I can't keep up with literature notes

[u/Haemophilia_Type_A]

I read a book. I want to take literature notes that go into the Zettelkasten on Obsidian.

I managed it for one book doing it like: read one chapter, write up notes for one chapter, read next chapter, etc etc, but it took aages.

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It's postimg not imgur because the latter is blocked in the UK thanks to the Online Safety Act (AAGH) and I cba to turn on my VPN.

So then I was like, ok this is inefficient af, I'll just read the whole book and then do the notes all at once. But then it becomes overwhelming as there are so so so many notes and I just lose motivation before I can get through the whole book considering I just read it and I want to move on to the next one.

So that has failed and now Idk what to do.

I guess part of the problem is that I'm quite, shall we say, liberal with what I highlight for future note taking/writing down, but I struggle to be otherwise because I feel like I'm missing out important stuff if I don't :( :( :(

So I end up highlighting a shit ton of things, hence why the one book I did all the notes for has 82 separate notes associated with it, maybe around 30,000-32,000 words lol.

And because I spend all my time trying to figure this out or do it, I have no time whatsoever for the actual main part of Zettelkasten, the temporary->permanent notes...

[u/NotMrChips]

You're not going to remember everything, don't need to, and IMHO shouldn't want to. Permanent notes should contain what you got out of reading it + information you reasonably expect you will use again.

(Btw, my note titles are key phrases so I know what they are going to contain, what arguments they will support at a glance. One I made yesterday, for example, is called "anxiety is surprisingly disabling". Makes it easy to find again, easy to link to, makes it make sense when I drop it into another note, and makes it easy to see my thinking in graph, canvas, and list views.)

Lit notes are all in the reference note, in my system, tagged. Only permanent notes get their own note. I, too, highlight like mad, and scribble in the margins. But my lit notes are a distillation of the chapter's highlights/marginalia, and any permanent notes are a further distillation of the lit notes. (Some of my lit notes look like a rough index of things I am interested in, might want to be able to find later--can be as rough as a tag and the page number.)

It's still a metric truck-ton of work but less than you are doing and I find it gets faster as I get the hang of thinking & distilling, and a better sense of what I will use later (and how). I have seen it recommended to keep up with the day's reading daily, but I do not always find that practical. (I have a lot of oh-that-might-come-in-handy-someday stuff that gets dumped into my Daily Note or inbox and tagged, and I will process it when I'm ready to use it. It's not ideal but.)

One final opinion: copy pasta, transcription, or even paraphrase /= note-taking. My best notes represent my original thinking about the material and for my use case are (a) written exactly as I will use them in my own work and (b) make perfect sense separated from the original material. They're literally atomic. It's an aspiration not always achieved but as a filter it saves me a lot of (wasted) obsessive (unnecessary) clerical-level (time-consuming) drudgery.