Member-only story
Note-taking workflow and backlinks
I am a hand surgeon and medical director of a medium-sized orthopedic hospital. My secret passions are data-science, digital health and machine learning. I must read a lot, to prepare my presentations in the different fields of my interests. Often it’s difficult to remember everything I have read within the different media, e.g. Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn and scientific journals.
My history of computing
I began computing and programming in the early 90s and was always looking for a perfect workflow to collect my knowledge. My first approach was a reference management program written in dBase 3 using the Clipper compiler. Over 35 years computers developed, and I used a variety of operating systems: CP/M, MS-DOS, Windows. I wrote my PhD-thesis with LaTeX under OS/2, then I used Linux for many years. For 8 years, I use Apple devices.
The red thread misses
I collect all scientific papers I read within Mendeley, which is a suitable tool for collecting papers. But it’s not sufficient to build a red thread binding the small parts of each topic together. DevonThink is nice to collect text snippets, screenshots or images. Adding tags to each note binds them together, but you cannot see the big picture and the connections between topics.
