My Workflow for Reading, Organizing, and Maintaining Articles, Papers, & Books

Key Takeaways

what's going on everybody I got an email last night or this morning asking about how I organized my documents reading lists do I use an e-book reader what's my workflow for that how do I note highlight different things and documents like PDFs organizer articles I'm interested in reading and what's my system or and/or do I like LF so if it looks like I'm looking upwards it's because I'm actually you have my external monitor hooked up right now but I don't actually use LF from when I downloaded larb I still have VI FM and I'm perfectly happy with it it does what I needed to I've used Ranger before and I have Ranger on my bun two laptop that I don't really do anything with but I haven't done LF but as for like my documents and articles and things that I read I don't really have a great system because they don't really have a ton of stuff to manage like I'm not doing a PhD I'm not really in school at the moment not yet so I don't really have a terribly large amount of things that I'm trying to read so like really all I do for that is I have like two main things like I have solid large books that I'm trying to read either have my physical books which I might keep stacked in a specific area in order of which I want to read them which is like my bedside table but if it's like digital stuff then I have a books directory here I have books that I have finished reading for posterity books that I am currently reading or like in this case for meditations by Marcus Aurelius I have like notes I've been taking but I actually I have the physical copy of the book and so I was just writing my notes on here and marked down because why not but I'm still reading that it's kind of you know you got to take time to digest it but I'm also currently reading several of these things and then books that I haven't read or even started and just I separate them out by like category I got a humble bundle for like 15 bucks and I got like like 15 Oh Riley bucks just all kinds of stuff and then some stuff that some friends sent me like on pointers and see but like Emacs I'm probably not gonna read that because how many pages is that 536 pages on Emacs yeah I don't use Emacs so I'm probably not gonna read that but I mean it was part of the Humble Bundle so I did finish a book on regex the other day I just added this to my bib file took some notes on it so like in my Joplin it's gonna I just need to do oops Joplin if I'm gonna do CLI so on regex richer expressions so like this is all I did for my regex stuff is I just took some common pieces I mean this actually does look better in the GUI hold please Bridget's so like I just took like some common pieces of reject stuff like I did in my video and I just put it in here and this is really all I took from the book because I don't really I used regex on the command line for some grep stuff and pulling out different things and it is useful when you're doing stuff on the command line but I mean I didn't pull out too much out of that book but what I'll do is I'll usually just like have like I'll have the book open if I can't figure out how to open something I'll have like the book open like on a side and then on another side I'll have like you know I actually have Joplin open or something and I'll be like writing my notes over here or I'll have Joplin CLI open and I'll just be you know scrolling through the book just taking my notes or whatever like for my Viking research I have the PDF open here and I just write an armed markdown document because I actually do some stuff with figures and some pictures in here and I do have a bibliography file for this because I tend to like have all of these write-ups for different articles for my Viking guild research and I'm ultimately going to get like all the cliffnotes of all these different articles that I read and then create a like actual paper and cite each of these articles so I need to just know like this one comes from this article and then when I smash them all together I'll have the citations correct but in general I'll just have like a note-taking thing open and a book open and because this is in Zathura if I actually close this like if I go to let's just go to some random page so like this is page 15 right here matching digits we can see right there if I just close this book and then open it up again it remembers the page so I mean that's really useful for me I just it goes back to the page but I'll just read this I'll take notes at the same time as I find any salient points and that's it and then if I am doing something where I'm moving it through my process so I'm reading it move it from unread to reading event and I finished reading it I move it from reading to read and then I'll just add it to my bib files so I got one for books and then I have a separate bib file for articles and one for papers because these aren't like super large documents I tend to just keep them in here in this directory just because I might want to refer back to them I should ultimately probably just consolidate books in here too but I like to have a books up in the top so I don't forget about them this is just four things that I have finished reading and I don't have a place for articles or papers but when I do that I will I add them to these different bib files and then I have a she'll screw cymbals shell script where I just take each of the bib files I have I just did a simple character regex here so any of the things that start with a and end with dot bib I just cap them in to make a bib which is just like my consolidated bibliography file so that's how I do like my note-taking with my books now for articles and research papers I have a directory here for research I have just like different research topics I have here HTML notes they shouldn't be in here these are these are done notes I should put that in like Joplin or something but for Python I have a bunch of I'm working on different files right here because I'm actually learning more about Python right now so I got my whole little Python learning station here you know I'm writing notes on each thing in Joplin well also watching these socratic of videos on youtube you know it's like a single Python course before I dive into some other more complex material and some projects I watch the video here I move the file to done cuz I'm going to save the videos and I'm writing the code and bsp KO diem and taking notes in Joplin but in these directories I have like different things all related to like Python research but in data science I have a bunch of data science related papers research papers and articles or from the Journal of statistical software I'll read those things I got a nine hour long video on statistics I've still haven't gotten around to finishing I'm gonna reread all my statistics class material too and then like my Viking research material I have this PDF on Viking leather work but I mean I have all my research papers articles and stuff in the research directory all my books in the books directory and then all my bibliography files in documents bib directories and I mean that's I mean it's not a super great workflow I haven't really like I haven't tried to optimize it because for me for me it's good enough like it gets job done and it's it's good enough for what I'm doing so I don't really care too much about it at the moment I don't really do too much reading on my computer I do try to get around to reading these PDFs articles and papers and books but I'm more likely probably to pick up a physical book sometimes if I can pick up a book at all it's hard to get reading these days but that's basically all I do for it I don't really have a system or management stuff yeah this is really all I have set up why for like workflow for reading things and citing them in like my bid stuff and all my bid stuff is on a github repo too so as soon as I make a change to any of the bid files and consolidate my megabit again I just push all that up to github yeah I don't have an e-book reader yeah I mean I I have an iPad where I have the Humble Bundle on as well and I know like on my iPad I have some reader thing lets me like highlight and make comments and notes and stuff but I mean I don't really do that I just kind of like write my salient points in markdown documents and if I need absolutely needed to I could just reference the page I got the notes from and that's good enough like I don't really do too much crazy stuff with that at this point so I haven't really had a need for anything more advanced that's really all I do yeah so sorry if you were looking for something a little more advanced but that's all I got I mean I use VI FM I don't have LF VI FM works just fine for me I mean I want to go to my books directory I could even from in here I don't need to open a terminal I could just you know I can navigate to books but I could also just do like C books and you know have some basic commands in here you know mark stuff whatever like VI FM it's pretty great I mean it works for what I need - so that's all I got for like my studying reading workflow so yeah that's it if you have any questions feel free to shoot me an email or comment on the video by