How to Choose Excerpts for a Book Reading
Accept you ever read a book passage that you're sure could ane 24-hour interval be applicable to your life? But, between your shopping listing, work to-dos, and your aunt'southward upcoming altogether, the passage rapidly fades from your memory causing you to draw a blank when yous really demand to reference it.
When I began reading seriously for personal growth at the terminate of terminal year, I experienced this problem constantly. I was flying through books, simply I was unable to recollect or use any of the information.
Over the by year, I've been exploring and testing new methods for organizing what I'm reading for easy retrieval in the futurity. I've been looking for a system that meets 3 conditions:
ane. Easy to reference and contain all the necessary attribution information.
When I'thou writing, I often mention quotes and passages I've picked out from recent books. Past having all of the citations fix in my notes, I can reference a book without resorting back to the full text.
2. Offers multiple views when searching for information.
Normally, when I'm looking for a particular quote, I'yard more than interested in finding like quotes on that topic than I am virtually reading other quotes from that particular article or book. For that reason, reading notes should be organized by topic as well as source.
3. Helps me to summarize and revisit the main points of a volume.
Inquiry shows that summarizing the highlights of a book can help to elevate agreement. Through recording my reading notes, I hope to farther increase my understanding of the text.
With those goals in mind, I discovered 7 resources to help me organize notes from the books—both concrete and digital—I read for easy reference afterward on.
Capturing Notes
Creating an Index
Maria Popova, an gorging reader, pours through countless texts while compiling content for her site Brain Pickings. Each postal service she writes (she publishes three a day) references at least a scattering of thought-provoking passages from writers including Henry David Thoreau and Kurt Cobain.
To reference excerpts from the concrete texts she reads, she creates a carve up index in the back of the book. The alphabetize uses page numbers to marker location and abbreviations to denote the type of passage (quote, thought, etc).
During a contempo read of "The Smartest Kids in the Earth and How They Got That Way", I used the index technique to marker passages (pictured in a higher place). Hither'due south my abbreviation key:
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Q - Quote
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I - Idea (topics I desire to read more on)
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P - Main Point
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R - Enquiry (studies I found particularly interesting)
I noticed two main benefits to using this system. Beginning, annotating the text is incredibly quick. Jotting down a folio number and alphabetic character takes only a few seconds, meaning I'chiliad dorsum to reading in no time. Second, when I go back to revisit the passages I've marked, I can read them in the context of the page. With other note-taking systems that pull passages out of text into a separate document, I occasionally find myself reading a quote and thinking, "What was that in reference to again?" When I'm reading the quote within the actual page, I can read the paragraph before and after to get a more complete pic.
Using Notecards
Author and media strategist Ryan Holiday has used books equally a primary learning mechanism since dropping out of higher at 20 years old. The experience and insight he has gained through pouring over text helped him to write 3 bestselling books including "The Obstacle is the Manner".
I've always been impressed with how Ryan incorporates quotes and stories into his writing. In "The Obstruction is the Way", each chapter or main signal is reinforced with at least one to two examples from history. To help him recollect and recall the vast amount of textile he reads, Ryan keeps a commonplace volume, a drove of notecards each featuring a particular quote or passage. A similar system is also used by swell minds like writer Robert Greene.
While Ryan is reading, he diligently takes notes directly in the margins of the physical text and highlights quotes or passages that he wants to capture subsequently. On these particular pages, he folds up the lesser corner. A few weeks later he finishes the book, he revisits the pages and transfers the notes onto index cards. Each notecard contains a unmarried quote or thought. The ideas are then organized by category, non by book. This way, when he'southward writing, he can pull upwardly all of the information on a certain category to reference within an commodity or volume chapter.
I haven't followed Holiday'due south method precisely by creating my own commonplace book. However, I accept done something similar in the by. While reading, I'll still fold over a corner to identify a page for later while marker up the bodily text. And so, a week after I'k finished reading, I'll type the notes into Evernote (more on that later) and tag each note for piece of cake reference in the future.
Regardless of whether you lot want to copy the notes onto index cards or type them upwardly, this method has two main benefits. First, waiting a week or more than after finishing a text to revisit your notes allows the book ideas to ruminate in your mind. I find that the material sinks in more than than if I copied the notes right after finishing and placed the book back on my shelf for adept. 2d, I've constitute that copying the notes either by hand or by typing helps to increment retentiveness versus copying and pasting from Kindle highlights (an alternative method I'll cover in this mail).
Drawing Visual Notes
For those that are drawing-inclined, author Austin Kleon, who describes himself as a "writer that draws", demonstrates how you can use a tactic called visual note-taking to capture book ideas. Kleon, is a huge abet for pairing pictures with words, a trend we savor as children in comics but largely forget later. He also happens to be quite a fantastic artist.
Visual notation-taking can be a huge catalyst for creativity. Equally Kleon explains, information technology turns a largely linear activity (note-taking) into a non-linear art. Instead of list ideas in the order they are presented in the text, visual note-takers tin place similar ideas side by side to one another regardless of how they are presented. This tin enhance creativity and help readers identify connections between seemingly unrelated topics.
For those that might not have aced fine art class or are exist timid to give visual note-taking a endeavour (like me), Kleon emphasizes the central is just to get over the hump of the blank page. Begin in the heart of the page with the main subject. And so, branch out adding sub-topics around the center. Use colors to organize ideas. Cut out pictures from magazines if you don't want to draw. The chief point is to break out of the traditional notation-taking mold and try something new.
I recently gave this a endeavour mapping out the ten characteristics of flow mentioned in Steven Kotler'south "Ascent of Superman". At the risk of complete embarrassment, here's my sketch:
I found visual note-taking to be difficult since I immediately wanted to use words instead of pictures to translate the ideas. But, with a fleck of attempt, I was able to slice some images together. I still presented the ideas in the gild described in the book (moving clockwise), simply with some do, I feel like I would become better at deviating from the standard gild.
Exporting From Eastward-readers
By introducing the Kindle Eastward-reader, Amazon turned reading from a traditionally physical feel (curled up with a thick novel into a digital one). Whereas readers could previously marker up the marginalia (the term for notes in the margins), at present, they were forced to interact with screens. Fortunately, Amazon has fabricated it incredibly piece of cake to highlight and add together notes while reading.
While I'thou reading on my Kindle, I use the highlight office to markup the text. I rely on 3 different colors to assist separate out the types of highlights (similar to the abbreviations in the index method above).
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Pinkish - Ideas and words I want to explore further
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Yellow - Memorable passages I desire to remember for afterwards
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Orange - Books I desire to add together to my reading listing
Kindle users tin can find all of their book highlights and notes using kindle.amazon.com. This is corking if you only desire to see what passages you highlighted. However, if you're trying to compile all of your notes in one place that'south easily searchable, you're going to desire to move them elsewhere.
Copying and pasting directly from kindle.amazon.com can work, but you lot'll be spending quite a bit of time editing and reformatting the quotations. Thankfully, there's a handy little browser bookmarklet called Bookcision that tin can assist. Bookcision works past grabbing the notes and highlights from a specific book and and so translating them to plain text. From at that place, yous re-create and paste the highlights into Evernote.
Readers that purchase and eat books using Apple's iBooks app tin can highlight and annotate similar to Kindle users. After reading, there are two main means of capturing highlights for storage. One way is to utilize the Mac app Digested. When yous're washed reading, plug your device into your computer and run the Digested app. This gives you the pick to salvage your notes as a PDF (which can be copied and pasted elsewhere) or export your notes directly to Evernote.
If y'all're non on a Mac or don't desire to use Digested, you can send notes directly to Evernote by using the email sharing choice and your specific Evernote e-mail address.
Storing Your Notes
There are a plethora of options for storing your textile once y'all pull it out of your volume. Some options are very simple, while others have more features than you could ever imagine. Hither are a handful of the top apps I've come across.
Evernote
Peradventure the nigh widely used and recognized service, Evernote arguably offers the near functionality of any note-taking service out at that place. Notes can be organized and tagged for easy retrieval afterwards on. Additionally, Evernote boasts handwriting recognition, meaning you lot tin can take a picture of handwritten text you've written in the margin of a volume and have it automatically converted into a new note.
I've constitute two main benefits to using Evernote. Starting time, many services (like iBooks mentioned in a higher place) have straight integrations with Evernote to post new information as notes automatically. Second, the search function on the Evernote platform searches note titles, tags, and content pregnant you tin pull up related volume notes within seconds.
Normally, my process goes like this:
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Highlight in Kindle app
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Use Bookcision to pull highlights from kindle.amazon.com
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Tease out the book notes from ideas needing further research and reading recommendations (stored elsewhere)
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Paste volume notes into Evernote and tag accordingly
Regarding the utilise of tags, I don't use a particular hierarchy just yet. Even so, avid readers that take dozens of tags all clustered effectually a detail theme or topic might notice it helpful to create child tags. Child tags are essentially sub-topics of their parent tag. For example, "Decision Making" and "Mental Biases" are both sub-tags of "Psychology" in this example.
Writer and business concern leader Michael Hyatt uses a like system to organize his Evernote collection.
Those looking for like functionalities outside of Evernote may want to consider either Notebooks App or Microsoft's OneNote. Both offering comparable features for organization and note-taking.
Tip: Users of Evernote will find integrating it with Zapier an attractive characteristic, besides. Past doing so, you can begin to automatically back up notes in Dropbox, create Trello cards from notes or publish a note directly to your WordPress blog.
Personal Website
The major do good to sharing your book notes and highlights on a website is that you can hands share them with others forth with your private opinions. Investor and avid reader Brad Feld, for example, often makes note of the books he reads on his personal site along with some commentary. Similarly, Shane Parrish, the man backside the web log Farnam Street, keeps a list of his reading cloth on his site.
In addition to adding volume notes to Evernote, I've been posting them to my personal site alongside a short summary. I utilise a plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites called Reading List that creates a new post type chosen "Books". The principal benefit of using the plugin is that your reading list is then kept split up from other web log posts on your site. Otlet's Shelf provides a similar functionality in a theme for Tumblr sites.
DayOne
Traditionally viewed as a journaling app, DayOne (available for Mac and iOS) too works extremely well as a method for saving notes and memorable quotes yous run across while reading or perusing the net. I use the Quick Entry Card Bar icon to drib in items that I might want to reference later. And then, I use hashtags to categorize the entry for piece of cake retrieval.
The main benefit to using DayOne for saving ideas is the quick entry. Under the Preferences pane on the Mac app, you can setup a keyboard shortcut that makes creating new entries effortless. On the iPhone or iPad app, you can ready the app to open directly to the "New Entry" screen nether Settings -> Avant-garde -> On Startup. Both of these settings assistance you lot to take notes with picayune disruption.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffet famously said that he spends upwards to 80% of his day reading and thinking. Reading books is one of the all-time ways to acquire. But, quickly skimming through a text isn't enough. To truly benefit from the books we read, we accept to read carefully, take notes, and try to apply what we're reading to other areas of our life. Setting up a system for organizing and cataloguing what you read allows you to reflect back on the information later and get the most out of your library.
Credits: Books photo courtesy az via Flickr .
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Source: https://zapier.com/blog/best-book-note-taking-system/
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