Synthesizing on "Autopilot" · Synthesizer School

Nov '22 in Other

Synthesizing on "Autopilot"

As a 32yo it's not always easy to explain the knowledge game to my generation. I feel like we fall between "being glad to have a J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) and staying with the company for as long as possible" and "there's more out there, I guess". I'm trying to perfect my synthesizing and here's my current system:

Consume deliberate content in line with my own goals, aspirations and interests. For me, anything to do with landscaping, ecology, landscape architecture, gardening, etc
Take notes in Obsidian (read "Smart Notes", by Sönke Ahrens) to convert them to small entities.
Link as much small ideas together.
Research scientific papers concerning the content I consume (I'm up to my eyeballs in papers on soil health and the effects on a landscaping investments by clients). Forming a research question can be a huge help in narrowing down a niche topic. Using a framework like PICO, PEO, SPIDER, SPICE, ECLIPSE helps forming a qualitative question to research. Using Boolean operators in search engines using the terms you come up with while forming the question is key.
Use Research Rabbit to find similar papers/content.
Add all to Zotero Reference manager and link zotero to Obsidian
Highlight interesting points in Zotero and export to markdown in Obsidian.v Convert to solitary ideas you can connect to the rest of you data.
Rinse and repeat.

Sometimes it helps to consume content about stuff you know, stuff you don't know. More importantly are those small gems of content about stuff you don't know you don't know. Down the rabbit hole you go.

If I want to synthesise: look something up in Obsidian. You can just click and drag your smart notes in a new file, order the information so it makes sense, make the paper flow. Tadaaa. Done.

I might overthink all this, but I'm still iterating on this system. Any tips, advice, concerns are helpful.

Thanks for reading.

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