Reading

How often have you finished a book only to retain the vaguest sense of what you just read?
This is anecdotally a pretty common occurrence, and I've found that my recall improves when I introduce a few additional practices:
Engage my own critical thinking.  "Is this a good idea?" "What are arguments against this?" "How would I articulate this to someone else?"  Basically, anything that forces my mind to actually work with the idea, instead of just passively absorbing.
Externalize complex ideas.  For multi-step arguments that exceed my working memory, I write down the components and work through them independently.
With that in mind, this is how I use my PKB to read (mostly non-fiction) books:
1.I read a book once through to get the overall picture.
2.I create a textfile with the name of the book in my Reading/ folder.
3.I take another pass through the book and try to extract all the ideas or facts that I find interesting.  Even if you disagree with it, it's often worth recording to sharpen why you disagree with it.
4.I annotate these notes with my own thoughts and commentary.
5.I then cascade the interesting insights from the notes about this book through the rest of my PKB. For example, if I just read Seeing Like A State, then I probably have interesting ideas to cascade to my PoliticalScience/ folder.

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Last modified 1yr ago

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