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How to take notes while reading a book
Capture key ideas without interrupting your reading flow
Taking notes should not become a tedious process, but it should be made as seamless as possible.
- If you are reading a physical book, write down main ideas or questions in the margins. Try to keep it very short. If you are reading an ebook, highlight the essential parts and write a few words to add contextual information.
- If your goal is to learn or reference your notes in the future, you may want to stop at the end of each chapter and collate the ideas separately from the text. This can be done on the inside cover of the book, or on a separate index card, where you rewrite the key ideas with the corresponding page numbers.
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Key Ideas
Note-taking: a powerful tool for learning
- Notes extend your memories: writing can be seen as an external enhancement of your brain, allowing you to think more complicated thoughts and solve harder problems.
- Not...
Figure out your purpose
Ask yourself why are you reading:
- What am I trying to remember?
- How am I going to use this information? (e.g. on a test, cited in an essay, etc.)
- What do I plan to do with the notes later? Will you be studying off of them extensively? Or maybe you’re just taking notes to stay focused, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll look through them after?
Strategies for note-taking
- Jot notes in the margin. These aren’t particularly searchable, but they allow you to reiterate the main idea.
- Keep a small notepad on the side, take breaks each section to jot down the main ideas.
- Create flashcards. In the rarer situations where memorization of details is important, then a simple strategy can be to just create flashcards while you take notes.
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Key Ideas
Meta-Learning
It's knowing how to learn. Learning itself is a skill, and knowing how to do it well is an incredibly valuable advantage.
Merely acquiring information is not learning....
Learning has 2 phases
Learning is a two-step process:
- Read/listen: feeding ourselves new information.
- Process and recall what you’ve just ‘learned’: connecting new materials to what we already knew.
Remembering the right things
You should not waste your time by committing unimportant details to memory.
Your focus should be on understanding the bigger picture, on how things relate to each other.
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Key Ideas
Taking Smart Notes
When we take notes, it should not become a stack of forgotten thoughts. Our notes should be a rich and interconnected collection of ideas we can draw on regardless of where our interests lead us.
Luhmann's slip-box
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) designed his slip-box made up of index cards. They were thematically unlimited. His simple system produced a prolific output. Over his 30-year career, Luhmann published 58 books and hundreds of articles while completing his two-volume masterwork, The Society of Society (1997). He regularly pointed to his slip-box as the source for his fantastic productivity.
How Luhmann's slip-box worked
- He wrote down any interesting or potentially useful ideas on uniformly sized index cards on one side only.
- Each new index card got a sequential number, starting at 1.
- When a new source was added to that topic or something to supplement it, he would add new index cards with letters added to the number (1a, 1b, 1c, etc.)
- These branching connections were marked in red as close as possible, where the branch began.
- Any of these branches could also have their own branches. (For example 21/3d26g53)
- As he read, he would create new cards, update or add comments to existing ones, create new branches from existing cards, or create new links between cards.