My current Note-taking tools and process

I’ve tried a lot of different reading tools over the years, and I’ve always tried to find a single tool for the job. I hate the idea of paying for a bunch of SaaS services. As far as my system goes, I hate the idea of vendor lock-in, which is precisely what many of these services do to make their product more ‘sticky’- it’s often an important measure of growth for SaaS companies because it relates to user/customer retention.

Anyhow, one of the things I’ve been mindful of building into my system is a way to ensure I am not eternally tied to these tools. The way I do this is by writing in markdown with plain text files. This ensures I’ll always have files that can be read by any device. Obsidian is my go-to tool for this because it uses local storage as well as cloud storage and so I always maintain ownership of my work.

Currently, my workflow looks something like this:

Web sources are saved and read on Instapaper > notes and highlights sync to Readwise > Readwise converts notes and highlights to plain text and saves to Obsidian.

Sources that are saved in Readwise get added to Zotero, a reference manager, which also stores files locally and prevents me from needing to keep a record of sources tied to Instapaper.

This process is somewhat similar when dealing with E-books and PDFs. Everything goes through Readwise. And while Instapaper and Readwise are both important tools, there aren’t major dependencies insofar as I’m free to move on without too much hassle once a better tool comes along.