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How To Apply What You Learn (Part 5 In Note Taking Series)

notes, mental models, metalearning, productivity

We have finally reached the end of this series on how to take good notes. The final edition of this series will focus on how to apply what you have learned and notated during the previous four steps.

I will attempt to keep this post shorter if I can, however, I am not known for brevity.

Here’s a quick reference guide to take you back to the first 4 parts in case you missed those:

Part 1 – The META Method
Part 2 – The 6 Areas Of Knowledge Extraction
Part 3 – Reflection During & After The Note Taking Process
Part 4 – How To Take Evergreen Notes

How To Apply What You Learn

The main focus on this article is on application. The previous articles have prepared you for the note taking process in general. Now, we’re going to talk about how to actually use the knowledge you have gained through your note taking skills.

In essence there are three areas you are going to focus on now that you have completed the reading, study, and note taking process.

Here’s the three areas you will want to focus on to actually apply what you learn:

Let’s look at each of these 3 steps in greater detail so you can put them to immediate use.

How To Apply What You Learn: Practice

You probably have a lot of new information in your mind now. You may have created some Anki cards, you may have even created evergreen notes for yourself. All that is great, but it really isn’t using the information in the “real world”.

That is where practice comes into play.

You want to focus on 3 different areas of Practice:

  • Form
  • Retention
  • Understanding

Form applies more to physical skills you are learning such as dancing or karate, for example. You want to practice the movements over and over again. Repitition is the key to creating muscle memory and therefore your ability to use your skills in real life situations.

Form also applies outside of the physical realm. For example, you can conduct thought experiments every day for 30 days about the new topic you are learning. Here’s a video to learn more about how to conduct thought experiments

When you conduct these thought experiments you want to really focus on thinking through all the possible outcomes that may occur and both ask questions and answer those questions.

This is such a powerful way to grow your mental ability to think through problems and really apply what you are learning.

If you want a great read on Mental Models, check out the book by Shane Parrish.

Next we’ll look again at Retention. Retention isn’t really the problem. Most of what you have read or watched or listened to is actually in your brain. The problem is that you have to recall it.

It’s sort of like we know we saved the file somewhere on our hard drive, but we just can’t remember what folder it’s in. The solution here is to store the data in a way that you are most likely to retrieve it.

This means linking, thinking, shrinking and winking.

Link together ideas. Bind them. Compare them to other things you have learned.

Think through abstract ideas and turn them into as tangible of a concept as you possibly can. This means creating metaphors, similies, and stories that help you easier recall information.

Shrink means to minimize the amount of information or data you are trying to remember and use to it’s bare essence. It’s easier to remember one person, one date, one historical fact then it is to remember 20 in one “chunk”. So, you want to shrink down the size of the chunks into memorable pieces.

This is also where story and emotion come into play. The stronger the emotional appeal, ht more likely you are to recall it. I call this ‘winking” because you want to make it playful. Also, think about flirting. You are much more likely to remember a flirty conversation than a business talk. By winking to yourself, you increase the odds of being able to later recall what you have learned.

Finally, let’s look at Understanding. This is a pretty simple aspect of Practice. You want to make sure to practice your newfound knowledge on other people. Talk to them and teach them what you have learned. You will quickly find gaps of knowledge and that’s good.

Now you can go back and study those areas and come back and teach again to see if you finally fully understand the full topic.

How To Apply What You Learn: Analysis

An analysis is the continued study of material you have learned or acquired. You want to always be analyzing what you have read and learned previously.

One reason for this is that a lot of informaiton is unreliable. Unfortunately, we are fed data from the internet, from wikipedia, from friends, and books that may not be accurate. We can achieve a higher rate of data accuracy by consuming more information.

This, of course, isn’t easy and takes up more time. But it is very important. The more data you have at your fingertips, the more you can analyze and decipher.

Another core component to analysis is to continue to break down all theories or hypothesizes to their bare essentials. You ultimately want to be able to focus on one aspect of an idea… the core idea or main belief you are to add to your belief backlog.

This goes well with the Practice step as well. You want to convert large ideological chunks into malleable pieces and blocks of knowledge. Knowledge blocks are easier to contain, control, and confirm.

And they are much easier to build upon. Here’s a great read on knowledge building blocks by Tiago Forte.

How To Apply What You Learn: Synthesis

And that brings us to the final step to apply what you learn. The great and powerful synthesis. Here’s a good working definition of syntheses from Google:

The combination of ideas to form a theory or system.

Defintion of Synthesis

I love that defintion because that is what must be done to turn knowledge into application. In this step, the goal is to take what you have learned from your continued analysis and start combining it into other ideas or concepts you have learned or created.

It is literally the act of creating new knowledge from old knowledge. The interesting part is you don’t have to necessarily even create or discover anything new. Rather, you are putting together different areas of knowledge that perhaps haven’t been connected yet.

As an example, I have created a series of 5 blog posts on How To Take Good Notes and there really isn’t anything “new” I have added other than coming up with interesting words and phrases to explain ideas first discovered or shared by others. From the META Method to Practice, Analysis, Synthesis... these ideas are not my own, but the branding is.

It’s equivalent to white labeling a product. You can modify the product slightly, but mostly you are creating new packaging and new marketing. Call it White Labeling Ideas. By adding multiple ideas together and explaining it in a new way, you have in essence creating a new product by white labeling the ideas of others.

Here’s a quick description of white labeling from SmartyAds:

“White labeling is producing the products and services and their further rebranding and advertising under another brand’s name. The aim of it is increasing customer loyalty and trust, saving resources and time necessary for new the new solution development and deployment.”

Of course, also give contribution to where your ideas came from. There are entire books that are nothing more than the white labeling of other people’s ideas.

And by this art of synthesis, you will also end up creating your own unique ideas, theories, and systems, but that’s just a side benefit. In the end, your ability to speak clearly on a wide range of topics, your ability to write and explain your thoughts with clarity, and the amount of knowledge you can apply to your life is worth all the effort you have put in.

I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. As always, please leave comments below and also make sure you follow me on Twitter for more info around notes, productivity, business, and more.

My Twitter –> Michael Giannulis

How To Take Evergreen Notes (Part 4 In Series)

notes, metalearning

Welcome back to part 4 in the seemingly never ending series on how to take good notes. In this episode we’ll talk about how to take evergreen notes.

Come avere una pancia piatta? – Culturismo boldenone bodybuilding ricetta per frittelle ad alto contenuto proteico: bodybuilding da accademia forte per le donne.

Here’s a quick reference guide to take you back to the first 3 parts in case you missed those:

Part 1 – The META Method
Part 2 – The 6 Areas Of Knowledge Extraction
Part 3 – Reflection During & After The Note Taking Process

And that brings us to part 4, which is what to do after you are done reading. The goal here is to directly convert the ideas swirling around in your head and turn them into more actionable content you can use for later.

In the world of Zettlekasten, this is akin to writing evergreen notes. One of my favorite thinkers on Evergreen Note-taking is Andy Matuschak.

Make sure you check out Andy’s page, but be prepared to spend hours there. Here’s just a brief note from Andy about his thoughts on Evergreen Notes:

Note-writing can be a virtuosic skill, but Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts and Note-writing practices are generally ineffective.

In short, the idea is that evergreen notes are reusable, short, specific, and dense. They can be dropped off throughout space and time and still hold up.

I’ve not focused on evergreen notes and much as I should, but it is on my list to get to.

A great book I highly recommend you read is How To Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. I finished it recently and will most likely publish my notes from that book here on the blog soon. This book goes over the Zettlekasten method of note-taking and content production.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s move on to the process you need to follow once you have finished reading a book and have all those great ideas swirling in you head. How do you capture further the ideas and turn them into usable evergreen notes?

How To Create Evergreen Notes

There are 3 steps I like to take before I start writing out my thoughts or evergreen notes. What you want to focus on is three simple areas.

  • Recollect
  • Inspect
  • Perfect

Creating Evergreen Notes Strategy 1: Recollect

This is a seemingly easy and obvious first step. You have finished the book, you’ve taken notes using the META method as your framework and you focused on the 6 areas of knowledge extraction.

You then asked yourself further questions and looked for lessons and connections as you went through the material so your “real time notes” are pretty good.

Now, we need to take a breath. You can even decide to let a day go by before you do this. There’s nothing like a good night’s sleep to help your brain reformat all that information you’ve just taken in.

What you wan to do to start on your process to create evergreen notes is to really recollect everything possible. And I mean this word in a double-use sort of way. First, re-collect all your notes. Grab it all and read through it again.

Look for areas that jump out at you or resonate with you. This will sound a little “woo-woo” but I think the areas that gives us that mental tingle are what we are called to work on first. You should start feeling a natural attraction towards certain notes, principles, and ideas.

You also want to think about your notes or recollect as much as you can mentally. This part can be very painful because pretty quickly you’ll realize how much you have already forgotten.

And that’s ok, you can start writing down your notes now and look for the knowledge gaps. Write down what you do know and leave blanks for what you don’t know.

Some of my notes come out looking like this:

The 3 Secrets Of Success Are Consistency, Application, & ___________.

Yikes! What was that third thing? I don’t remember and my notes missed it. No big deal, I’ll just go back through the book (or Google it!)

This is a great way to make sure you learn the right answer. And one you learn something by having to retrieve it you are way more likely to remember it.

Creating Evergreen Notes Strategy 2: Inspect

You should now be writing out evergreen notes as you reviewed them in the recollect stage. The next step is to inspect these notes with great care as you write them. What you want to do here is to make a plan on how you see yourself using these evergreen notes in the future.

Inspect them for the following criteria: (note – not an exhaustive list)

  • Quality
  • Content Value
  • Context
  • Quantity Of Words
  • Usefulness
  • Evergreen Nature (ie does it stand alone)
  • Future Use
  • Current Use
  • Past Use

The last 3 are particularly important. You can add tags to these notes that will help you find them when you need them for future use. This is a great concept I picked up from How To Take Smart Notes.

Don’t tag notes based on how you found it, but by how you’ll use it in the future. You want to makes your notes discoverable. And this discovery may very well be on accident as you dig through your notes later.

So, think of how “future you” will find these evergreen notes.

Also think of current projects you are working on. Do any of these Evergreen Notes fit in there? Can you put them to immediate use?

Same with Past Use. Have you written about old topics that could use some updating? Do any of your new notes or discoveries apply to old pieces of content or old ideas you were pursuing but abandoned?

Sometimes all it takes is one really good evergreen note to breathe life into a dead project.

Creating Evergreen Notes Strategy 3: Perfect

This is my favorite part of the evergreen note taking process. You can (and should) review your notes again and see if you can improve upon them.

Some quick wins to improve your evergreen notes include:

  • Make them denser: Make them about ONE idea and ONE idea only
  • Think of the note as a “block” or one line of code that serves one function
  • Make them clearer: Make sure the note makes sense all by itself with no other reference

By doing this, you end up with really tight evergreen notes that you can use again and again in the future.

Now, this next part is a little controversial because there’s an ongoing debate in the knowledge management world.

If you want to perfect your brain’s ability to recall the information you have learned, you can do that by creating a follow up program to memorize this information.

One of the best-known ways to get this information from the page to your brain is known as Spaced Repetition.

Here’s a great video about Spaced Repetition From Ali Abdaal:

The basic idea is to split up your learning sessions into chunks. If you have 10 hours to learn something, you’ll be better off to spend 1 hour a day every other day for 20 days as opposed to a 10 hour “study” session.

You can take concepts from your evergreen notes and turn them into note cards, for example.

You could have one side of the card be a definition and another side be the keyword. I recently did this to study for a real estate exam, which I am glad to say I passed on the first try. (It only has a 50% pass rate on the first try).

I also only spent about 45 minutes a day studying for 10 days.

I owe a lot of that success to the spaced repetition method of learning.

For an easy (and FREE) way to use note cards for spaced repetition, I recommend ANKI. Check it out, it’s pretty amazing.

Evergreen Notes – A Conclusion

The world of evergreen notes is massive. My post here today is just meant to help you a little bit on your journey. I highly recommend you do lots of googling, lots of reading, spend some time on Youtube and just learn.

It’s a perfect excuse to practice your new note taking skills as well.

So, in a way, you get to feed two birds with one scone. 🙂

Now, in part 5 of this series we’ll look at some other post study application methods that you can employ to make the information you’ve learned become a part of you even more.

If you’ve ever dreamed of waxing poetic and pontificating for hours about a subject matter, this next blog post should help you do just that.

Part 5 is here – how to apply what you learn.

How To Take Good Notes (Part 3)

metalearning, productivity

Welcome back to How To Take Good Notes.

This is part 3 in what will most likely be a 5 part series. If you missed part 1 or 2, you can (and should) go read those here: How To Take Good Notes Part 1 and How To Take Good Notes Part 2.

In part 1, we talked about using the META Method:

Medium
Experience
Time
Accomplish

In part 2, we went over the 6 areas of focus when taking notes, namely:

Notes: Ideas or thoughts from your study in your own words.
Quotes: Extractions from the material in the author’s words.
Anecdotes: Stories and examples from the material to support claims such as stats, studies, and charts.
Claims: What claims are made by the author and how are they proven?
Names: Names of places, people, and events that are worth remembering.
Frames: What frame is the author using to convince you of the material? Notate any bias or predispositions that may color the material.

Now we will move on to further look at what sort of information should be gathered both during and directly after the consumption of knowledge information.

How To Take Good Notes For Long Term Memory

These are the three areas you want to focus on in order to remember information for the long term. These aren’t so much traditional notes as they are thinking about the material and looking for ways to further explore it.

Whereas notes are about writing down what you are learning, this strategy is thinking about the material and working to draw conclusions or set yourself up for future resarch.

Here are the three areas to add to your note taking system in order to better learn and retain information:

  • Questions
  • Lessons
  • Connections

How To Take Good Notes Strategy 1: Questions

As you read the material and even after you are done, you should be consciously thinking about the material in the PDF, the textbook, or on audio. You want to inundate your mind with this material so you can better absorb it and transfer it to long term memory.

One of the best ways to do that is to ask yourself questions. As you read the book, start jotting down questions as they come to you.

Questions to ask yourself include:

  • Do I believe this?
  • If this is true, what else might be true?
  • How could I prove this right?
  • How can I prove this wrong?
  • What other books or material should I read to learn more about this topic?

Obviously, the questions you ask are going to be dependent on the material and your level of interest. But I will say this. Usually, the more questions you can ask the better.

Perhaps the best part of asking a lot of questions is that it gives you a chance to practice active recall which is an excellent strategy for remembering what you’ve just read.

How To Take Good Notes Strategy 2: Lessons

This is a very powerful way to learn and remember. As you read through the material and reflect on it afterwards, think about the lessons you have learned. Also think about other material referenced by the author.

A good author will have linked to numerous studies, other books, online articles, and more. Each of these references are the author’s “source material” and most likely contain a lot more information about the topic you are studying.

You should take note of all these other references and pursue them afterwards. Things to check for include:

  • Does the study referenced actually back up the author’s claims?
  • What other lessons can you take away from this source material?
  • What could the author have written differently if he wanted to make the opposite argument?
  • Do you trust the source material as accurate?

The other thing you want to do as part of this note taking strategy for long term retention is to make an attempt to create your own lessons that you have learned during your time with the book.

This doesn’t have to be elaborate by any means, but it should be written in your own words and it should be thorough enough that you could actually teach it to someone else, preferably a child if possible.

The practice of creating a lesson and then actually teaching it, is really the best way possible to learn. Check out this tweet from David Perell.

Production is the secret to learning

When we create content for others to consume, we are forced to organize the information in our minds and reorganize it in a way that is easy to understand and share. The value of doing this is without equal in the “learning” game.

Here’s a further video from Vlogger Shu Omi, on the importance of producing more than you can consume. He also lays out a strong argument for producing as you go.

Create More, Consume Less

Note Taking Strategy 3: Connections

Finally we turn our attention to Connections. During this phase you are looking for things that help you connect the information you are learning about to other things you already know.

This is a great way to turn information into knowledge. In fact, we remember things easier if they are connected or linked to knowledge we already know.

As you can see in the image from @gapingvoid, the difference between information and knowledge is connection. The more you can connect new ideas to existing knowledge the better the odds are you’ll remember it.

This is what makes it easier to learn related fields. Imagine if you spent years studying water and plubming. You would understand the flow of water, pipes, pressure, etc. Now, think if you had to learn electricity.

Even though they are two very different fields, you would look for ways to connect the two ideas together. You could start with the idea that electricity “flows” in a current, just like water. Water takes the path of least resistance, so does electricity.

This makes it easier to remember and eventually apply your newfound knowledge.

Here are some of the Connection Questions you can ask yourself to look for connections that might not at first appear obvious:

  • What does this remind me of?
  • What word(s) in this book jumped out at me that I can apply to other fields?
  • What field that I’ve previously studied does this most remind me of?
  • What are some metaphors I can think of to describe what I’m learning?
  • If I had to describe this using an analogy, what could it be?

Granted, these are tough questions. Making connections is one of the biggest leaps when it comes to “creating” knowledge. But you can do it. And the more you do it, the easier it will get.

In many ways, these Connections will turn into new ideas over time. You can start writing these notes down into small, bite sized, atomic notes that stand alone. These notes can be used when you write future articles or books, or serve as inspiration to new ideas you may have not stumbled upon yet.

You Can Do This!

I know this part 3 section is tougher than the first two. If you are looking for just a way to take notes that don’t really get used, you can skip this section altogether. But if you’re reading this blog post, I doubt you’re that type of person.

You just need to take time to think as you read and after you read. A big part of reading for future knowledge acquisition and application is thinking. Sadly, we aren’t told this much so we don’t think of reading as a form of thinking, but it is.

You need to let the words pass over you and through you. Extract what resonates with you, then devote time to searching for further questions, lessons, and connections.

Now that the book is done, we’ll move on to part 4. In part 4, we’ll talk about what to do immediately after you have finished this book or PDF or audio file.

There will be some crossover to part 3, but it will be worth it as this next step is about planning out your future learning while cementing in your brain what you have read or consumed.

Part5 – How To Take Evergreen Notes is ready for you. 😀

5 Mental Models To Gather & Apply Wisdom

metalearning, mental models, productivity


5 Mental Models


Different mental models help us to make sense of the world around us. This post covers 5 Mental Models you can use to gather and apply wisdom.

They can also be used to provide us with tools to gather wisdom and apply it. In this article, we will briefly cover 5 different mental models that can help you not only to become a better learner, but also a better doer. Let’s begin with the 1st mental model.

The first mental model is to think of yourself first and foremost as a lifelong learner.
Lifelong learning is truly one of the most important mental models we can develop because it puts us in the driver’s seat. We are in control because if there’s something we don’t know, we at least know we can go and figure it out.

Lifelong learning is where it’s at. To walk down that path requires a deep-seated humility about what’s knowable and what each of us knows. What’s knowable refers to all those things in the world that others have already figured out, or at least labeled in some way. What each of us knows speaks to our human limitation. Unfortunately, we can never know everything. We are finite beings with a finite mind. We have to face up to this reality while still striving to remain a lifelong learner knowing that our job is never done.

Now, there are times when learning gets tough. We’ve all been stuck on a problem and unsure how to proceed. It can be very frustrating to work on a problem and be unsure how to resolve it or more forward. In these circumstances, you need to use the 2nd Mental model which is paramount to your becoming a better learner.

This mental model is known as the Einstein Model because believe it or not, even geniuses like Einstein got stuck dealing with problems that he couldn’t solve.
Thankfully, he had an approach to help him when he got stuck on a seemingly unsolvable problem.

Albert Einstein put it this way: “I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while** I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

That is such a huge key. Listening to what is going on in your imagination unlocks the door to a world of new discovery that may have been hidden away from you previously. It’s a true secret mental model you need in your arsenal.

The third mental model has everything to do with assumptions. As you learn more and become wiser, you want to make sure you don’t fall guilty to the idea of always being right.
In fact, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall into this trap. A very smart guy by all accounts is Elon Musk. He has a mental model for dealing with this.

Tesla’s Elon Musk describes his everyday stance as, “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” The physicist James Clerk Maxwell described it as a “thoroughly conscious ignorance—the prelude to every real advance in science.”
So remember you should never assume that you’re right. In fact, assume the opposite. Most of the human error comes from the wrong people thinking they’re right.


By approaching the world as if you’re wrong, you will become more humble and be less apt to make mistakes of ego. And besides all that, it’s best to think of human intelligence not as what is going on IN your brain, but as what is going on outside your brain.

Because the reality is, our thinking is really part of a bigger picture. And that brings us to the 4th Mental Model. This model helps to tame the ego even more than the idea of assuming you’re wrong.

This Mental Model is called “The Brain”.

It operates on the assumption that human intelligence isn’t within your brain. It’s actually outside in the civilization around us. Her’s another way to think about it.

Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — our brains are modules in a cognitive system much larger than ourselves. A system that is already self-improving, and has been for a long time.
And none of this matters if you don’t take action on these mental models.

Which brings us to the 5th and final Mental Model. The mental model is the most important one of all because without it you won’t actually follow through on the other 4 Mental Models.

This mental model has to do with discipline and actually getting things done.

You’ve got to rely heavily on self-discipline. This is the mental model that strings all the others together. And it’s massively important to your success. Too many wait around for emotions (read: motivation) before they want to get started or keep acquiring knowledge.

Self-discipline is the ultimate mental model because by using is power wisely, you will unlock all the other mental models to guide you through the rest of your life. It was said best by the late, great, Jim Rohn.

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” ~Jim Rohn

About this post. This post was written "LIVE" on the Building A Second Brain course featuring Tiago Forte and David Perell.
There are several notes taken directly from David which he provided as part of the class. Hope you enjoyed it and make sure you check out BASB and Write Of Passage.

This entire post was written in less than an hour using random notes pulled from David's Evernote file.

How To Take Good Notes (Part 2)

metalearning, productivity


Welcome back to How To Take Good Notes.

This is part 2 in what will most likely be a 5 part series. If you missed part 1, you can (and should) go read that here: How To Write Good Notes Part 1.

To briefly recap, when you want to take good notes, you start off by using the META Method. This is just a short acronym that helps you remember the 4 Questions you must ask yourself before you even begin to learn the information.

Medium
Experience
Time
Accomplish

Once you know the answer to these 4 questions, you are ready to dive in and learn more about how to take good notes. For this example, we’ll look at reading a book as it’s the simplest and most common way to consume information.

You can consume a textbook or a non-fiction book all the same. The key to this method is to look for the highlights of what you want to remember. Now, one note taking methodology I like a lot is Progressive Summarization by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs. It’s a key component to his Building A Second Brain course which I highly recommend for any knowledge worker.

The gist of the method is that you first extract the information you want to learn (like highlighting the text in an ebook reader). You do this as you read the whole book.
At the end of the book, you may have 10 pages of notes (or more). These notes are not in your own words, however, so you are very unlikely to remember them. You also don’t want to have to review all those notes so you embark on phase 2 which is to go through and bold the notes that seem most important to you.

Then, make a second pass and focusing only on the bold try to highlight the most important parts of the bold text.

You should be able to take the notes down to maybe 20% of what they were. And now you have boiled the book down to its essence. As an optional step, you could now go back and look at the bold highlight text and rewrite this portion in your own words as if you were the teacher trying to explain it to someone who knew nothing about the subject.

This is a technique made famous by Richard Feynam. Professor Feynman won a Nobel Prize and was considered a genius by many. He also offers this sage advice:
• Read every day.
• Spend time with nature.
• Ask questions.
• Never stop learning.
• Don’t pay attention to what others think of you.
• Do what interests you the most.
• Study hard.
• Teach others what you know.
• Make mistakes and learn.
• It’s Okay to not know things!

How To Take Good Notes – The Strategy

Now, where I want to differentiate my instruction from the advice above from Tiago is to zoom in a little more on WHAT I like to take notes about. Tiago no doubt does an excellent job as well with his method, but perhaps this will speak to you as well because I try to keep it simple and I use a lot of easy to remember words.

As you are reading the material (meaning in real-time) what you want to look for are certain types of topics or things to take notes on. Here are the 6 main things I focus on that help me take good notes.

Notes: Ideas or thoughts from your study in your own words.
Quotes: Extractions from the material in the author’s words.
Anecdotes: Stories and examples from the material to support claims such as stats, studies, and charts.
Claims: What claims are made by the author and how are they proven?
Names: Names of places, people, and events that are worth remembering.
Frames: What frame is the author using to convince you of the material? Notate any bias or predispositions that may color the material.

Now, my list is a little bias towards if you are needing to take notes with the goal of taking a test in the future or memorizing facts. But it’s still the same principles you would want to follow, it just depends upon how deep you want to go.

Let’s look at each of these areas a little closer.

Notes are just things that jump out to you as important or interesting. The key here is that you want to write them in your own words. Doing this makes it way more likely that you’ll remember the ideas as well. I used to think it was the writing that made this happen. Really, it’s the thinking that makes it happen. You have to bring the information into your mind, process it, reformat it, then produce it again in your own words. This is a powerful tactic to remember more of what you read.

Next, you’ll also want to extract Quotes. These are just copy/paste of what the author said. This is especially good for detail or paragraphs of content that you want to get right. You can always go back through your notes and rewrite these as well in your own words later.
You also want to remember to denote as best you can what is something you wrote as a note and what was copied as a quote. Using a simple N or Q can make this easy to remember and track.

You’ll also want to listen for Anecdotes. For me, anecdotes mean a few different things. Stories obviously but I want your main thought here to be what is the author saying that supports the claims she is making. And don’t worry, we’ll get to claims next. As you read you will want to extra the support pillars of the piece. This includes things like stories, statistics, studies, and charts. You want to be able to go back and review the studies mentioned to see if they hold up.

I tend to downplay note taking on “stories” in books, mainly that’s because while entertaining they don’t hold a lot of knowledge value to me. But they are fantastic teaching tools. If you plan on teaching this material it’s always best to reference the characters mentioned in a story. There are many great stories I wish I remembered that proved a point I was trying to make. So, be better than me!

Now, let’s talk about claims. Believe it or not, every book you read is attempting to sell you something. Usually not something physical, but an idea. Or a belief. The author of the book wants you to believe something.

You should make special note of any claim the author makes or wants you to believe. Many of the smartest people read books with a skeptical eye. This actually helps you remember the material more too because you are in essence attacking it which can trigger a hormone release.

See what I did there? I just made that up. I vaguely remember reading something about it, but it probably isn’t true. Just because something is written down, that doesn’t mean it’s true. But I did find this article that maybe can stretch to cover part of my claim. Write down then vet all claims as you take notes if the material is very important to you.

That brings us to Names. Here you will want to track all the names of people, places, events, dates, etc. This is really important if you are going to be tested on the material.

Who was the 16th President of the United States?
What is the Capital City of Nebraska?
In what year did Columbus sail across the Atlantic?

These are the sorts of things you’ll be extracting as you read and look for names.
And to wrap it up, cause we’re running long here. Let’s talk about the final thing you want to pay attention to while taking good notes.

You want to look for Frames. This is not necessarily a “how to take good notes” process, but an admonition to be aware of how the author is framing a story or idea. Framing is powerful. By the nature of writing, we have to leave some information out and focus on other information. Crime Documentary’s do this to extreme effect. I’ve watched some that leave me beside myself with the unjustness of an innocent man only to find out later that the Documentarian left out a ton of the evidence used to convict the person.

So, you want to watch out for bias, watch out for the experience and life the person had before writing the book, and most important look for any “color” added to the descriptions of events or stories. The words used by the author can make a major difference
Consider these two phrases and how they technically are both true but conjure up different feelings.

“The man wore all black and slowly made his way up the driveway. He glanced around before banging his fist against the door to see if anyone was home.”

“Dad wore his favorite black hoodie, the same he had since high school. He playfully sneaked up the driveway so he could surprise Mom, who hadn’t seen him in weeks. He banged loudly on the door to disguise his easily recognized knock. He was grinning from ear to ear as Mom asked who was at the door.”

Same story, a different voice, a different viewpoint, and entirely different feelings evoked, right?

Alright, that’s enough for this post. Next time around we’ll look at 3 things you need to focus on directly as you read the book. This additional method allows you to create new ideas from what you’re reading instead of just extracting information.

Part 3 is now available here now.