Reading books and writing notes on them. My process
As I shared this through my X Profile I thought this might be interesting to others as I've struggled a lot with this process on how to create a simple, clean, and low-friction process for reading books.
Reading books was never really a joy to me, Having ADHD, a lot of interest, and always a way to busy schedule this was low on my list. But since I've had this practice I read more books this past year than I've done all my life combined. I re-read a lot of my work and sparked new ideas because of it.
Hope this helps somebody out.
During my reading, I collect notes. Either through highlighting on my Kindle (Readwise) or underlining my physical books and transferring them periodically.
My notes are clean and simple, purely from a style perspective I like to keep my attributes in a written form instead of properties. and generally only use links as my main metadata instead of tags.
1. Gist of the book
I think it's important to capture the gist of the book. A lot of non-fiction books tend to have basic concepts explained very well but often repeat a lot. Drilling it down to just a few sentences is a test to know if I really understood the book.
2. Key concepts
The book often has some more concepts I like to write down. Those could be individual notes but this is more in a summary style.
3. Top quotes (if any)
These are separate links to quote notes of quotes I want to keep with their reference.
4. Main ideas (other notes distilled from the book)
The atomic notes I distilled from the book will be here. Often I create notes without really writing them out during reading. but Interesting questions, concepts or interesting thoughts will be written down here and later refined.
5. Raw notes/passages either transferred or from readwise.
Of course I keep reference of all the highlights I made on my kindle or underlined in my books.
The process is really one of iteration. Before I tried doing these kinds of things perfect. but now I do what I can when I can and want. The more interesting the book the more detailed the note gets.
