Taking notes while reading

[Simon Håkansson]

I´m not sure if this thread belongs to this forum at all, since no category really seemed to fit, but I write it anyways.

I find it very difficult to take notes while reading self-help books, I have tried both using blocks and taking notes on the computer through onenote. Most of the time I prefer reading on the bed, but it feels very clumsy to have both a book in my hand and an open computer at the same time, every time I want to write something down, I have to close down the book, write some notations and continue reading, which leads me to spending more time taking notes than actually reading and thinking about what I´m reading. This has led me to not taking notes at all for the latest books that I have read, but I have also discovered that I forget alot of the things that books talked about. How do I make note-taking more comfortable?

I´m also quite confused about what I should take notes on, how do you develop a sense of what is relevant or not? Another question regards notes I have taken, which I often forget about. How often should you read through your notes and how do you remind yourself to do it?

[Leo Gura]

Yes, proper note-taking takes more time than reading the book itself, which is why most people never do it.

But it can also get several times more value from the book, and you can return to those notes years later without having to re-read the book.

Usually I just underline passages in the book. This is very fast compared to true note-taking, and it allows me to re-read a book very quickly, within 15-30 minutes by just reading the underlined sections. I never read a book without underlining it. Via underlining I basically condense a book down to the top 5% of its insights. Since most of the books words are just filler. You want to extract that 5% which is gold.

Once a book as been properly underlined it becomes 10x more valuable. To the point where I've even thought about how I could sell my underlinings to you guys. But it's not practical.

If I had an ashram, I would have a library of my underlined books which you guys could browse.

[Rinne]

17 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

If I had an ashram, I would have a library of my underlined books which you guys could browse.

Do you one day plan on creating a ashram?

[LordFall]

On 2/11/2019 at 6:34 PM, Leo Gura said:

If I had an ashram, I would have a library of my underlined books which you guys could browse.

 

You should properly consider that. 

[Mezanti]

@Leo Gura have you considered adding those underlinings to the book list? 

I have bought the booklist and would benefit from that tremendously, and so will the thousands who've bought it as well.

[Leo Gura]

@Mezanti It's too much work to extract all that. And it would be out of context.

[Michael569]

buy a bunch of sticky notes with 5 different colours. Assign a category to each colour notes For example. 

Green: Briliant insight - Top Priority
Yellow: Moderate insight - quite useful
Red: low importance insight but may come handy one day. 

And just every time you find something noteworthy, underline it with highlighter and stick a colour note accordingly. Granted, it does make the book look like 12 year old girl's diary but it does work.