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There's a whole book on that ('How to Take Smart Notes'), which I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/-/pt/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-...
Hands down one of my favorite (non fiction) books I read this year. The book is written by an academic, who I actually reached out to for a 1 on 1 consultation to help me with integrating Zettelkasten into my daily routine.
I don't take notes. I find it distracting. I end up absorbing less information. The few times I did try taking notes, I rarely referred back to them, and when I did, found that they weren't very valuable. I've got a good memory, and I'm willing to reread something to absorb more, but notes have never helped me. Not criticizing note-taking; just offering another perspective.
One key strategy to avoid this kind of note graveyard forming is to interlink notes. That way seeing a note can essentially lead you to wiki-binging through old ideas, trains of thought or re-stumbling on reference you thought was interesting once upon a time.
The value of interlinked notes is showcased by the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's notetaking system which he used to rediscover things he'd forgotten. His knowledge base consisted of ~90,000 index cards that were apparently worth referring to because of the wiki binge type effect his hyperlinking system allowed.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...
https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook...
Step 2: batch export all the highlights and comments out and paste them into my notes app as a new note
Step 3: go through that note and highlight the ones that are the most valuable (i.e., progressive summarization)
Step 4: summarize and re-state those points as notes in my zettelkasten
I find this process really helps me keep track of the things that I find valuable without clogging up my notes with all the fluff. And the last step helps me build connections to other unrelated thoughts.
My tech research mostly collects snippets of information. Not terribly worried about attribution of any given phrase, fact or passage as paraphrase or quote from the author (though I am always careful to note the source, mostly so I can find it again ;)
For academic and thought research I am extremely careful. I take notes, riff on what I read [1], and take care to quote accurately.
Throughout all of this productivity, my reading is surprisingly the same. I filter every text with a narrow set of categories [2], and if it doesn't fit into one of these categories, then the text should be quoted (see?) or I'm not interested in the text (yet).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476470
[2]: Marginalia: Sign-posting a text https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/139g4uFXFCL1ZYrcWKTShbPsw...
I try to read books/papers on mac as it's faster to google and go deep into things I don't get. Select text (a+space and it queries selected text on google). Then it's trivial to open any note (with alfred) from my wiki ( https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge ) & edit it under appropriate topic. On the go, I usually note things down in Telegram saved messages and later transfer it to wiki or turn it into articl…
On the go I'll add a task to taskwarrior and get reminded when I sync it from the PC.
>What would be even more amazing is when you can take ability to note under any line in a book (as Holloway already lets you), and see everyone's notes for any line/chapter of the book/paper you are reading.
I haven't used it but sounds similar to what https://web.hypothes.is/ is trying to do.