I take copious amounts of notes and it is slowing me down.

[benny]

I need a few principles for note taking that will cut my reading time down. I spend wayyyyy too much time assessing text and trying to jot down every bit of info I think is important. I want to get through one book on Leo's book list per week. Right now it's taking me anywhere form 1-2 months per book.

 

What are the principles for quick, effective note taking?

[Preety_India]

A bit of OCD. 

Take breaks. 

Separate information time and implementation time. 

Give your brain a rest every now and then. 

Walk in nature. 

Consume limited info everyday to avoid burnout. 

Get good sleep. 

Listen to music to wire the brain back. 

 

[r0ckyreed]

Don’t rush through the magic of learning!

I would much rather you solidly implement one book on that list into your life than to read all the books on that list with no application to your life.

The key to good notes is to write down specifically how your behavior will change from reading the books. No need to write down redundant info. Just write down what you need to do differently than you are now. 

 

[Leo Gura]

Don't take notes, just underline text with a pen.

[Vision]

33 minutes ago, Fearey said:

It may be about how you structure your notes. I would recommend looking into the Zettelkasten method for efficient and structured note taking.

With this method, you basically filter notes by importance. You sort notes into 3 sections, fleeting, literature and permanent notes. The fleeting notes, you delete regularly, while the literature notes are used to build upon permanent ones.

The book How to take smart notes by Donke Ahrens goes into depth on this and efficient note taking in general. 

@Fearey Was about to mention Zettelkasten but you beat me to it 

But to add to this, @benny you can look into the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) space. LYT (Linking Your Thinking) by Nick Milo and BASB (Building a Second Brain) by Tiago Forte are great places to start off with. 

However, I would pay more attention to the former, as there are many parts of Tiago Forte's philosophy that I don't think are the best approaches — at least for now. No hate to Tiago though, he is one of the pioneers of this whole digital note-taking field. 

Also, don't take notes unless you think you've found that some excerpt from the book sparked a creative idea in you, in which case you would be making notes rather than just taking notes.

Making notes is more valuable than taking notes as you are actually using your own brain and creativity, compared to taking notes where you are just writing down another person's thought process.

But both of them are important.

You want to take notes of the key points in the material so that you can come back to them and glance at the notes you took to jog your memory.

You want to make notes so that you are actually contemplating the material for yourself and forming new creative insights, beyond just the material you are learning. 

Edited May 23, 2022 by Vision

[LSD-Rumi]

@benny Notes are good but they beat the purpose if you overdo them. I would recommend minimizing your current notes taking style by 80%. Remmber, the 80/20 rule. Only 20% of work accounts for 80% of results. 

[Matt23]

Been there.

I think "the"/a principle is = Enjoy it. If you find that you're not enjoying reading, adjust HOW you're reading. 

Perhaps from taking too many notes, or reading material you don't like, or other things.

I used to have an underlying anxiety that if I didn't study and know the book cover to cover, then that's bad and I'm wasting my time and not fully integrating the lessons.  This might be true for college or university reading, but it's just not that practical.  

Besides, even when I was taking lots of notes and really trying to study the material hardcore-style, a few years later, I can't really remember all that stuff anyways.  ==  I think it's more about the simple principles you get in book that last rather than all the intricacies.

 

Also... maybe there's an underlying belief that "These books hold the blueprints for life, and if I just memorize them all and use them, then I'll be set."  I think this is false or not the best way to be living.  Like isn't an algorithm.  Sure, I'm not saying it's not helpful.  Not at all.  I'm saying that sometimes we can get overly attached to development, "getting it right", not fucking up, trying to improve, that it ends up backfiring (like in the case of taking 1-2 months to finish a book and write a ton of notes, only to forget more than 3/4 of it a few years later AND also missing all the time life experiences we could have had in the real world).

 

Recommendation:  ====   Prioritize DOING things in the real world rather than studying.  I wish I did this a lot more when I was younger.  I can't say all the hours I spent reading and studying alone really grew me a whole lot of made me more satisfied.  It's like "ya, great, I've read some things."  But I also missed out on a lot of life experiences, joys, interactions, sex, new events, etc..  The fun stuff, the juice of life.  I still enjoy reading, but I take it a lot more lightly now.  Just underlining, and contemplating things that interest me.  Follow your curiosity without rigid rules of how you should study and read.  ==  Organic > Mechanical.     Enjoy reading something, and then just playing with the ideas in your mind; making connections to other ideas you've heard, things you observe, practicing what you read a bit, etc.. 

 

Also... Something I heard from the guys from Charisma on Command that they got from the guy who wrote the Slate-star codex psychiatrist dude (paraphrasing)

• People often cover up their ineptitudes with knowledge.  So if someone sucks at dating, they'll spend all their time studying dating, allowing them to avoid actually getting out there and doing the thing they feel shitty at: dating. 

 

[Nilsi]

I used to do that, it really is a waste of time. How often do you actually go back and read through your notes?

Try to understand what the book wants to communicate to you, contemplate, make connections in your mind. Taking notes just takes you out of the flow.

If you think you really need to remember something just underline it and after your reading time you can just take notes of what you have underlined - you will notice that most of the shit you underline is not even that important and profound outside the context of the actual text.

Go sit somewhere nice and quiet and just allow yourself to enjoy the reading.

 

I set aside 3-4h a day for reading and I can easily read through 2-3 books a week and go really fucking deep into them. So just set aside 90 minutes a day - which is the amount of time in which your brain is most receptive for learning - and you will easily be able to read through a book per week while also engaging with it deeply enough to let it transform you.

I drink a can of coffee and take MindlabPro (Qualia Mind is also supposed to be good) before reading and I can penetrate the book so much more deeply it's quite amazing - of course don't get addicted and make sure you cycle all performance enhancing substances - i just wanted to mention it because it really makes a big difference, for me at least.

Edited May 23, 2022 by Nilsi

[Einsteinonacid]

9 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I used to do that, it really is a waste of time. How often do you actually go back and read through your notes?

Its not a waste of time if you use the spaced repetition and active recall learning techniques.

[Nilsi]

7 minutes ago, Einsteinonacid said:

Its not a waste of time if you use the spaced repetition and active recall learning techniques.

You don't understand something by repeating it, you understand it by penetrating it so to speak and for that your mind needs to be razor sharp. 

All this repetition and recalling will just muddy the actual insight that's available.

[Superfluo]

@benny Underline the side of the text. For example, you find a sentence you want to underline. But you fear you might do a bad job underlining the text, or you don't want to make the text more difficult to read, or you simply want to have things neat. Well, just underline the side of the paragraph at the height of the sentence. For very important concepts you might underline two times, or underline one time adding a dot.

[Yog]

18 hours ago, benny said:

I need a few principles for note taking that will cut my reading time down. I spend wayyyyy too much time assessing text and trying to jot down every bit of info I think is important. I want to get through one book on Leo's book list per week. Right now it's taking me anywhere form 1-2 months per book.

 

What are the principles for quick, effective note taking?

Use kindle. when you mark text you have the option to either highlight it it or create a note embedded in the marked text.

My notes are couple of words long and on kindle they are quite easy to revisit and see in which context they were taken.

After I finish a book, I tend to extract them and turn them into bullet points for easy revisiting.

[yetineti]

So I know I need to take notes, I get it- I have a few but not much really.

The bright side of not taking notes is everything I know I know I know.

So from avid not noter, maybe try to focus on raw understanding and allow your notes to loosely refresh you while retaining key data/points.

[kag101]

be more selective of what you make notes

"is this super meaningful to me?" > if not, then let it go