How I Use Logseq to Manage PDFs and Book Highlights

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel my name is Allan and I am back again this week with another log seek video in my first video I talk through how I use log seek to boost my organization and boost my productivity at work if you haven't seen it I highly recommend that you go watch that video first but to summarize in my opinion a good personal Knowledge Management System should allow you to store organize and retrieve information as well as connect ideas with as little friction as possible at work I use log seek to accomplish this by adding all of my notes to log seeks Daily Journal as I type I tag important Concepts to create pages that log seek self-organizes for me finally I make it a policy to only put the same piece of data in one place if I need it somewhere else I reference it instead of retyping it now this strategy is well and good for typing my own notes but one thing I didn't mention in my first video was how I organize notes from external sources like PDFs and books so that's going to be what we focus on today how can we use log seek to organize notes from external sources with as little friction as possible and the first area that I want to start with is PDFs so as a professional I'm constantly dealing with PDFs and the most common way that I interact with these and I need to have them in my notes is with policy documents a single policy document might contain sporadic information that I need and information might span multiple Pages now if you're watching this and you're a student or a researcher you might face something similar maybe you have a study a research paper or an article what would be the best strategy for getting all of that information from your PDFs into log seek well you might be tempted to open the PDF and just start transcribing it into log seek maybe onto one or multiple pages but there's a much better way let's jump into log seek and take a look okay here we we are today I've got this PDF that contains some new company policies about the dress code typing these notes out would just create friction so instead I'm going to add this PDF to my log seek graph as an asset and based on my philosophy of only storing the same piece of information in one place I'm not going to retype the notes first let's upload the PDF and I'll show you what I mean there are two ways to add PDFs into your graph as assets the first is to use the slash command button and type upload choose upload an asset and navigate to your PDF using the file picker the easier way if you have the PDF handy is to just drag and drop it onto your Journal like so this will create a double bracketed link to the asset that's preceded by a little pile of books emoji the magic starts when you click on that link to open up log seeks native PDF reader pane on the left within this pane you can read through your PDF and if you're looking for a specific word or phrase there's even a full text search available if there's something noteworthy I recommend using the PDF highlighting feature to do this select the text that needs saving and a popup will appear with color options once the text is highlighted rightclick it and choose copy reference then paste that into your Journal this approach has several advantages over just typing the notes out but besides that reduction and friction that I mentioned before the first once again is that it adheres to that good data practice of only storing the same piece of information in one place the second is that now the text is fully searchable in your graft and it can be tagged with backlinks the third is that the reference will link directly to the page in the PDF and clicking on it will take you to that broader context for this reason sometimes I'm less tempted to highlight full pages and paragraphs and I find myself just highlighting headings over the first sentence knowing that I can click on the link and read the broader context later and here's a bonus tip there are also AI apps out there like pdf. a that allow you to upload a PDF and receive an instant summary of the PDF you may also choose to copy and paste the summary into log seek to easily see what it's about with some links to specific details and Pages paste it in as references oh and one last thing just because it didn't fit anywhere else if you ever go back into your PDF you can click on the icon that looks like a bulleted list at the top and log seek will show you all of your highlights for that document okay so next up I have a tip that I don't often use for work but I think that any students or researchers using log SQL really appreciate and it has to do with managing book highlights allow me to set the state for you by sharing an example of how I use this in my own personal life I love birds and bird watching and recently I wanted to learn more about how to properly clean and set out my bird feeders for the winter I rented a few books from my library and I opened them up on my Kindle app as I read them I highlighted some of the information that I found helpful once I was done with the books and I returned them to the library all I was left with was several documents full of my highlights if I wanted to organize this information into my own personal log seek knowledge base how would I do this well I could type in the notes but again we're trying to avoid adding friction to our workflows so if possible we're going to want a better way I could copy and paste the notes but there isn't even easier way if you're willing to pay a little extra for a thirdparty service called readwise readwise is this really cool web app that can take all of your notes from services like kendle Apple Books Google Play books and more and save them all into one place for you and very conveniently they have built an official plugin for log seek I have mine set up to sync automatically into my Daily Journal whenever I open log seek the import process creates a new page with all of my highlights for that book and then back links to my journal and it even notes the day that I added the notes the process isn't completely without friction though I still go through the highlights and tag any important Concepts that I want to refer to later for example I added the tag bird feeders anytime that topic came up now I have organized all my notes from several sources onto one page and I can start putting my plan together with PDFs and book highlights covered I would say that at this point 95% of my needs are met really the only Frontier left for us to conquer is content from the worldwide web this is another tip that's especially going to be useful for those students and researchers that are watching there are times when I come across articles and websites that have really good information that I just want to save for reading later I also get email newsletters sent to me that always end up just lost in my mailbox hey I'm even subscribed to a few RSS feeds if you know what those are the question is is it possible to organize all of this chaos somehow into log seek with minimal friction and the answer is yes there's this really awesome free web app that was built to address this specifically and it's called omnivore so omnivore is what I'd call a readit later app it's kind of like pocket or insta paper if you're familiar with either of those but omnivore takes it a step further than those apps and it can even do things like generate a custom email address just for your email newsletters and it'll even save the text for you in the app and with the free browser extension and even an IOS app if you happen to be an iPhone user you can save any website easily into omnivore the Apple strip out all of the junk and the ads from the website and it'll save just the content that you want and once the content is added as you read through it you can highlight the content in omnivore in the same way that you do on a Kindle or another eBook reader and to top it all off omnivore has both a plug-in for log seek and a built-in integration with readwise the app we mentioned before this means that you can potentially just save your highlights in omnivore and let your readwise plug-in import process bring them in to log seek for you automatically honestly omnivore is too good to be free so I would check it out and sign up for an account while it still is okay so that was all a lot of information just to quickly summarize when I type my daily notes I make sure to enter those into my Daily Journal and I tag Concepts as I go this allows log seek to handle the organizing for me when I have PDFs to manage I don't waste time typing or copying and pting tting I just use log seeks built-in PDF feature highlighting key passages and referencing them in my journal as I go for books and highlights I rely on a thirdparty plug-in called readwise I save websites newsletters and RSS feeds into omnivore and I import them into log seek using that same readwise plug-in all of this virtually guarantees that I can enter 99% of my notes into log seek with as little friction as possible hey I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Alan Young

Views: 12,209

Keywords: logseq, productivity, logseq tutorial, how to use logseq, logseq vs obsidian, logseq app, logseq basics, logseq guide, logseq notes

Id: Ry3Ni30HBPw

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023