Why I don't use web clippers

It's a philosophy of note-taking problem

There are web clippers

Obsidian Web Clipper, Readwise and any other read-it-later service that allows you to automatically import in articles to your vault are so tempting.

This, is the topic we shall be dissecting today

We want to save, because:

• We worry that what we're reading now won't be there later, we need to bookmark for this seems valuable, and we want to have read it.

• We want to read it offline, on our ereaders / the fanciness.

• We have this urge to collect and have everything in our vault.

You could also just save the article because you don't want to read it. You want to see if it's worth reading later on, when initial enthusiasm has faded, and you want it off your mind now.

They are a problem

I would argue that using a web clipper is actually detrimental.

I do like to use readwise for highlighting and active reading, but using it for saving ideas to my vault is actually a rather terrible idea.

I used to do this. I would activate the web clipper to save what I have highlighted to my vault, so I can do ‘progressive summarization’ and then… never actually did this. This was back in my Evernote Era where I collected everything that inspired me (see ‘Collector’s Fallacy’) and never really revisted it again.

We have all been there.

I'm not saying that web clippers are not useful because sometimes you need to reference information, and it is convenient to have it in a note. E.g. a recipe / child development timeline (very important for fiction writing). There is the internet archive, for articles that have gone down, and we can just collect links, but it is satisfying to have this information safely collected by you, in an easy to scan manner.

The problem is that collecting creates a false sense of having learned and it feels productive. so we feel like we have made progress, even though we haven't actually engaged with the material.

This is why:

I don’t use them for saving zettels

What I do: I manually collect information when I want to think.

This might sound really stone age. There is so much technology and I'm the weird person trying to organize my life by pen and paper instead of the internet.

My argument is that, it is actually unproductive, to our true goal of ‘understanding + thinking deeper’ because

This shortcut cuts out thinking

What is thinking?

My experience says this

Thinking is struggle. Selecting, editing and reflecting is thinking.

When you have to work out where to select, which part of the text to copy and whether or not to edit it, that is thought work. You are looking at the text and your brain is quietly developing upon the fleeting thought you had, because you are focusing on what inspired you.

So I believe that you should read with a highlighter or a pen in hand. (Regardless of whether this is good for studying according to research). It is good for keeping you focused on the material and to finish reading the article or book.

In the age of the internet, we struggle with the question of whether this article even deserves our attention.

This question, is another thing stopping you from thinking.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one - Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius

I find that I spend more time thinking about whether I should read something and leaving it in my inbox, compared to just scanning through the article and seeing if there is something of value there.

Don’t ask yourself if you should read, just skim-read and decide.

We can read for information, and we can read for inspiration, where the idea we come up with doesn't really have much to do with the original text. It just served as a prompt for you to think.

Example:

The experience of reading a physical book with good stationary by the side, is the best way to understand ‘reading for inspiration’. This is not the same as reading your textbook with the intent to learn this chapter of biology. The mindset we have when we read for pleasure is much more relaxed, and that is when all sorts of weird ideas can come to us.

My best ideas are found in the library. When I browse through books and collect up random primers about shinobi along with homesteading manuals and historias.

I wrote about my most recent library trip here, so I shall move on.

How do I think then?

Step 1: Read

I amble along reading online, as you are doing now.

I spot something interesting as I skim about, and narrow in on my prey.

the article I was hunting

I find keywords like “growth mindset” over here, along with the unexpected “no meaningful effect”, which makes me curious because everyone has been preaching about how important the growth mindset has been for the last decade.

Step 2: Manual capture

I create a new note in obsidian (if you are curious, I do automatically populate my zettel id + date). The title is just the current date and I will change it later.

New Note - The minimal metadata I have settled on

I don't actually go straight to copy and pasting the information here. I usually read a few times to make sure I have an understanding of it, and I start writing my understanding down into the note.

I am usually dictating, as I read and reflect. Dictation has become a really huge part of my workflow this year since the AI models came out to make this reasonably fast & reliable enough that I can actually use it as part of my process. Way faster than writing and lets me get out my thoughts far more smoothly.

the comments sections where my thoughts go

I have also picked up the habit of just commenting my thoughts because I do want to engage with other writers more. I find that my opinion on randomly commenting has changed a lot after becoming a writer. I appreciate every random comment I get, even if I sometimes wonder if it's written by an AI.

This is pretty good for motivating me to think through everything properly and edit it so that other people can understand my thoughts.

specific excerpt

The specific excerpt that I finally collect is the most relevant part of the section that is necessary to understand my comment. It is not really that important. This is what the web clipper would have picked up for you as what you highlighted.

Final note - isn’t this beautiful

Look at the final note. The value here is the thinking that I have done, even if I never review the note again. I have done the thinking. I have formed an opinion about how we get a growth or performance mindset.

This might not be correct. I haven't done extensive research in this area. I have only formed the starting frameworks of how to think about education, but it is better than not thinking about education. An uninformed opinion is closer to an informed opinion than having no opinion at all while waiting for other people to do their research and thinking.

It was really hard for me to form opinions on anything, right after getting out of academia, because I would go, “is this true? What are the mechanisms behind this” & “is there research done on this? if there's no research done on this, then I don't know what is true, and I don't want to think about it.”.

It was not just the influence of academia that showed me that peer-reviewed research might not necessarily be the best vetting mechanism. It is also because I am around people who tend to make up a lot of reasons in order to justify what you're doing (a very human flaw, see the studies on how people adopt the beliefs of the identities they assume).

For me, self-care is working on building up a set of beliefs that I truly agree with, instead of blindly adopting them from people around me. I need to find a way of life that works for me, as an introvert, as someone with ADHD, and burnout. I need to stop masking, because I hit a breaking point of ‘I cannot do this anymore’ and so now, it is a lot of floundering and figuring things out.