Taking Notes on Books

Greetings from Lisbon!

I've been in Portugal for almost a week, and it's been a new, uncomfortable, but fun experience. Some of my favorite things so far are:

• Walking outside at night

• Pastel de nata

• Meeting other travelers

Some things I don't like:

• The hills

• No wifi in coffee shops

• Lack of basketball courts

I got a request to write about how I take notes on books. These are some of my thoughts on note-taking and the system I use for taking notes on books.

Why take notes?

I previously wrote that I don't think individual facts or ideas are the main value proposition of books. Rather, the perspectives and methods of thinking stick with us long-term. While I still believe this, books have valuable pieces of information, and it's worthwhile to at least try and remember/apply some of that information.

Information is potentially valuable if it allows us to do something we couldn't do before. This could be a specific instruction that makes a task easier, a piece of advice, or a new way to think about something. We take notes to remember, and we want to remember because we believe they will be valuable in the future.

This sounds obvious, but it's often overlooked. I say information is potentially valuable because unless it facilitates an actual change in your life, its utility isn't fully realized. Information that only lives in your memory has far less value. Even more abstract information, such as a novel perspective or mental model, is most valuable when applied to something in real life.

Thus, a note-taking system needs to fulfill two functions: to capture information from books and to generate actionable insights from that information.

My capture process

The most important thing is to have a low friction process. You can't make the act of reading more difficult. The effort required to take a note should be minimal. Otherwise, you're never going to take notes—or worse, you might just stop reading books altogether.

I read everything on a Kindle. On my phone, I have the Kindle app and it syncs with my Kindle device. To take notes, I use the highlight feature and highlight things I find interesting. Rarely, I will add a personal annotation.

This is all pretty standard stuff. The coolest part of my system is how I consolidate my notes. All my Kindle highlights sync to Readwise. Readwise is a service designed to resurface notes and content you've saved. Besides my Kindle highlights, I also put Tweets, web clippings, and notes from articles I read into Readwise. Every week, Readwise sends me an email with 5 highlights from the past.

Readwise also functions as a database for my notes. I can access all my highlights from any book, and it's much easier than using the Kindle app or web reader.

Generating actionable insights

As Ali Abdaal pointed out, most people will stop at just highlighting. Using Readwise is a small step up because you are now actively revisiting your notes. However, the best way to remember and apply information is to write about it.

I try to do this by writing book reviews or Twitter threads. I have reviews on The Courage to be Disliked, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Flow, and Excellent Sheep. I also have a thread on Anything You Want.

Writing a review for someone else to read is a super effective way to create actionable insights because it forces you to provide value. Ideally, the person reading walks away with a sense of what the book is arguing and ways to apply the concepts to their life.

Things I haven't figured out

Zettelkasten?

So far, my system stores different ideas in isolation. It would be cool if I could create a way for ideas to reference and connect to each other. I've played around with Zettelkasten note-taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, but I can't quite wrap my brain around the system. It definitely requires a shift in how you think about notes and ideas.

Even if Zettelkasten is not for me, I would still like to create a system for connecting ideas. If all your information exists in isolation, it's harder to have "original" ideas. The ideas in a single book have been read by millions of people. But the ideas that come from the intersection of two, three, or more books are rarer.

Action and iteration

This is moving outside the realm of strictly note-taking, but it would be ideal to have some sort of system to regularly review my notes and actionable insights. I'm thinking something along the lines of:

• Look over my notes and create a set of actions to implement in my life

• Review the actions I attempted to implement previously

• Take stock and iterate

After all, the point of taking notes is to cause a change in real life. It makes sense to have a feedback loop for the back half of the system. Without it, there's no way to tell if your changes are working.

This is actually really difficult. Often, I feel I don't have enough margin in life to stop and just think about how my life is going. It's kind of like meditation. Doing nothing, or in this case, reflecting, seems like a poor use of time when you're dealing with deadlines, social commitments, and side projects. The psychology behind this is something I want to write more about, but I'll save that for another time.

How to start taking notes

I'm still very much a beginner on my book-reading journey. Last year, I read 12 books. This year, I'm trying to read 151. A common piece of advice for reading more, which I think is stupidly effective, is to "read what you love until you love to read."

This means you should make the act of reading as enjoyable as possible. For me, highlighting is part of it. Highlighting interesting bits keeps me focused and makes reading non-fiction easier. If you're new to taking notes, I'd recommend starting out with this. You might find that it makes reading more fun. If not, maybe try writing summaries after you finish. If that doesn't work either, I wouldn't sweat it. Make reading fun. You can always come back to a book, but you need to read it first.