How I write a dissertation extremely fast
I just passed my comps, and I thought it would be valuable to record how I go about doing the work of research, writing, note-taking, etc.
I’m going to show you how I organized and created my chapters 1 and 2 for my dissertation in record time, without stressing nearly as much as others probably did!
When I learned how to take notes years ago, it involved going to the library and checking out books and articles and reviewing them in the library and taking notes on 3x5 cards.
Those skills are still valuable, but the process is now more advanced and aided with computer technology and AI.
This process includes three important apps: readwise, Zotero, and Obsidian.
Readwise
Readwise is an app that helps you remember what you read through spaced repetition. It has evolved over the years and added some cool features, the most amazing of which is a read-it-later service called Reader. With Reader, I save all my articles, PDFs, or web sites and then can mark them up as needed.
If I’m going to read anything, it’s got to end up in Readwise. This includes all kinds of ebooks as well, and so many other integrations! But to be honest, I just send everything to Reader. I have over 8000 documents in Reader now, and while I haven’t read all of them, most of them I’ve gotten something from. This includes saving posts on social media, especially threads on X.
When I take notes on something, I try to follow a zettlekasten approach and include my own thoughts with it with each note. That gives me something to remember why I saved it in the first place.
You can even import physical book highlights by taking pictures of the pages!
There’s one more piece here, and that is Readwise Chat, which uses natural language processing to find your highlights, which is exceptionally good. I’ll share more about this in the AI Section below.
So, all of that is awesome, but there’s more to it than just that, which involves the app Obsidian.
Obsidian
Obsidian is where I take all my notes. I started using it in March 2021, as far as I can tell, but I actually used a similar process for much longer than that.
Obsidian is based on a few important principles: file over app, private, durable, malleable. Learn more here.
I’ve been taking notes since 2009 in plain text files. I”ve used all kinds of note taking apps over the years, and Obsidian is simply the latest iteration. And, since I’ve used so many, I know how important it is to have my notes be portable, and go where I want them to go. That means that I can take them somewhere else, and because they are plain text, I can likely open them on any device!
I learned the hard way not to trust closed systems that don’t allow me to take my notes with me (Evernote, Microsoft Word, and many more).
I have a plugin in Obsidian that imports all of my notes from Readwise into Obsidian.
Since Obsidian is where I take all my notes, it is also where I want those things to live. I connect notes to other notes, and I’ve actually published all my work from my doctorate to drjethro.com, which is also pretty cool.
This means that these notes are searchable in a system I am already used to and using regularly. That’s a powerful place for them to exist. I can read something in Reader on my phone and in about 30 seconds, I can be copying that text into my writing in Obsidian.
So, all my highlights from whatever I’m reading are in Readwise, and by extension in Obsidian. It’s better to have them in Obsidian than only in Readwise for backup purposes, and to ensure that I can access them when I need them.
I recently flew and did a good amount of writing on the plane. Because Obsidian is local first, but you can sync easily, I had all the notes saved in my Obsidian “vault” on my computer, and then I was able to access anything regardless of internet connection status.
Zotero
Zotero is the tool I’m using to keep track of all my references for my doctorate.
Many people use Mendeley in my program, but I have avoided that because I don’t want to pay for it after my program is over, but I still want to access my references. So, I chose Zotero. Overall, I like it. It does a good job of getting a DOI number and pulling the file in.
So, this is my workflow, with all these pieces.
- Find a piece of research
- Import into Readwise.
- Skim it to see if it has what I’m looking for.
- If it does have something useful add it to Zotero.1
- Write based on what I’m trying to accomplish.
So, how does AI play into this?
AI
I have tried to get AI to write my literature review and it cannot.
That’s not to say that I have not used AI for much in my process. One of the best ways I have used it is by using that AI chat built into readwise. It uses my highlights as context and finds quotes that I have highlighted and shows me where I could use those quotes in my paper. It also surfaces highlights that I made years ago that are aligned with what I’m writing about.
Secondly, I used that Readwise chat to ask it what else I was missing from my highlights after I wrote the first draft of the literature review, and that was powerful. It helped me see some items that I had missed, and I knew it wasn’t hallucinating, because it linked me directly to those highlights so I could see exactly where they were.
One small problem, however, was that it directed me to the highlight in Readwise, not the highlight in Reader. Think of it like this, the highlight in Readwise is showing you which 3x5 card your note was on. The highlight in Reader shows you where it was in the article or book you read.
Putting it all together
With all these steps together, I have the information that I need right at my fingertips all the time, and in a very easy-to-reference manner. That means that I can crank out 1000+ words an hour and crank through things very quickly.
It’s still hard work, and it still takes effort, but I’ve been laying the ground work for this type of approach for years. And it’s finally paying off in a big way.
Next step is my [[ dissertation proposal ]].
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Often, I skip this step because I don’t know if it really has something useful until I add it to a paper. Then, I will add it to Zotero. ↩
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