How I Learn

Requirements

• iPad
• Laptop/PC
• Google Drive/DropBox/any cloud storage

Consume the content

When I read from an article, PDF, or any text-based resource, I follow the following rules:

• Use two highlighting colors (orange and green) and alternate between them to separate ideas.
• After reading for some time or feeling that I have lost or might lose track of what I have read before, I come back and write marginal notes (in red) to describe the general idea for each highlighted section.
• After completing reading the content, I revisit my notes and try to have a solid understanding of the content, and add more marginal notes with a different color (blue).
• Re-write my notes and general ideas into a piece of paper to understand the flow of ideas (just focus on important things and ignore details that aren’t important)

Document ideas

After I complete consuming the content, I move my notes to Obsidian to have them backed up in Markdown and organized for future reference. I try to refactor my notes every month or so.

The connection between different markdown notes in Obsidian.

Things that I use

I use my iPad to write notes by hand and read PDFs. However, I have a different setup to organize my workflow:

• GoodNotes: to write notes from scratch.
  • I use dark, square-style sheet
  • I use three colors (yellow=main content, red and blue=side notes)

• Notability: to read and highlight on PDF.
  • I use three highlighting colors (orange and green = highlighting ideas, and blue = for extremely important things or weird stuff that I want to look into later)
  • I use two colors for marginal notes(red = during reading, and blue = after reading)

Both of them are synced to Google Drive and I use insync to sync the documents created in both GoodNotes and Notability to my PC/Laptop.

In addition, I use the following to do certain things:

• Mathpix: take a screenshot on pdf or hand-written equations to turn them into LaTeX equations (basically to be added to LaTeX or Markdown document)
• Google Drive: for cloud storage
• insync: to automatically backup my stuff between different machines
• Zotero: to manage pdf files
• Todoist: to manage tasks and reading content
• raindrop.io: to manage online content (smart bookmarks)
• Super Simple Highlighter: to highlight on the web