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Do you take notes while reading non-fiction books, such as technical books? I'm trying to find a good system but failing at the moment. I've been using orgmode. One file for every book I read and respecting the book's outlines. What I find when rereading my notes is that is basically a transcript of the original, albeit in .org format. With this system is sometimes hard to find specific details because they might be scattered in many chapters. And when I export the file, to say html, it's not very readable. That's why I'd love a little advise from you, lains.

>>1894 I try to take notes with all my books, but recently I've been just reading through them to save time. What I did was have a notebook handy and then write in thoughts, important sentences, etc. Then I would transcribe it into OpenOffice where I would sort of organize everything into one cohesive document. I did it one document per chapter so that I could dive into the section I wanted easily later on. Don't know if that helps, but there you go. Since you're using emacs and org mode, I'd keep separate files, each containing related ideas and notes along with comments on which chapter a particular note came from. Put in lots of tags that would make files useful for searching from Bash or whatever so that you have an ad-hoc database of information. Maybe look at GNU RecUtils as well. It's a sort of flat-file database system. Hope that helps.

>>1896 >I try to take notes with all my books, but recently I've been just reading through them to save time. That's what I've been doing lately. Halfway through a book I feel that I've lost too much time taking notes and just want to get over with it. I thought a lot about keeping separate files, but I wanted to avoid fragmentation as much as possible so my notes wouldn't be scattered all over the place. I think I'll experiment with it though. That would give me the possibility to use footnotes without clutter. A good naming convention might also make files more manageable. Thanks for replying.

I always read math books with a notebook at hand where I state the theorems on the first half of the notebooks, and the main outline of the arguments on the second half, along with numerical examples where they might be enlightening. I always keep coming back to them for reference when I find something that relies on such arguments, so that I don't lose sight of it.

Do any of you rewrite your notes? What I used to do was take notes with pen and paper and then transcribe them to a computer file for later reference. I felt the act of rewriting the notes helped set the ideas in my mind. It's time-consuming, though. Lately I haven't had the opportunity to do it as much as I'd like.

Notes are completely useless to me beyond the act of writing them, as that kinesthetic bit helps me internalize it. But if I can't internalize it to the point where i cant just google the gaps it does nothing for me. One thing is that I can't follow instructions or memorize, if something doesnt make sense to me or have some significance in my own brain its totally worthless. The other is I cant read my own handwriting, at least half of it.

>>1921 Are you me? Did I forget writing that post? Anyway, isn't there a way to work around the "stuff has to have meaning or I won't remember it" thing?

You could try memorising more out of the books. I've heard the "Memory Mansion" or "Memory Castle" system works. It dates back to ancient Greece, in one form of another.

>>1928 makes sense on some level, but AFAIK isn't that system designed for memorising speeches and whatnot? It seems like it would require a vast imagination, coupled with a lot of repetition, to internalise a vast amount of knowledge from a non-fiction book. Which isn't to say it's useless, just time-consuming,

What follows is based on personal experience. Remembering the content of a book is easy. What is not is to know all of the vocabulary it depends on. When reading a sentence out of the book you should have a precise image of what is going on. If you don't you won't remember it efficiently. I suggest you take a look at Anki for remembering such things. I use Anki and Simplenote.

I don't have suggestions for technique but just sayin' I do this with all reading, including fiction. Sometimes it's reflections of my own, other times I just copy down a line or paragraph. Some people read bible proverbs or zen stuff for inspiration and motivation; I re-read passages I've saved from SF novels or like, Anne of Green Gables.

I do different things depending on what I'm using the notes for. When I'm studying from a book, notes just become an extension of my working memory. Helps for when I get a reference to a theorem I studied a couple hours/days ago to just have it all condensed in front of me. Plus the process of writing helps me remember things. I don't ever revisit these notes once I'm done with the book though. Less frequently, I'll make aggregate notes that I do keep around for reference. Usually when I'm studying a few related papers and just want to have all the relavent information in one place. Then there's notes that are literally just numbers and data that I would forget otherwise. I've always envied people that could create summaries of the stuff they read and actually have it be useful to them in the future. Most of my notes just get thrown out eventually.

I handwrite notes, been doing it for ten years. The fact you read, and then transcribe it manually really helps with recall. Usually get notebooks from redbubble, with dumb anime soykaf on them and then fill them up in like a month. I take a lot of notes, and I've noticed that 1) my memory is greatly improved only if I wrote it down and 2) if I need to reference it I always know which notebook. I have been able to recall technical information I wrote down slowly, manually, five years ago as if I had just read it. I forget about notes I've transcribed on notepad or information I've casually read almost immediately. Write your notes. You aren't just transcribing them on paper.

>>2073 > I have been able to recall technical information I wrote down slowly, manually, five years ago as if I had just read it. I forget about notes I've transcribed on notepad or information I've casually read almost immediately. I try to write notes often because of this. Except that it seems somehow I got the habit of zoning out when I start writing and don't pay attention to the content. It's as if I'm just seeing letters instead of words.

>>1927 Mnemonics as a whole is just encoding the information into something meaningful enough to remember. A book I recommend about the subject would be Moonwalking With Einstein.

- revision and review are important parts of the note taking process. if your notes are taken verbatim spend revision time trying to rewrite in your own words. this will help build your own understanding as well as decluttering. - condensing notes into easily read chunks makes retaining their content easier. - peer feedback and/or discussion of notes. you can demonstrate your understanding (or lack thereof) to and for others. - colour coding or symbols (i'm sure there are electronic equivalents. hyperlinking? sorry i'm a digital dunce) as a means of stressing importance, emphasising change, and linking ideas across several pages of notes helps with cohesion. on a similar tip... - summary documents of important concepts. related to condensing, obviously helpful if you have ideas fragmented across multiple sets of notes. - formulating your own questions and answering them, especially when it comes to minutae. the example in my mind is the left hand side/right hand side Socratic style of The Little... series of programming books. phrasing important insights in this way can help with retention. pic unrelated.

>>1894 I usually write by hand with a pen. I can convert to PDF if needed, but I find just picking up the notes and quickly reading them helps recall everything covered. By hand writing it creates a map in my brain, so Ctrl+F isn't needed. If I ever do need to search through the notes, then the process of searching creates a stronger neural link - which means I don't search again. If I was going to do it digitally, I'd write over PDFs using a graphics tablet. Here are a couple of note taking book gifts on note taking: https://mega.nz/#F!bLpECIiJ!K4qZhMr8ozKCi_c97hEr2g The Sketchnote Handbook 397Mb The Sketchnote Workbook 195Mb

>>2119 Same books, without bullsoykaf proprietary javascript clouds: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=96D309F4AF6F5407C601767E6B47C7CD http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=4855ADD23C2DC5CBC6F6C77863542ADE

>2074 Sadly, same here

>>2909 Thanks for the links to these books. One of the things I appreciate about this place is all the resources for self-improvement that are shared. I've only gone through the first book, but for taking notes from a book, I'd recommend quickly scanning through a chapter first, then reading again in detail using the sketchnote techniques. That sort of acts as an analogue to the book's recommendation to do research prior to taking notes during a presentation. That should help map things out onto the sketchnote more easily.

>>1894 I take notes while reading technical books but I don't know of the way of writing notes right now is that efficient. Basically, I'm writing it ala tree style diagram so every thought is nested within another thought so I don't lose context but sometimes it gets too wide for my tastes.

>>3181 It happens the same to me. Normally I try to respect the book's hierarchy. I separate format ideas using bulleted lists, nesting when appropriate. But I'm always displeased with the result. Almost feel as if I don't benefit from taking notes at all.

>>3181 >>3182 >>1894 just use the web Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! >It helps you 'member by spacial recognition (similar to memory palaces, you remember what part of the page something was written on) >It helps your memory flow in a systematic but not rigid format >you can connect ideas that are unrelated but have commonalities >Eliminates redundancy (writing the same not under different main topics) >tfw people ask me why my notes look weird and are completely useless to anybody but me

I have a public-facing journal that is generated using hugo. The journal has semi-daily entries. Each day is a date-named markdown file (eg 20190331.md) and has notes for the day. Each file has tags which let me search by topic on the website itself, and git grep works well for finding entries with certain books or keywords. Specifically for your question, the journal is separated into sections by headers, and if taking notes on a book this h3 header is the book name (eg "### On Writing (2000)") and h4 is the chapter if it's applicable (eg "#### Chapter 5: Stephen talks about dogs") The main weakness right now is getting an overview of a book I've been taking notes on for the past couple months is difficult, but this should be trivial by parsing the markdown files and combining everything with the same h3 header. But it's easy enough to grep around the filestructure or follow tags, so it hasn't been a significant problem so far. The purpose of notes for me is mostly holding me accountable for reading it, and making me think about information by transforming thought to writing. Some books, especially undergraduate textbooks found on libgen, have questions at the end of each chapter which can make it very easy to learn something in-depth. >>2119 >>2909 Thanks for the recs, lainon

>>3182 I've changed my method quite a bit though it might be wasteful of paper. I devoted the right side of the pages for notes and the left side for insights and comments so that I can still preserve the verbatim or near verbatim tree diagram while also having insights and comments.

I write down anything that seems important, and sometimes also just any thought that pops into my fool head

>>1894 After finally fixing my handwriting so that I can read it myself without any trouble, and coming up with an acceptable color scheme (blue for everything, red for underlining or important small notes, black for notes on the notes and code examples etc) and finally finding pens that are ok to write with (not too thin, not too thick, erasable) namely the Pilot frixion I started looking into formal note taking techniques. I settled mostly on: - SQ3R and its derivatives like SQ5R etc: Essentially: -- Skim the text -- Query the text, that is ask questions to the text. Can be as easy as taking every subheading and turning it into a question, can be your own questions that you have for that particular piece of text. The more the better -- Read. The whole text that is. Make notes, particularly try to answer the questions from the Q part -- Review. Your notes. Make sure all questions have been aswered, Do not forget any questions that could have come up from actually reading the full text (going back to the Q part is fine) -- Recite. Based on your notes only recite the key points in a coherent and correct way. If it does not work, go back to the point where the error surfaced. Cornell note taking is more suitable for lectures but you could technically also use it for books. (look it up) Feynman technique works better than Cornell for books but should be limited to only a small key aspect. Excellent for teaching what you learn to others. As for electronic notes or transcribing of notes: Org modes is of course your friend, if and only if, you put in the required time to become good at it first. Its useless if you have to look up the commands for basic formatting or navigating every time (or worse: that you have to navigate using the mouse). As much as I hate to admit it: If you have a Surface device (Surface pro, Book or laptop) then consider OneNote, esp. with the surface pen it can be quite an interesting alternative. (get the 2016 or earlier version of OneNote, without the Office 365 garbage)

when reading a math book it's simple, just work out everything on the notebook. Whatever steps are skipped here and there I can actually work them out on the paper, and whenever there is too many words or some sort of redundancy all I do is abbreviate it and I end up with something rather clean, though at the excercises I always end up with a mess. It's super helpful especially when the text says "...and thus applying (2.2) and (2.3) we can work out such..." And then I can just look at my notebook for such expressions, which is mostly helpful when reading a pdf but also because I can just copy them again in the relevant page if the procedure is not too clear and I actually needs to see them side by side or actually work it out.

>>3203 What are you studying? Are you preparing for Cisco exams?

>>3224 I worked through the book "distributed systems" (not by Tannenbaum) because I had a project coming up about agricultural data recording and management in a somewhat sub-developed country. It was therefore not a good idea to rely on one or few servers as those might not be reachable when power fails (daily).

>>1919 I've found this helps greatly also. But yes, the worst part is that it takes up a lot of time, and often I get irritated by repeating myself (it feels like a waste of time even though in practise I know it helps set ideas into my head).

I like to take notes/mark things with a highlighter in the book itself. And then I summarize in my journal books I finished. I do this only for non-fiction books, fiction I just read it and enjoy it

I usually write in longer paragraphs, rougher and messier than regular writing, my thoughts transcribed aloud onto the page. I edit this into finished interpretations later on.