I love reading and have a frustratingly limited memory. I spoke to my brother about it (who was the better student between us) and he highlighted similar issues for himself which surprised me. His advice was as follows: “accept the fact that your memory sucks and figure out an annotation and note taking system that helps you recall things faster”. You don’t need to remember the notes about a particular topic if you can remember that you took a note about it.
How we implement it:
1- he and I annotate almost everything we read worth annotating (I wont do it for escape reading)
2- our annotations have similar systems across books. Underlines may be something fun or interesting, stars highlight significant points, “Qs” pose thoughtful questions, top left corner is location in plot top right is general theme of the scene etc
One and two allow us to get up to speed on a book we previously read very quickly or find particular sections in an instant.
For teachable items - books or notes I don’t want to forget that are nuanced - I transcribe my annotations to OneNote (my favorite note taking app).
For example I read a book about Japanese death poems. There were a few that really resonated to me. I don’t need to ever pick this book up again nor do I need to remember any of them, I just have to remember I wrote them down. Here is one of my favorites:
My heart
is a bottomless river,
a raging torrent.
(Written by a woman who took her husbands life, for taking the life of her brother, moments before she took her own.
Anyway this system works for me and thought I would share.
Wow, I really like how you reserve the corners of the page for specific content.
I also really like writing notes in the book, but I take a picture of each page and stick it into Evernote. On each note I'll write down the book and page number that the note came from in case I want to see it in more context.
That way the notes are all searchable and it really helps when I don't remember which book I read something in
How we implement it:
1- he and I annotate almost everything we read worth annotating (I wont do it for escape reading)
2- our annotations have similar systems across books. Underlines may be something fun or interesting, stars highlight significant points, “Qs” pose thoughtful questions, top left corner is location in plot top right is general theme of the scene etc
One and two allow us to get up to speed on a book we previously read very quickly or find particular sections in an instant.
For teachable items - books or notes I don’t want to forget that are nuanced - I transcribe my annotations to OneNote (my favorite note taking app).
For example I read a book about Japanese death poems. There were a few that really resonated to me. I don’t need to ever pick this book up again nor do I need to remember any of them, I just have to remember I wrote them down. Here is one of my favorites:
My heart
is a bottomless river,
a raging torrent.
(Written by a woman who took her husbands life, for taking the life of her brother, moments before she took her own.
Anyway this system works for me and thought I would share.