How I take reading notes
Taking notes while reading serves two purposes:
- It helps me think. These notes are transient and do not need to be kept;
- It helps me file important ideas for future use.
When I read a book about a technical topic, say bayesian inference, I open a new notebook on my Remarkable and scribble away. I come back to these transient notes regularly to extract the core concepts, formulas, figures, etc that I want to remember. I type these permanent notes directly on my computer. I sometimes use paper to organize transient notes as it is faster to re-arrange things. The transient notes should then be discarded as they clutter your mind with noise.
But this is only practical insofar as I am not reading books in the train or on my couch. For lighter reading, I will mark interesting paragraphs with an asterisk in the margin and take notes with an A7 (not bigger!) notepad that I always have in my pocket. I then move these pieces of paper around until I get a set of fairly self-contained, wannabe-permanent notes.