A System for Reading

Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash

Reading and retaining what I’ve read has always been a challenge for me.

“Your head is for having ideas, not holding them.”

David Allen (of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame) was correct, of course. But that’s easy to say.

A system for retaining what you read. At its most base level, this is note-taking. And, we’ve all done it at one point in our lives. Whether at school, in our younger years, but definitely during our university years, note-taking became fundamental to our education. Without it we could not study and pass exams.

At work we all take notes. In meetings, on the phone, even from emails to create a todo list. Note-taking is everywhere and critical to our ongoing function.

So why is it that when we read, we think our memory will be enough?

Many people journal. The system you choose is irrelevant - what matters is that you record important information. Journaling is note-taking for the mind. All the experiences, the thoughts, the dreams that you had today will be gone tomorrow. That is why you journal. To remember. And yet, what seems logical for our thoughts and ideas, does not immediately translate when we pick up a book to read, or navigate to an article online.

There are many ways to take notes, just as there are many ways to journal. I would argue it doesn’t matter how you do it, just that you do it. But I’d be wrong with such a simple statement.

How you take notes matters. It doesn’t matter to me, it matters to your future self when they go in search of that quote you noted when you read that fantastic article by Andrew Zav 😊

Whenever I read a physical book I take a lot of care not to bend the pages, keep them clean and not damage the book. After all, I want it to look good when I’m done with it and it sits on my shelf. But I am wrong here.

After reading many articles from people on how they take notes within the books they read, I’m convinced that this is the method for learning.

Whether you choose to underline passages, highlight the edge of the page, write in the margins, or use sticky notes to mark important passages, all these serve the same purpose - a place for you to go back to, to record the relevant sections within your reading notebook and flesh it out to better understand it.

How you take notes matters. There are countless examples of people running with a 3, 5, X notebook system that they swear by. And that’s fine for them. I’m certainly not recommending a particular magic number of notebooks to run with. What’s important is that whichever system you choose, it works for you. There’s no point having 3 different notebooks if you barely take notes.

Start with one notebook and take notes. On anything throughout your day. Todos. Ideas. Quotes. ANYTHING. The point of this exercise is to form the habit of taking notes. This is the starting point - where you end up will look much different. Trust me on this.

As you take notes in your notebook, start differentiating the different types of notes that you’re taking. Work notes, todo list for odd jobs around the house, shopping list, ideas for your next Substack posts. You can even write each in a different colour. Or use symbols. Anything that, with one quick glance, you can immediately know that it’s work related. Or personal.

This may sound simple. Silly even. But if you cannot do this simple task repeatedly, the next stage will be of no use to you.

So what is the next stage? I’m glad you asked and that you’re paying attention 😊

Obviously, the next logical step is to break out the DIFFERENT types of notes into their own notebooks.

At this point you’re thinking

“How can I think about using multiple notebooks when I can’t even consistently use one?”

Fair question. The answer is simple. Do what I’ve outlined above for a period of time, say 3 months, and you will notice that you won’t need to remember to take a note, it’ll become natural. Instinctive. That’s when you’ll know you’re ready to move on to multiple different notebooks.

Of course, how many notebooks you actually use is up to you. Like I said earlier, there is no magic number beyond what is comfortable and makes sense to you. And sticking with one for everything is totally fine. It’ll make finding specific notes challenging later, but it’s doable.

However, if you do progress to multiple notebooks for the different note-taking in your life, you also get to introduce a bit more structure to it.

For example, even with multiple notebooks for their different uses, how will you find a note that you took six months ago on a particular topic? Let me introduce you to the Index. Much like a table of contents. But rather than being at the beginning of your notebook, you reserve the last 4-5 pages at the back of the notebook. And fill it in as you go along.

You may be wondering how you’d possibly find a quote from that philosophy book you read 6 months ago, for example. Here’s the fun part - there’s also a system for indexing…if you want there to be. You can index by topic, by genre of book, by project, use can use tags when you take notes and index via tags. The options are endless and entirely down to what you’re comfortable with.

When you read, you’re looking to learn. But if you don’t take note (pun intended) of the highlights, you’ll soon lose them. And if you lose them, what does that say for the time you spent reading?

Please Note: Take the information above and do with it what you will. Nothing of what I’ve written is revolutionary or unique. It’s knowledge and experience gained over many years of reading, trying different things and failing.

Failure is the best teacher, they say. Failing to try though is negligent.

Until next time.

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