I found the best way to take book notes

I read a lot of books and if you want to remember what you read then one of the best things that you can do is to take book notes this is true for philosophy but also any other kind of non-fiction and fiction as well if you want to remember what you read you need to take notes I've tried a lot of different note- taking systems over the last 10 years or so and what I found is that these practices are often too complicated they're difficult to sustain or they try to get me to think in

a certain kind of way that I don't always find natural but I think I found the best way to take notes or at least the one that really works for me and I want to share it with you I'm going to tell you about some of the mistakes that I've made along the way on my notetaking Journey as well as the really simple method that I now use to take notes I'm Jared Henderson I'm a philosopher and I also love to read books and if you end up liking this video or you've liked some of

my other videos maybe try checking out my substack I write several times a week on there right now I'm doing a readal of Aristotle's nickam mckian ethics and if you become a paying subscriber you're helping me bring this content to YouTube and supporting me on top of that I think you'd enjoy what I write okay so the very first step in this method is to read the book and annotate there is no shortcut or hack here you need to take your time you need to read slowly you need to really pay attention if the point

of note taking is to really understand the book then if you cut some Corners here you're basically undermining the entire process while you're reading you're going to want to make annotations by annotating your book you'll become an even more engaged reader but also these annotations are going to set you up for Success later on this is a place where I used to make a lot of mistakes and there were really three big ones so if you take a look at my old copy of aerosotle nicoman Ethics which I've read multiple times I've had it for

at least 10 years you will find pages that are almost completely covered in annotations just take a look at this page more than half of the lines are underlined and I actually think that this form of annotating is completely useless annotations are indicators for your future self as you read you are highlighting what you think is important so that you can go back and revisit it later but but if you're underlining half the words or sometimes even every line on the page then you haven't done any of that sort of curation for yourself you've just

said every line seems important and that's equivalent to not underlining at all you could just read the page again so mistake one was making too many annotations I think that annotations in general should be quite minimal they should be really readable and they should be focused on those crucial bits of information in the book that's for non-fiction obviously for Fiction it's a little bit different cuz you're not just reading for information in the same way but here you might want to annotate things about theme for instance and not every single line is going to be

relevant to the theme of the book by making minimal annotations you're also giving yourself room for a reread good books are worth reading more than once and you're going to have different thoughts as you read a book for a second or a third or a fourth time I think I'm on like my sixth or seventh read of the nican ethics at this point but because of the way that I annotated this book my first time and maybe my second time time I've just given myself no room for future annotations if I want to make annotations

in my book I would need to buy another copy the second mistake I made was only underlining so underlining basically just highlights text but it doesn't tell you anything about why you're highlighting that text or why you think it's important so if I look at one of those passages where I underlined everything am I saying that it's important confusing maybe difficult to understand do I think it's a call back to an earlier part of the book I haven't given myself any of that information so instead I think it's nice to come up with different ways

to annotate your book now if you're using a highlighter which I don't love cuz I don't like the way it looks you could just color code so like blue could mean that something is important and this pink could mean that something is difficult and you would just kind of come up with a key for your different colors instead I now annotate just using a pencil I will sometimes underline passages that I think are important but if I think it's a whole passage I'll use a bracket because it's fewer lines and it just takes up less

space I will Circle words that I think need to be defined or I think are maybe being used in a weird way that way I can think about how the writer is using them I'll put stars next to important passages or important lines as well and I'll put question marks next to things that I don't understand or find confusing you could come up with your own symbols there's a lot of flexibility here the point is just come up with those different symbols to give yourself more information later on my third mistake was writing too much

in the margins writing one or two words next to a passage is totally fine but I was writing entire sentences that were curving around the page in strange ways and if you need to write something that complicated about the passage I think the best thing you can do is find another place to write it the next step for annotating is that I like to put these sticky tabs next to my annotation basically I'm just flagging where the annotations are this is optional you can also use those metal book tabs if you'd like but I think

it's actually a very helpful step now since we're talking about booknotes you might be wondering what you're supposed to do when you're out on the go and I found one of the things I like to do is just talk out loud especially if I'm like on a walk it's a little bit inconvenient when you're out on a walk to just start writing and that brings us to today's sponsor plot AI plot AI is a way for you to transcribe meetings or conversations or just thoughts you're having about whatever you're reading they use GPT 40 in

order to make the transcription a lot better a little more accurate I found by the way that this is a perennial problem accurate transcriptions in various apps have been really hard to come by it also lets you record phone calls but you have to flip a switch in order for it to be able to record any of your phone calls that might seem a little in convenient but I actually think it's a nice feature that way you know that you're not like accidentally recording private phone calls I've also been working on another project lately on

a book and I found that one of the things I need to do is just interview people to get their experiences or their expertise for the book project and I can just record these phone calls and then transcribe it and plot can even add speaker labels to cleanly separate who was talking when if you're interested imp plot you can check out my link Down Below in the description when we've gone through our book we've annotated we've tried to mark what we think the important parts of the book are especially for whatever purposes figuring out why

we're reading the book but now we need to go and do something with those annotations just annotating your book is not enough they don't really count as notes yet and I actually just think the act of annotating if you're not going to do anything with it later is also kind of useless I just call this exporting what I'm saying is we want to get those annotations out of that book into a format where you can review them more easily and when I'm exporting I like to use note cards I use note cards because I like

writing by hand there are apps that you could use as well like obsidian my only note about using apps though if that's how you want to do it is to still manually write this is especially helpful if you've been reading like on a Kindle or something where you can export your highlights and some of your thoughts I would suggest manually copying those quotes into whatever app you're using the reason I say that is because the act of manually copying whether that's by hand or by typing is actually going to help you retain the information and

I think process it better if you automate the process to make it nice and convenient you're actually robbing yourself of an opportunity to review your notes and annotations and to start retaining the information that's in the book automation is basically the enemy of retaining information but of also understanding complicated ideas these books deserve your attention and you shouldn't bring too much automation into the process so what I do is go through the book and I'm using those sticky tabs to kind of indicate where my annotations are and then I go through the book and I

start writing down my thoughts I will copy quotes that I think are important it's another reason why the quote shouldn't be too long your hand's going to cramp eventually I'll also add a couple of little thoughts about the quotes I'll put a page number so it's easy for me to find this is also a great place to write down sources that the author was citing that you might want to review what goes on these note cards can really vary sometimes it's just copying something from a book sometimes it's adding your own analysis or thoughts be

flexible experiment and figure out exactly what you need for whatever your goals are this is also by the way a great time to write down vocabulary that you need to Define these can be historical references bits of jargon just words that you think the author is using in a strange way take the time now to Define that vocabulary my export phase is really similar actually to a system that's been used by Ryan holiday and also Robert Green and I'm sure many others have used this system I'm going to link down below to a couple of

videos if you want a little bit more detail about how they do it I think everyone does it subtly differently and it's nice to look and see what the options are so you can figure out what's going to work best for you so by exporting you are methodically deciding what is important in the book and that's why I say you shouldn't have any shortcuts you should make the decision about what's actually going to go into your big stack of note cards when you've gone through the book and you have your note cards you're going to

need to sort them I me you could put them all in one big pile but probably common themes have Arisen and you're going to want to try to manually sort those thinking through how these ideas can be grouped together is again going to help you understand the book even more if you're doing a larger research project so you're not just reading one book you can start combining note cards from multiple different books because you're finding common ideas from different books that are all on some topic and that's going to help you synthesize them in whatever

your research project is that's really useful for college students but also for people who are trying to write a book a major obstacle that you're going to have with no cards is figuring out exactly how to organize them I think this is actually an advantage though because thinking through how you're going to organize them is also thinking through how you're going to organize ideas kind of doing that housekeeping that's going to let you remember and better understand what you're reading and if you're worried about your no cards getting scattered all over your desk I have

some really good news for you some leading researchers have been investigating this very important issue for a very long time and they realized that what was missing was like some kind of technology that would clip pieces of paper together and they finally cracked the code and they've named it the paperclip and even better the paperclip is very cheap it's very accessible you can buy it almost anywhere so some paper clips that way you're going to be able to actually hold your note cards together now aside from the actual reading of the book this is probably

the most tedious part of the process but I also think that this TDM is part of what makes this an effective way to take notes for a long time I used to stop there I even made a video about something like this system almost two years ago and I didn't really go any further than exporting and sorting note cards but I think that I was missing a crucial third step that's really helpful for people I call this active reflection the point here is to actually take the information so these are my note cards from about

two chapters and to actually do something with it you don't want the information to just be static the the knowledge to just be sitting there you actually want to take it and start using it because that again is going to help you understand the ideas because once you started using that knowledge you've acquired it's actually going to stick with you this is the step that has the most flexibility so one thing I like to do but it's very tedious is to write something like a lesson plan so if I were going to teach you know

part of Aristotle what would it look like if I were lecturing say undergrads the point is to like imagine that you're teaching it to people who are just like a little bit below you in knowledge and ability they're not dumb they're not stupid you don't need to talk down to them but they know just a little bit less than you you would need to introduce them to the subject matter you would need to be able to clearly State the author's thesis or thesis if there's more than one you would need to be able to Define

key terms to explain arguments and you would need to be able to consider complications and objections basically start asking what are the sorts of questions that someone who knew a little bit less than you would have I actually found this really useful lately I mentioned that I've been reading Aristotle on my substack so every week my substack community has been reading you know one of the books of Aristotle's Nick mckian ethics there are 10 books in that work and every week I've been writing about 1,000 to maybe 1500 words summarizing and lightly explaining the text

and I found that by actually trying to answer the question questions that have been arising from readers who have maybe not read a lot of philosophy or read this for the first time I've learned more about the text they've actually been able to point out blind spots in my own understanding of Aristotle despite the fact that I've read it many times and so trying to explain it to people who know just a little bit less than you is just a really powerful tool if that sounds tedious or a little bit boring there are other options

I'll just talk about one more but again I would really encourage you to experiment here in 1886 Andrew Lang wrote a book called letters to dead authors it's a weird book I'm going to link it down below because you can read it for free it's public domain but I love this idea essentially Lang just wrote letters to some of his favorite authors and thinkers and while a lot of the book is just him praising he's also raising criticisms and asking them questions it's a really kind of intimate way to start engaging with the ideas in

a book so you could even try to write these letters to dead authors and then you could try to imagine what they would say back to you how would how would they respond to the criticism that you're raising books are like this amazing technology that is able to get you into like the mind of another person but it's a one-way form of communication by writing these letters we get to kind of pretend like we're engaged in an extended conversation with some of the greatest thinkers from Millennia past centuries past and from every corner of the

globe and you get to kind of imagine yourself as part of this Grand conversation where you're talking about I ideas you could find other ways to actively reflect on the text you could just write blog posts to try to summarize it you could write many essays there's a video by another YouTuber that I'll link Down Below on that topic the point is to just find some way to start using this knowledge that you've just acquired from this book because once you start using it that's how you really learn it that's how you really retain it

you really remember it and it's how you're able to eventually move on and start forming your own ideas so you read these books closely you annotate as you go you export the information and then you act reflect on it and that way you're actually able to incorporate that knowledge into your life and turn learning not into something that you did but something that you keep on doing