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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
July 8 - August 5, 2022
PKM—or personal knowledge management.
According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1
Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.3
report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems.4 Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs.
Have you ever lost your smartphone or been unable to access the Internet, and felt like a critical part of yourself was missing? That’s a sign that an external tool has become an extension of your mind. In a 2004 study, Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki discovered that when monkeys and humans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake to reach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of the body to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea that external tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds.
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.
In 1953, American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick made a profound discovery: the structure of DNA was a double helix.
By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association.
recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones.
American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger once wrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7 When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with.
intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.
keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.
distill your notes down to their essence.
Creativity depends on a creative process.
Feynman is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1965. In his spare time, he also played a pivotal role on the commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster
Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too.
There’s scientific evidence that our intuition knows what it’s doing. From the book Designing for Behavior Change:9 Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards—some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong—long
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Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later reading
On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes.
save it to a “read later” app,
Use a voice memo app that allows you to press a button, speak directly into your smartphone, and have every word transcribed into text and exported to your notes.
Capturing parts of YouTube videos: This is a little-known feature, but almost every YouTube video is accompanied by an automatically generated transcript. Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes.
Capturing excerpts from emails: Most popular notes apps include a feature that allows you to forward any email to a special address, and the full text of that email (including any attachments) will be added to your notes.
you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas,
recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most.
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to. First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose, but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place.
notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.
Paradoxically, the more notes they collect, the less discoverable they become!
I have my read later app synced to my digital notes app, so any passage I highlight there automatically gets saved in my notes, including a link to the source.
The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self*—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it.
Sönke Ahrens observes in his book How to Take Smart Notes, this is the fundamental paradox at the heart of writing: you have to do the research before you know what you will write about.
the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.” To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action.
One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish.
by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done.
If you look at the process of creating anything, it follows the same simple pattern, alternating back and forth between divergence and convergence.
The Archipelago of Ideas technique
Hlavne myslienky ako ostrovceky, ktore ked mam, tak uz ich len poprepajam
choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing).
Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.*
Design Thinking, an approach to creative problem-solving that emerged out of the Stanford Design School and was further popularized by the innovation consultancy IDEO starting in the 1980s and 1990s.
mise en place, a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world. Developed in France starting in the late 1800s, mise en place is a step-by-step process for producing high-quality food efficiently. Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up. They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they are preparing. In the kitchen, this means small habits like always putting the mixing spoon in the same place so they know where to find it next time; immediately wiping a knife clean after using it so it’s ready for the next cut;
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The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.
