regardless of the tools you use, taking notes on what you read is a great way of boosting your native memory.