Ask HN: How do you take notes of interesting ideas while podcasting
Does anyone frequently save information from podcasts or audiobooks?
Curious about how you capture things you want to remember or reference later. If I'm on the go on my phone and there's a cool idea in the podcast I'm listening, then I take a screenshot of my locked screen as it shows my audio player (with the button shortcuts). And then later on I go back to those screenshots and I know which podcasts and which moments had important ideas. If I'm doing active listening, i.e. listening to a podcast or watching a talk and actively taking notes, then I use https://sidenote.me For example: https://sidenote.me/note/0gcKho/nailing-your-first-launch-ad... I've actually begun using iOS voice memo app more often. I just add to a weekly recording whenever I come across something interesting. Recording can't get easier than this. Easy to passively listen and read. If i have a hard time summarizing it into a couple of lines, i know I dont know it well enough right there. I move the interesting ones into relevant google docs when I get the time and clean up the recordings. Joplin + Johnny Decimal https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/ They go under 80-89: Inspiration & Notes > 81. Other Thinkers' Ideas Mentioned in Podcasts & Articles Title: {author or (podcast name & episode)} - {1 sentence description} Content: - blog post screenshot? - bullet point summary of ideas and context building up to ideas? - url link E.g. these 2 examples https://imgur.com/a/w3De47J Worst part abt this system though is that I often listen to podcasts while doing the dishes. Inevitably I rush to write an idea down but my hands are sopping wet.. :^) I use TaskWarrior[0]. Low friction.. This stuff served as the seed of our knowledge base where I work. - [0]: https://taskwarrior.org/ Wow! That is some dedication to building a 2nd brain :) I am doing some market research on folks that go above and beyond to take notes to document their learnings while podcasting. I would love to talk to you for 20 mins and ask you a few questions. As a thank you, i'd like to buy you a coffee (via paypal / venmo). Let me know if i can reach out to you. Here are some of my replies: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100 (understanding codebases, etc.) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873103 (making the most out of meetings, leveraging your presence) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827841 (product development) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356222 (giving a damn) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008223 (If I disappear, what will happen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24972611 (about consulting and clients, but you can abstract that as "stakeholders", and understanding the problem your "client", who can be your manager, has.) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209518 (on taking notes. When you're told something, or receive a remark, make sure to make a note and learn from it whether it's a mistake, or a colleague showing you something useful, or a task you must accomplish.. don't be told things twice or worse. Be on the ball and reliable). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503365 (product, architecture, and impact on the team) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22860716 (onboarding new hires to a codebase, what if it were you, improve code) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710623 (being efficient learning from video, hacks. Subsequent reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723586) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632 (communication with the team, and subsequent reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614372) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886 (template for taking minutes of meetings to dispatch to the team. Notes are in GitHub/GitLab so the team can access them, especially if they haven't attended). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177646 (communication, alignment) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439 (useful things for the team and product that add leverage) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323660 (more meeting notes. Reply to a person who had trouble talking in corporate meetings) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715971 (management involvement as a spectrum) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922120 (researching topics) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147502 (keeping up with a firehose of information) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26123017 (fractal communication: communication that can penetrate several layers of management and be relevant to people with different profiles and skillsets) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179539 (remote work, use existing tooling and build our own. Jitsi videos, record everything, give access to everyone so they can reference them and go back to them, meetings once a week or two weeks to align) Some of them may be more relevant to you, such as the one "keeping up with a firehose of information", and the ones dealing with taking notes, alignment, communication, etc. I don't really do "podcasts", but I use these strategies when I collect papers (or watch technical talks), cherry pick the relevant ones, read them, summarize them, and then send the notes to my colleagues. If I'm on the go, I'll just take screenshots of that point in time and if I remember, I'll go back to that moment and take notes on it, google search it, or something. If I can stop what I'm doing (if I'm on a walk), I will pause and take notes. With audiobooks, I can bookmark and take notes in Audible. I do wish I could see the transcription because I always worry Audible didn't capture the right portion of the audio so that when I go back to listen later it takes me a while to try to figure out what I bookmarked/clipped. Whereas in a physical book, I know exactly what I highlighted. Does that make sense? Yeah makes a lot of sense! Thanks for describing your press. I am doing some market research on how power users solve this problem and would love to talk to for 20 mins to get your advice on a few things. Happy to buy you a coffee (via paypal / venmo) in return! If you use an iPhone, and listen to podcasts with headphones that have buttons: https://apps.apple.com/hu/app/airr-highlight-podcasts/id1355... A triple tap creates highlights at the current location. If the podcast has transcripts, even the surrounding text is saved. It integrates with readwise.io too, so you have export/reminder options there as well. Unfortunately nothing like this for audiobooks yet. I'm in the process of creating a website to host a podcast after getting in contact with the producer. I wonder you know: - are there any open source software that couples transcript with the podcast? - do transcripts get crated through NLP or some other tech automatically for English podcast? This is why I believe shownotes are so important. Include text, links, chapter marks/titles already in the podcast feed... transcripts via AWS/wit.ai or other cloud services... Show notes are vital for podcasts. Often, I will just skip over a podcast if the show notes are lacking. I just know they will say something interesting that I would never be able to get back to unless I listen through it again. A lot of podcasts these days just add transcripts and leave it at that. Transcripts are better than nothing and probably good for the podcast producers for SEO or whatever but I don't find them all that useful. IMHO the show notes must have links for every broad topic, concept, person, book, project, conference talk mentioned. The folks at Oxide Computer get this https://oxide.computer/podcast/ Hey sigjuice! I couldn't agree more about the importance of show notes for podcasts. I am actually doing some market research around power listeners that like to refer to show notes in podcasts. I would love to talk to you for 20 mins and ask you a few questions to learn from you. Happy to buy you a coffee in return (via paypal / venmo) :) Hey there’s this website I use listennotes It’s pretty good as it transcribe the audio and I usually capture interesting
links to resources shared in the podcast to my pocket app. Last but not least I have a README file on github as TIL where I put stuff I discover from podcasts or just in general Ahh.. listennotes is so great!
I use Google Keep to catalog my notes, similar to your readme workflow, but what i'm missing is being able to go back to the exact point in an episode. I am doing some market research on this problem and would love to talk to for 20 mins to get your advice on a few things. Based on your HN profile, it looks like you are a heavy podcast listener! It would be a great opportunity for me to learn from you. Yup please feel free to reach out to me I would love to help
Nowadays i barely get time to listen to podcasts. If it is really good, I will try to get the material in print if available. Otherwise, I just end up pausing and writing down key ideas.
Then I annotate the task task add +read "Book title. Mentioned in interview [link for the resource] by X with Y. Useful because [reasons].
I also add notes there. I also used markdown files and MKDocs [old link: https://jhadjar.gitlab.io/kbase/] task 180 annotate (triple quotes)(multi line thoughts)(triple quotes)(return)