How I write my notes [Part 1]

In this post, I will share the tools that I use, my general thoughts about the setup, and an example of how I would go about writing a note.

Here are the tools that I use to have an active and productive experience when learning from books, courses, and general content (e.g. YT vids, online articles, etc.):

• Notion for project planning, reading list tracking, and scratch pad for logging and writing random notes for certain projects. It is basically used as a database and a tracker of the progression of my learning/consumption of the content.
• Obsidian for perma-notes and I use LYT setup, which is a fluid system to take notes.
• As I only read digital books, I use Okular as my pdf reader/highlighter.
• MathPix for converting equations to LaTeX equations to be imported to Obsidian.
• Insync to store my notes and pdf files on the cloud.

My thoughts:

• As I have ADHD, it is easy to get distracted by multiple things and be focused on small and unimportant details, so my pipeline is structured (at least for me) while giving me the freedom to grow and mature as my learning experience is.
• My Obsidian notes are 1. an extension to my thoughts 2. organized of content. The notes aren’t meant to be read by others, they are meant for me to interact with the content.
• I believe in recycling information to develop a strong knowledge of some context. This means reading about backprop from school/traditional course will give me an idea of how backprop works, but when reading PyTorch’s implementation of backprop will give me more interesting and practical information about how backprop is actually implemented and used. Those two data point share backprop but they are learned at a different time of my life (which means I am a different person) so when creating the notes, they won’t be connected besides knowing their sources and they are related to Deep Learning note, which is enough connection. Hence, the parent note (Deep Learning note) is always organized to have a nice TOC of connected notes to ease the process of exploring my notes.

Here is an example for when going through the Full Stack Deep Learning Course pre-labs:

• On Notion, I import the course structure and labs into my study_plan database and set pre-labs as Not started for me to view them into TODO tab.

• When I am ready to tackle any of the learning material, I use study_logs database as a scratch pad to write my thoughts while learning the material. Here is an example for the first lab.
• When I am done consuming the content, I move to Obsidian to write useful information to be stored to improve my knowledgebase system. Left note is for the lab 1 note and right note is for the course note where I use it as a TOC