My New and Improved Note-Taking Process While Reading Books

This post is for all those note-taking nerds who are as obsessed with note-taking and the process of note-taking as I am. I know there are some out there who exist 😉

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The Reading Highlight series that I started has caused me to rethink a lot of the ways that I read and take notes.

I’ve been reading for years now and I’ve always taken copious notes and made copious highlights to every book I’ve read. When I first began reading, I was reading on paper books that I ordered. In the past few years though, I have really taken a liking to the Kindle and iPad for reading.

At first I made the jump from all paper books to some paper and some on the Kindle. Then I eventually got an iPad and realized that I prefer the iPad over the kindle.

I still read the occasional paper book, but 99% of my reading is done on the iPad now. This evolved out of the craziness that was highlighting, writing, re-writing and compiling notes from reading paper books.

My journey in reading and taking notes and keeping organized with all of these notes has been across several years, spanned across several devices and remains to be a process that has all sorts of refinements and “tune-ups”.

Today I learned a few more strategies that make my note-taking life even easier which prompted me to want to do a little write-up about how I read and take notes, especially as I’ve been doing for the past few days with the Reading Highlights series.

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My New and Improved Note-Taking Process

My new and improved process for taking my notes from the books I read on my iPad to uploading them to my computer and crafting a post has changed quite a bit recently.

Today I learned that you can easily select multiple highlights while in iBooks and email them right over to your computer. Can you guess how much time this saves me? Well, you’d have to know what I was doing for the past few years before I figured this out (just today, by the way)…

I was manually airdropping each highlight individually onto my computer… Hundreds of highlights per week… manually. It was extremely monotonous and boring and it was busy work that was taking away from reading/writing time.

Now I can open my notes tab on iBooks, hit a button called select all and then shoot all of the notes to my computer all at once in just a few seconds.

Once I have these notes in my email, I copy/paste them from my email into Evernote. Evernote has been my note-taking app for about 5 years now. I absolutely love it. So many ways to tag and organize notebooks and keep all your notes in order. I have literally thousands upon thousands of notes stored in my Evernote.

Anyways, I create a new note for each day, here’s a screenshot of what an individual note looks like (for my reading highlights specifically):

As you can see, the top of the note is titled “Reading Notes: 12/7/18 | Fooled By Randomness By Nassim Taleb”.

Additionally, each note is individually titled with the day that I took the highlight and the corresponding chapter with which the note lies. Some of these highlights were taken on the 6th but were merged into this 12/7/18 note, in case you were wondering why the dates are slightly off.

Now that I have all of my highlights and notes in one safe and secure place (Evernote), I then go back to my Daily Note** and write a post for the day using the highlights that have been compiled.

**My “Daily Note” is a note that specifically tracks everything that I write during each particular day - kind of like a daily journal - I’ll have to explain this in detail some other day.

Now that you know the how, I’ll explain a few of the reasons why I’m so obsessed and detail-oriented when it comes to taking notes while reading.

The Value of Highlighting & Organizing for the Long-Term

The value of simply highlighting meaningful passages in a book and then organizing and storing them in a file, note-taking service or even in a physical notebook is immense.

Reading is not even half of the battle. The main value that I get from reading is actually after I’m done reading when I go back through my notes and re-read and write about certain passages that caught my attention while I was reading.

I tend to take my time when I read. A lot of people are obsessed with speed reading and trying to read as many books per week as they can, but I’m more interested in finding just 1 golden nugget and studying that thing profusely. I find that obsessing over the quality of your highlights and notes is far more valuable than obsessing over the quantity of books you can consume.

It also has an interesting “library” aspect to it. One of my favorite things to do is treat my Evernote like the great library of my life and the work that I do on a daily basis. I keep daily notes (as I mentioned before, kind of like a daily journal) about the most important thoughts, actions, notes, posts, etc. that occur during a day.

I’ll often write thousands upon thousands of words per day in this thing and each day it is saved as a note that I will have forever. I can always go back through my Evernote and search for key terms, dates, books, etc. and immediately pull up highlights, notes, posts and thoughts that I had in the past.

It’s a really valuable tool and resource. Almost like my own personal version of Google for my life.

The Value of Written Notes and Written Posts

I kind of touched on this earlier in the post. The value of writing notes about the highlights that you’ve made is incredible.

A lot of people highlight books, but I feel that what separates the great reader from the good one is that the great reader will write their own thoughts regarding a highlight.

This is what has made me so infatuated with the “Reading Highlights” posts that I’ve been posting to Steemit. I’ve taken notes in this manner for years now, but I’ve always kept them to myself.

These notes just always sat in my Evernote and collected some virtual dust. Nobody could access them but me and while it is still highly valuable to keep your own notes in this manner, it is rewarding and interesting to be able to share the notes on the Steem blockchain.

The value of writing your thoughts is truly underrated and the additional value you can get from sharing your thoughts and then interacting in the comments is even more so.

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QOTD:

Do you have a specific process for taking notes?