THE PROCESS#
Borrowing Tiago Forte’s CODE methodology:
- Purpose
- Capture
- Organize
- Distill
- Express
PURPOSE#
To start, I analyze the problem I hope to solve, create a new collection in Zotero, and begin the quest for papers.
CAPTURE#
Zotero makes capturing a breeze 🍂.
With the Zotero app open in the background, I click the little extension in the extension bar of my browser.
The extension extracts the necessary frontmatter, including the paper title, author’s names, and abstract. It then saves a PDF copy of the paper (if available.)
ORGANIZE#
Each paper gets tagged with at least one of these statuses:
- Red 🔴—Unread
- Yellow 🟡—Reading
- Green 🟢—Read and ready to process
- Lightbulb 💡—Interesting/ highly influential
- Checkmark ✔️—Processed and ready to export
- NEW: Brown leaves 🍂—Not important enough to take notes on
- NEW: Green leaves 🍃—Contains notes
DISTILL#
I highlight papers with the following colors, which also aids their review. (Credits: Bryan Jenks & Artem Kisanov)
- Yellow 🟨—Interesting examples and resonant points
- Orange 🟧—Important note by the author
- Green 🟩—Assumptions, questions, goals, and problems
- Blue 🟦—Background information that could be important. (including non-obvious acronyms)
- Gray ⬜—Quotes
- Red 🟥—Methods
- Purple 🟪—Results, findings, and conclusions
EXPRESS#
Essays—published on my blog—and papers are written in Obsidian using the Citations, Pandoc, and Pandoc Reference List plugins.
The Citations plugin allows me to cite papers and import highlights and notes from Zotero.
My Zotero library, exported as a .bib file, is linked in the plugin settings—granting me access to all papers.
Pandoc Reference List formats inline references and lists all cited papers in the sidebar. (Per a specified citation style)
Pandoc converts the completed manuscript into PDF or other formats.