How to take notes or a summary of a book?

Thoughts:

It is easy to create digital data.

• Click and picture are stored in the gallery.
• Some activity and is recorded.
• Or maybe some notes added to it.
• Moving data from one place to another. Simple cut, copy, paste, or one app to another through cloud backups.

However, it is difficult to transfer content through time.

• Read a book, new ideas are vivid in mind. A great feeling of learning new notions. Valuable knowledge is gained. Nevertheless, pretty soon the intended change fades away over time the everyday life demands come rushing. Subsequently, the motivation for change is lost.
• People try memorizing learning or blame the “self-help” book as not helpful enough. Moreover, there is the force-feeding and endless pursuit of reading in search of motivation and vigor, in the hope that something will stick.
• It is all about learning the right thing but at the wrong time. You’re reading a book on Marketing learning the tactics you will need after 8 months. You’re watching a Youtube video learning skills that you will need someday.

The challenge is knowing what knowledge is worth learning at what time. In the world of information overflow, almost any knowledge could be acquired at any time.

The struggle is to build a system to move forward along with time learning what is required. Learning what to learn through/overtime is crucial. Time is important as if you learn when it is needed then you refrain from memorizing it, or worrying if you will remember when you will need it. At the right time, you have the right motivation and the only thing to be done is the application of newly acquired knowledge. With motivation and knowledge acquired at right time, the application transcends it to the experience. Now, this knowledge is an experience. An experience is something you carry forever. It is something that can never fade away.

This is exactly what is referred to as the “Second brain” or “Conscious brain” — an integrated repository for all things one learns or knowledge one acquires. This knowledge can later be leveraged at different walks of life.

Therefore, identifying what to learn at what time makes all the difference in the acquisition of knowledge. If actionability is added to this knowledge, then the experience of actions never fades over time.

There are different notes taking strategies. The knowledge of the intent behind notes taking helps identifying the strategy that works for you.

I highly recommend the “Note-first” strategy mentioned by Tiago Forte in his article related to Progressive Summarization. This strategy has worked well for me. Authors like Ryan Holiday uses similar note taking strategies.

Tagging your single-page note is the best to archive this information. Additionally, tagging gives great advantages when it comes to the aggregation of information from different books or articles. Hence, this strategy is inherently valuable and highly transferrable to other activities like visual thinking or finding the core theme.

The “Note-first” approach emphasizes discoverability and understanding.

A note easy to digest is discoverable. Avoid fluff by using succinct summaries.

An understandable note is the one that involves the context with examples if any. Remember not to miss the citations.

To paraphrase it, you compress the information preserving some context. In this process, what information to be discarded is equally important to what information is kept. This will give an advantage over time when you will need context to understand the note. The note should not be too compressed. But if there are too many details on the note, then we lose discoverability. To keep a note discoverable, it still has to be succinct and precise. Therefore, this balance between context and compression is a difficult decision to make.

The process of this decision-making works in layers and there is a compound effect it. Everything starts with layer 1 where you copy the notes as it is from a book or article. On this layer, mark the bold with bold. This gives you layer 2 with bold passages. Layer 3 works on top of layer 2. Highlight the core idea or theme out of the bold passages. This gives you the best of the best. Layer 4 is to write a min-summary on the highlighted passages from layer 3. The final layer is the medley of all the min-summaries created in layer 4.

This concludes the progressive summarization — a strategy on taking notes that lives through time.

Originally published at https://raghavnyati.ghost.io on January 11, 2021.