The ReadRefs Method

I don't like to write in or highlight my Bible, nor any other book. This removes my objectivity the next time I read the material. For instance, if I highlight a few passage on a page, my mind will automatically classify those highlights as higher importance than the other ideas on the page. I can easily miss out on other important elements of the page.

Not marking in books is beneficial for practicing levels of reading. For instance, I can skim a book using inspectional reading and find interesting or main elements that need further analysis. I can then go back to those areas and dig deeper using analytical reading. Furthermore, I can use the book once again in syntopical reading to compare/contrast against other books. Any markings for me would be limiting for any subsequent level of reading. (See How To Read A Book by Moritimer Adler for more on levels of reading)

I am a messy, disparate note-taker. It's all so scattered. It's bad, I promise. An index card here, a fresh notebook there, Apple Notes, Drafts App, Obsidian, email, whiteboard, printer paper, you name it. I've tried to tame the analog dragon for decades, but to no avail. So, I check out the latest digital tools and get tired of them after a while, and then go back to using real paper. I have stacks of notes that really have no context to my life of when I wrote them, or why.

This presents two problems. I want to take notes but I don't want to write in my books. I also want to take notes, but I'm a psychotic note-taker. I searched for a method that would help me solve these issues, but to no avail. Mind you, I watched dozens of hours of digital PKM and second brain videos. I installed a hundred Obsidian plugins and thought my life had finally found perfection. I also nerded out on Zettlekasten and loved its wonderful history. But, I still love paper and notebooks. I have a hundred blank, beautiful notebooks in my library waiting to be filled. I've always come back to my love for the analog paper and pen.

This year, I found the Bullet Journal Method and it's revolutionized my personal life. It's merged my love for paper and gave me a system to not be so scattered with my notes. I carry one journal with me and I'm able to rapid log my life and use simple bullets to denote tasks, events, or notes about my day without nested ontologies, meta declarations, cloud syncing, etc. It can be a mess, but it's a curated mess. The concepts of indexing, migration, and reflection are wonderful. You can read more about my journey in BuJo here.

With all of the wonderful goodness of Bullet Journaling, I found that I didn't quite have a place for my reading notes. I didn't want to just create a new collection and add notes without any trace other than the book title. With my requirement of not marking in books, I had to have a way to go back to the source and find the original material. So, I created my own notation system called ReadRefs.

ReadRefs is a system to quickly take notes and write an address where I can quickly return to the location of the reference. This spec is built on stable references that only break if you lose a book or the journal. (That's a fault with any system though.) My sons can later find my notes and trace the location fifty years later. I built it so that your book notes can be inline with your journaling, placing them in the context of your life. With bidirectional indexing, you can easily find notes from your actual book, or find book references from any notebook. It also has a cross-referencing concept as well.

I won't explain it all here, but if you're interested, visit the site and check out the notation method. If you have any questions or if you want to contribute, you can create an issue on my GitHub repo here. If Bullet Journal and Zettlekasten had a baby, it would be ReadRefs. 😄 I hope you enjoy and happy journaling.