PKM with Logseq and Readwise
Learn more about my personal knowledge management (PKM) setup with Logseq connected to Readwise, which aggregates highlights from Command, Feedly, Kindle, and Pocket.
Over the years, I tried many different apps for taking notes and organizing thoughts: OneNote, Evernote, Keep, Sublime Text with plain Markdown, Obsidian, NotePlan, but in the last few months I have settled on Logseq.
I used NotePlan for over two years and liked it. A lot. All notes are in Markdown, it has great calendar integrations, but it lacks proper knowledge management. Unfortunately, I never relied much on the calendar integration and I really wanted a better solution for knowledge management, which is why I stumbled onto Logseq. It also has native LaTeX support, which is really nice for more technical content. The exorbitant price tag of Roam never made me consider it.
Logseq
The integration with Readwise convinced me to switch permanently, because I no longer had to export the latest highlights from Readwise to Markdown, download, unzip, import, and organize into folders. The full setup is shown in the image below:
All notes and highlights from Command, Feedly, Kindle, Pocket are automatically synchronized through Readwise to Logseq, which even keeps the information fresh while the app is open. Logseq is also where I add notes, course summaries, ideas, and meeting minutes, because it has all the information I can possibly need at my fingertips:
With basic queries, you can build pages that look through everything for specific combinations of tags. For instance, say, I am interested in quantum computing and machine learning. A simple query to list all notes that have #quantum and #ml tags is easy enough:
More advanced queries are possible too, but they require knowledge of Datalog. More information and links are available in the official documentation, which is a browser-based version of Logseq, so you can see what it is capable of live.
Logseq offers full page history when git auto-sync is enabled. A cron one-liner pushes that to the upstream once a weekday at 5pm:
00 17 * * 1-5 cd /path/to/local/logseq/folder && git push > /dev/null 2>&1
Readwise
Readwise is the link between the web and Logseq. I use it to collect highlights from different apps without having to build and maintain my own integrations. All highlights are available within Logseq, alongside my own hand-crafted notes. Note that Readwise also supports importing highlights from physical books using OCR.
The only integration that is in my opinion missing is Paperpile, which is where I annotate and highlight research papers.
Feedly
Feedly has been my RSS reader of choice for many years. Nowadays, I also use it to read articles on various topics I am interested in.
Pocket is great for saving articles permanently and highlighting. Tags created in Pocket are synced to Readwise and therefore also available in Logseq, so the knowledge graph is automatically extended. If you prefer Instapaper to Pocket, that’s fine. Readwise has you covered in any case.
Kindle
Amazon’s e-book service, apps, and devices probably need no introduction. I highlight and annotate most of the books I read on Kindle. These highlights then end up in Readwise. For technical books with code or mathematics, I tend to rely on physical books and handwritten notes in physical notebooks, because the rendering of technical content still leaves a lot to be desired.
Command
Command is a browser for iOS in which any text or image can be highlighted and organized into journals. I mostly use it for grabbing single quotations from articles that otherwise are not worth keeping. Everything else lands in Pocket.
For studying audio engineering theory, I rely heavily on Command. I highlight text from HOFA-College, which I then export to Markdown to organize and summarize by hand. The highlights aid in creating crisp summaries that are then linked to all existing notes in Logseq.
Knowledge Graph
All in all, my knowledge graph based on notes and thousands of highlights looks as of today like this:
