How to Take Good Notes - The 6 Areas of Knowledge Extraction

When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own. Not to mention, if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, over time you’re going to find yourself doing l

Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mea

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

While the purpose of taking literature notes is as clear as the procedure, you are free to use whatever technique helps the most with understanding what you are reading and getting to useful notes – even if you use ten different colours for underlining and a SQ8R reading technique. But all of this would be just an extra step before you do the only

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.