How many books did you read last year and how much information do you remember from them?
Hi, it's Mariana here and today I'm going to talk about several techniques related to
note-taking that might help you to retain a little bit more information from the books
you're reading. These techniques are used by great readers like Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday,
Tim Ferriss, or Marina Popova. This video is going to be focused solely on physical books
and taking notes with pen and paper. I'm going to make another video where I will talk about ebooks,
audiobooks, and storing your notes on the computer. So if you don't want to miss it out, please subscribe.
The methods I'm going to mention, cover different aspects of note-taking.
I'm going to start with how you can mark the books you're reading and finish with how you can store your notes.
Before you start reading your next book, ask yourself: "Why am I reading this book?
Is it just for fun and maybe I don't want to take any notes on this. Or do I expect that this book is going to change my life and I'm going to implement a lot of information from this into
my life or I'm going to use the information for my next project?" Because if so, you probably want to
take good notes on that. So you have a book and you want to take notes. Where do you start? If
the book is yours and you are fine with writing in it, you have several options. The most widely used
is to highlight the interesting parts while you're reading. If you want to take it to the next level,
you can write in the margins - you can write your own ideas, you can write some critique, you can
write questions you might have about the ideas that you're reading about, you might write down
hey, I want to check this idea in another book, or whatever you want.
This all kind of encourages active learning.
If this sounds like too big of a job for you, you might want to consider the "Morse code method". I came across this method while reading Cal Newport's blog. Cal Newport
is a great author. He wrote excellent books such as Digital Minimalism, So Good They Can't
Ignore you, or Deep Work. He's also a professor, so reading and writing is kind of part of his job.
This method is really really simple. When you're reading a book and you come across a new idea,
you write a "." next to it in the margins. If you continue reading and you see an explanation
or an example of that idea. you write a "-" next to it. Once you're finished with the chapter, you go
back and you paraphrase the ideas and examples or explanations and you write it down in your
notebook or on a notecard, whatever you prefer.
Another method I came across, is the "Index of key ideas". This was mentioned on Tim Ferriss's podcast with Maria Popova. She not only highlights
the text she's reading and writes down her own notes but she also creates an index at the end
of the book. What she does is, she writes down the recurring topics and ideas that are relevant to her life
or her work. Then next to it, she writes the pages where those ideas or topics occur. This can come
really handy if you grab this book years later and you want to - just with one glance - know,
what relevant topics are there in this book. And then if you want to grab a quote or an example,
it's very easy to see through the index where it is located in the book.
If you have a physical notebook where you write down all the notes from the books you
read but you find it difficult to locate certain information within the notebook,
then you might use the technique called the "High Five Notebook Method". How it works is,
the last page of your notebook acts like an index. Whatever under new information in your notebook
you tag it. Let's say you wrote down great advice about investments. You go to the back of your
notebook and you write "investment" under the index. Then you go to the page with that advice
and you make a mark on the left side of the right page on the same line as is the investment
in the index page. You repeat this process with any new information. Then if you would
like to locate all the information on investment within the notebook, it's very easy to do so.
Last but definitely not least: the most complex system, the holy grail of note-taking "The
Commonplace Book". I read about this method from Ryan Holiday who had it from other people and apparently,
it has been here for centuries. You can use this to store your notes from books you're reading
but also to store your own ideas that you might have, and you might feel are worth writing down,
you might use it to write quotes you read on social media, or it's completely up to you how
you use it. And it works like this: You read a book and you mark down the passages and parts
that you found interesting. If you have your own thoughts, you write it down in the margins and
then each page, it has some kind of scribbles or highlights, you fold the bottom corner
of that page. A few weeks later - and that's really really important - a few weeks later,
you go back and revisit the parts that you highlighted and the ideas that you wrote down. If you wait few weeks,
you get a new outlook on the ideas that you marked and you kind of realize that maybe some
of them are not so relevant. So it's a great way of editing and making sure that the information
you're going to write down is actually the most relevant information. You take a small note card
and you write each new idea on a separate card. Then at the top part of the card,
you write the theme or the category that the card belongs to. If a card fits multiple categories,
you duplicate the card. It is important to know why you're taking those notes and how you're going
to use them. Is it something that you're going to use in the next project at work? Is it something
that you want to implement in your own life? You might store your note cards in different boxes so,
for example, you might have one box with all the information or all the categories that
are related to your work and then another one that relates to personal life or your
self-improvement. So in such a box, you might have categories like relationships, health, finances,
productivity, and so on. It just depends on what you're interested in, what kind of books you're
reading and the what is relevant to your life.
This takes a lot of work but the rewards are really really high. Just imagine that you have one place, perfectly sorted, where you have all the
interesting ideas that you came across. How cool is that?
That's all from me today. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe, it motivates me to make new videos every week
and it helps other people to discover this channel. Thank you and I'll see you next time!