I just finished reading a book and took lots of notes. Now what?
writing.bobdoto.computer
writing.bobdoto.computer
This is a very important sentence. Modern day knowledge workers are under constant cultural pressure that tells them everything they do is better if they shove it up its own ass. You don't have to create a document for every book you read, a record of every action you take. Without specific goals in mind obsessive self-documentation is just a massive level of busy-work that doesn't actually contribute to your skills or happiness.
Really brilliant people, the kind of people that can take different ideas from different sources and synthesize them into new things, they don’t read books in this way. They just read them. If they do take notes, it’s to check something with some other source or if it’s something they want to remember. They don’t make “120 notes about the most interesting ideas” or whatever. That just sounds like some kind of obsessive dedication to a note-taking system, not a way to actually learn anything, let alone as a good way to experience culture.
Ah yes, let me take a note of that and remember to mimic these "really brilliant people" who all operate in one way.
I think my own view is not too far off yours, oops, but the way you wrote it as a statement of fact (which is really like 4 propositions in one) made me chuckle.
He wrote a book about it—"How to Read a Book," published in 1940—which was summarized by the Farnam Street blog: https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/
These people make connections in their heads while reading. They don’t just read but gaze away sometimes and play games in their heads about these ideas. They vet it. Thinking about them in connection with other stuff just come up in their minds.
Notes are to not to forget to follow up something for them mostly.
Taking lots of notes are inefficient and diverts you from doing the stuff above.
I think.
(I read almost exclusively programming/product/art related non-fiction).
I am someone who “thinks while writing”. Taking notes while reading a book (I usually write into the book margins) allows me to clarify what I think the author is saying, start bringing in some of my ideas and juxtapose them, reformulate some important points. It is the opposite of taking away from the book reading experience: it makes it oh so more vivid. This also applies to articles on the web and my twitter stream.
Seeing how fallible my memory is, I envy people who can recall what they were thinking even just yesterday when reading a complex piece of literature, let alone retrace the complex arguments I make to myself (and the reified author) when reading.
Exactly. Taking notes is great if you have a goal in mind, like incorporating ideas into your own writing or quickly grasping a complex system you're learning about. It doesn't make sense to apply to everything you read unless you don't read for pleasure at all.
From what I had found when reading about hand- vs keyboard-written notes on Scholar, it didn't seem to make a difference what method you used w.r.t. studies in the contexts of students and grades or memory (citations needed).
If the point is recall, which for me is the main reason I want to take note from reads, intuitively I don't see why the method of writing would make a difference on my recalling process which happens in my head. Keyboard has the advantage that it's easier to organize and keep around, so you have the option to reread your summaries more available.
We're shaped by unconscious gestalt understandings, not by small details.
I've even had experiences where I was profoundly affected by some interesting material, only to later realize that I had encountered that material (in a different book) less than a year prior. I hadn't ignored the material the first time, and had been affected by it then as well. I'm pretty sure it didn't shape me at all.
Whether to take notes or not depends on the purpose of reading nonfiction. When I read biographies, I'd like to get the bigger picture rather than the details - so if I do take notes, they are very sparse (e.g. summarizing the major points - perhaps 1-3 pages worth). With some other books I copy quotes of insightful points (e.g. reading The Demon Haunted World, I was struck by how critical he is of the behavior of many skeptics, and noted the irony that many skeptics had recommended the book).
But when it comes to potentially useful self help books: There's really no point in reading them if you don't take serious notes. They don't make for great reading, and may actually have useful material for you for life.
Books like Gladwell's: They're mostly for entertainment. It's fine not to take notes, although it's probably better to read fiction itself.
His response (immediately before much of your quote) was: "They spend all this time highlighting and analyzing. I read for interest, right? What I really remember is that people have to write 250-page books, because that's like a publisher rule. It doesn't matter if you have 50 pages of ideas, or 500, but you can tell pretty fast. I've read some really good books that are only 50 pages, because that's all they had. You can also read 50 pages, and you think, ‘wow, it's really great!’, but then the next 50 pages is the same shit. Then you realize it’s just been fleshed out – at that point I wish they just published a shorter book."
That doesn't sound like books that take more effort to really understand (e.g. Plato's works). In more technical subjects, such as mathematics textbooks, would it really be possible for most students to thoroughly understand the subject by just reading, without note-taking or at the very least, trying the practice problems? There is certainly value in note-taking for subjects and books worth thoroughly understanding, even accounting for edge cases where students can learn complex subjects just by reading, without writing.
I rarely read without a pencil these days. It is low effort and helps me find interesting bits later and engage with the book.
I am probably not really brilliant, so YMMV :)
When I have a thought or an idea, I can then refer to the book I read years ago with my relevant notes, else it's just in one ear and out the other.
"The simple heuristic is 'relax'." In other words: sleep on it?
Might be due to my soon 40yo brain, but I've come to more and more value forgetting things -- hoping that the really relevant to me bits of any information will "float to the surface" of my brain by themselves, over some time.
I don't know what it is, but I feel like I could read prof Kay's musings over and over again. There's always an almost magical clarity in the way he explains things, and a lot of empathy and respect towards the listener. What a great mind.
Some books are denser than others. Sometimes you can stumble into information very dear to your own interests, and the best way to keep preserve that memory is probably taking a note. This might be solely for personal education and fulfillment, by the way.
While reading 500 pages of fiction or non-fiction, we're introduced to dozens of people, places, events and ideas that we'd like to know more about, but don't want to interrupt the flow of the book to pursue at that moment.
Some of these people, places, events and ideas are new to us. Some are familiar but from a different perspective. Sometimes there's a different context or frame that provides new insights into what we thought we already understood.
Those of us with average intelligence sometimes find it difficult to remember what we thought was important when we were on page 206 of 500.
Even though we're not extraordinarily brilliant, we also want to synthesize different ideas and make connections among various sources for better understanding, and for inspiration into what to read and research next.
I don't think this is true. Taking notes like this is shown to help with the ideas and knowledge you retain after having read the book (surprisingly: if you take the notes by hand it is better than if you type them somewhere).
I often take notes while I read books or attend meetings without ever having the intention of using them for anything. It helps me memorize the important bits of the thing I spent some time of my life on. And then it can simmer within me, mix with some other books, movies, music, experiences and come out as an really new idea. And then potentially I could go back to the notes (I rarely do) if there is something I was not sure about.
Human memory is like dynamic RAM: you have to keep refreshing it.
AFAIK our brains are not saturated SD cards, learning something doesn't remove an older file.
I wonder what this sentence means.
"Your vacation is going to be way better if you shove it up its own ass."
???
You’d do that to a vacation by having a series of emotional goals for the journey, with a plan for daily photo session highlights for your social media audience, and five-point-plans for each waking hour with target goals, contingencies, and meta-analysis of how it all fits into your optimal vacation experience. You’d be taking notes throughout for your pre-planned four post blog series on how to optimise vacations at the end. Presumably all of this would be tied up into some deeply researched simple trick to get the best out of life, the universe, and everything, or get rich quick, or live forever. Something like that.
Instead of going somewhere, having a bit of an agenda, and trying to go with the flow and see what happens/enjoy it.
So I use a mechanical pencil to write small notes in the margins of books/essays. Then I write them up in a google doc (or if it's a coding book, on GitHub, usually in a public repo). My notes are always available and ~20-50x faster than if I were to re-read the book (and probably yield 90% of the value).
An unexpected bonus is the perspective gained from scanning notes I took years ago. It teaches me a lot about the person I was at that point in time, and my ideas then usually differ from how I think about things now. Very valuable for introspection and perspective!
Like you, I enjoy seeing what lens I was (over)using at that time, and what I thought of the various points made by the author.
Also concur about the ~20-50x speedup, especially useful to quickly recap what I found salient in the book.
> Your zettelkasten should be made up of your ideas about the authors ideas. Linking these notes is what's meant to happen.
If the subject is new to me, I will have few or no valid ideas yet. It'll take several readings to start having some.
In order to start having valuable ideas, I need to keep relevant third-party ideas in my working memory. That's where taking notes and, especially, reviewing them frequently is important.
But it all depends on the purpose. If I don't mean to improve my mastery of a subject in the short term, I can just enjoy and let the experience of reading surprise myself.
It makes total sense however that taking notes without synthesis is somewhat pointless. These are things you probably won't read again. The catch is I think many do both without really thinking about it in the form of commentary in notes.
It took me a couple of years of "doing it wrong", researching some more, and practicing the act of notetaking to understand why some people are such strong advocates of zettelkasten. Thinking and writing down one's own thoughts to reflect on later is far more useful than recording the thoughts of others.
Does this mean that if you don't know what you want to do that the zettelkasten is not the right method? In other words, zettelkasten is more a search than a find tool. Has somebody developed a method that's more appropriate for discovering and linking new ideas for new projects?
Yes. Luhmann called it a partner he could converse with.
But note that he didn't store cards about thermodynamics, cloud formation or garden plants in it.
He stored cards pertaining to his research interests.
It allows me to reframe my existing problems using what might be a completely unorthodox perspective and may even be at least on the surface totally unrelated.
But ultimately what you do with the notes is highly dependent on what your goals are. If your intent is just to be able to increase your existing body of knowledge then it may be worth looking into some kind of SRS flashcards system for the most salient points.
For somebody with a greater desire for application purposes then they might apply the strategy that I mentioned earlier.
Sometime in the 60s or 70s Krishnamurti came to the US and gave some lectures. Cage was at one of these. Krishnamurti started the lecture saying something along the lines of “Please don’t take notes. Just listen, and take away whatever you take away. Anything you forget didn’t matter to you anyway.”.
The woman next to John Cage was writing notes and the person on the other side of her turned to her and said “What did he just say? I couldn’t hear.”
To which the woman replied “He said not to take notes. See? I have it written here in my notes.”
[1] Which is a really cool book btw.
Then I move those files to my second brain and then I create flashcards from some of these books notes. I feel like the Kindle notes become more useful this way, before those notes were just forgotten in a txt inside the Kindle haha
I don't know anything about you.
I don't know anything about the book you are reading.
I don't know anything about the way you are taking notes.
I don't know what do you want.
So nobody can give you good advice. If you give the above information to strangers on the internet some people will be able to help you.
I don't always have time for that, so I keep a markdown notepad with bullet points on books.
Read another book ;)
Something the vast majority of you all missed in such a spectacular and majestic fashion, is that the post was responding to someone specifically asking about what to do after reading a book as part of the zettelkasten method (see the bottom of the post for a link to the original source and comment thread). When working ZK, one of the fundamental steps is to interpret things you find interesting in light of what you're working on, and import those ideas into your zettelkasten. The OP was simply capturing the ideas of the author, and when having trouble linking them to one another, wondered why. To which I stated that that was because the author had already done so for the OP (in the book they read). The OP's job now was to explore how the ideas of the author informed their own work. This is standard zettelkasten stuff.
Now, as per the comments on "why can't you just read without taking notes" and "this is productivity bs" and "this post is why Putin invaded Ukrain" etc etc.... Lets be clear.
1. When I'm not reading for the purpose of mining the material for insight into what I'm working on also "just read for the pleasure." But, I also read a lot with a pen in hand, which, I should say, is pleasurable to me.
2. 99.9999% of PKM at the entry level (and a few levels below it) is absolute productivity bs. The pkm scene has been thoroughly infiltrated by the productivity scene and it is a true summer bummer. Nevertheless, like anything worth your time, the goods are far beneath the surface. Zettelkasten, tho often presented as an aspect of productivity (which it certainly can be) is also just a dope as way of engaging with your own ideas if you're a writer. Not the only way. Maybe not even the best. But, defs a good one.
3. And, this is a real one referring to the commenter asking about "how can you have your own ideas if it's new material" this requires a much longer response, but I'll say this: if you don't have ideas when you read something yoube never experienced before either A. You've had a lobotomy or B. You're asleep. Of course you have ideas. They may not be worth much at the moment. But, perhaps that's because you're concerned with the wrong ideas. In zettelkasten, we're not necessarily concerned with ideas that are specifically related to the exact subject at hand but more so what it ideas, even tangential to the subject, come up for you. For example, when I read Donut Economics, I took a bunch of notes. Not so much on economics (I'm not an economist) but on how some of the ideas informed my thinking about social media. What??? Yes. That's because, writing and thinking about social media is something I was interested in, and that's where my mind went.
OK? Good? You all get the context now? Exhale. ;)