Logseq is a free and privacy-focused note-taking app that I use to capture and organize information from multiple sources, including articles, books, and PDFs. Here are some of the features that make it excellent for building my personal knowledge base.
Logseq’s Timeline Note-Taking Approach
Logseq is a network outliner that offers a unique timeline-based approach to note-taking, allowing you to easily organize your thoughts chronologically. Each day, Logseq creates a new journal entry, where I capture highlights, insights, and reflections from my reading as well as manage tasks, making it perfect for interstitial journaling.
What makes this approach effective is that each entry becomes a chronological part of a larger narrative, allowing me to easily capture and add different highlights or thoughts from different sources and dates. Since each journal entry is part of an interconnected graph, I can revisit ideas and discover connections I may have overlooked.
Upload PDFs to Logseq
As a knowledge worker or student, you may need an effective strategy for accessing information from external sources, including research papers, books, and PDFs. I use Logseq to organize my thoughts and store all my notes in one place, making them easily accessible and searchable.
This will create a link to the PDF in double brackets. You can click the link to open the PDF on the left side of the Logseq window and highlight it while taking notes on the right.
If you don’t want to keep your book or PDF notes on Logseq’s daily journal page because you don’t want them mixed up with other notes or tasks from that specific day, consider creating a page for each book or PDF.
This way, you can keep all the notes from a specific book on its page. Click the + Create button in the bottom left corner to create a new page. Type the name of the book or PDF and press Enter.
Find PDFs or Books in Logseq
I’ve built my second brain in Logseq, which means I use it for everything, including taking meeting notes, journaling, and storing resources. As my knowledge base grows, finding specific notes or resources becomes challenging. Fortunately, Logseq has many built-in features that make it easy to find information quickly.
The best way to make it easier to find a growing library of resources in Logseq is to add metadata, including the book title, article link, document type, and tags. This way, I can quickly find a specific resource by searching for the title or using tags.
After you set up a metadata template this way, you won’t have to remember where you stored your asset or its title. You can quickly access any information you enter in the template by searching it.
Text Highlights in Logseq
Logseq is one of the best tools for annotating and highlighting text. You can highlight specific sections and add brief notes while reading a book or article in Logseq. Each text highlight in Logseq becomes part of your graph, making it highly searchable and easily accessible via backlinks.
This is a handy feature for quickly revisiting important points in a book or article without having to search manually. So, you don’t need to highlight an entire paragraph or page, as you can simply link to a specific keyword or title you want to refer back to. Finally, you can quickly access all your highlights by clicking the bullet icon in the top left corner and selecting Highlights.
Import Highlights Using Logseq’s Readwise Plugin
So, how can you organize all your text highlights from other sources into Logseq? You can use Logseq’s Readwise plugin to import all your highlights from Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Pocket, or any other supported app. Readwise is one of the best RSS reader and read-it-later apps that you can use to save and revisit text highlights from multiple sources. It’s a great way to save all your important notes and ideas from various sources in your personal knowledge base.