- Go to the Obsidian preferences
- Click "Community Plugins"
- Click "Browse"
- Search for "Calendar"
- Install and Enable the plugin
@obsdmd 3. On your top right you can now access your calendar.
- Each day is simply a note in Obsidian.
- You can create a note for this day by clicking on it - super simple.
Here is a demo:
@obsdmd 4. The calendar will change as you add notes and todos into your daily entries.
Here is what each feature means:
@obsdmd 5. Make sure to setup a folder for your daily notes to avoid clutter in your vault
-> Go to preferences and select "Daily Notes"
@obsdmd 6. If you want to make weekly notes as well, you have to enable it.
-> Go to preferences and select "Calendar"
-> Check "Show week number"
-> Just like in the previous step, you can set a folder where the weekly notes will go
Replace Zotero with a reference map and leverage your spatial memory.
Here is how:
๐
1. Reference manager vs map
Take a look at this screenshot: Which one looks more approachable and interesting? On the right is Zotero displaying all your papers in an endless list. On the left is a reference map.
Reference maps lay out your papers or PDFs in 2D on an endless surface called a "canvas" or "whiteboard". There are many tools that are capable of doing it: Obsidian is an obvious choice, Heptabase is great too, DrawIO is more complex but also good.
2. Zooming in and out / Finding things
Using the scroll wheel or pinch gesture you can fluidly navigate between the bird's eye view and the detailed view with your own notes on a single paper. Left: Detail, Right: All Papers.
To find papers you "fly up" and then "land on" the paper you are looking for. It feels incredibly natural and easier than scrolling through a list.
3. Why it works: Spatial Memory
Humans evolved moving around as hunter gatherers and spatial memory is a key trait needed for navigation. You leverage it by laying out your papers in a landscape, not a list. Your papers gain location and relation.
4. Headers and Topics: Location
Now that your papers are on a landscape or map you can have "countries" on this map. Every country is a topic, further subdivided in sub-topics. Here is the "Machine Learning Country" in the far south west of my map:
I can refer to "papers in the south west" - this is spatial memory being leveraged to remember where things are.
5. Semantic Connections: Relation
The next step is to build the "roads" between locations on the map. Simply draw an arrow and write on it what this relation signifies.
In the above example Swenson 2020 (top) wrote "the trait-demography relationship is weak (Yang 2018)".
So I read Yang 2018 (left) and added a connection. Later I found that (Lynn 2023) suggested a few solutions and linked those two as well.
By just looking at this map you can immediately write a sentence for your literature review. A narrative emerges and synthesis begins.
Summary:
Lay out papers on a spatial canvas using e.g. Obsidian instead of Zotero. Remembering them will be much easier because you can use your spatial memory. Synthesis starts happening automatically when you annotate connections between papers.
Do you do something like this?
Share a screenshot with us!
This is one of the methods you can learn about in my upcoming webinar:
When writing I consider 3 things:
- Finding citations to support the argument
- Putting ideas effectively on paper
- Skimming papers for logical relevance
ChatGPT can now do all of these with the help of GPTs: