Speaker 1: So I'm going to talk to you today about my method for taking better book notes. This is not the method that I used while I was working on my PhD, but it is the method that I wish I had used. Because since I have started using this method, I have found that my workflow has been simplified, but also I am retaining information better, and I am able to make more interesting connections between all the different books that I read and my own original thoughts. So to use this system, you only need three things. First, you need a book that you're going to read. I also use some sticky notes, which I'll talk about in a second, but the sticky notes are not essential to the system. Another thing is that you're going to need something to write with. I have a pencil here. I like to use a pencil when I'm marking in my books, but you could use a pen. It's up to you. And then you're going to need a stack of note cards. So this system really only has three steps. First, you annotate, then you export, and then you organize. By annotate, what I mean is while you are reading a book, in my case, this is Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, you are going to make little marks in the page. If I were to turn here, you would see that the kind of little marks I'm talking about really are just lines, or in my case, I like to use these sticky notes to highlight what I think are particularly important parts of the book. I also think that using these sticky notes, by the way, has an added advantage. I don't keep the sticky notes in the book permanently. Once I have gone through the process of taking notes for the entire book, I will remove the sticky notes. So sticky notes actually serve as a visual reminder to me that there is a book that I have read that I have not yet properly taken notes on. How you annotate your book can really vary. I prefer to just make a little underline on certain lines that I particularly like, and maybe to put a little star next to a paragraph that I think is particularly important. On very rare occasions, I will write a sentence in the margins that is trying to sort of seed an idea that's maybe saying, here is where some connection might possibly be. But importantly in annotating, I am just allowing myself to mark what might be relevant to me in the future. I am not trying to have my great ideas yet. I think that if you jump too soon into trying to have your great ideas, what happens is you don't properly read the text, and you often have just worse ideas. So the second step is to export. And by export, I mean you're going to take a stack of note cards, and then you are going to go through a chapter or an entire book. I prefer to do this with an entire book, but sometimes you could do it by chapter. You're going to then go through all of your annotations, and you are going to write down the passages or the quotes or the lines that you thought were most beneficial from this book. While also exporting, you can decide if you want to add your own thoughts or summaries. I like using slightly larger note cards because I can get a few more thoughts on them. But one of the nice things about note cards is that they sort of naturally constrain how many thoughts you can have. So you really want your note cards to only have one or two major thoughts. In a couple of the note cards you can see in some of the footage I shot, I actually wrote a lot of notes. What I would probably decide to do is actually take one of those note cards and then break it apart into two or three note cards. This is an organic process. It's one that you iterate on. And so I have no problem taking one note card, eventually getting rid of it, but keeping those ideas and separating them out. The note cards themselves, I do really think are essential. It's totally fine if you will eventually want to put these into a digital tool. I just think that actually writing these by hand is going to help you understand the information. In part, it is able to help you retain information and to make more interesting connections because it slows you down. My worry with using digital tools exclusively is that digital tools really are optimized for efficiency. They want to get the work done quickly. But I think that if we want to have really deep thoughts and interesting ideas, we need to purposefully slow down. Now for about half a chapter of Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy, which is not long, I have about 10 note cards. These note cards, as I said, might be broken up into smaller pieces in the future. But for now, I have 10 of them. We might decide that we're going to hold off on doing anything with these note cards until we've finished the book. I think that this is probably the best method. What this is going to allow you to do is see broader and bigger connections between the entire text. If that's the case, then you're just going to want to find a safe place to keep these. So I like to use this wooden box. I keep it on my desk and I just call this my idea box. Inside of this wooden box, it's big enough to hold note cards and I just keep big stacks of note cards in there. You could use an envelope. You could buy a little plastic case. There are lots of different options here. One thing, though, is that you probably want to keep these 10 cards grouped together to start with. So grab a paperclip or a rubber band and then just put them together. There's one more step that really matters for this system. And that is that you're going to eventually group all of your notes together. Because right now, all of your notes have been grouped by the fact that they are about the same book and that they are from the same chapter. But that's actually not where your most interesting ideas are going to be formed. What you need to do is take your note cards, find a big open space. Maybe you have a big desk. Maybe you can use your floor. Put them all on the ground or all on your desk and start looking through them to find connections or themes. So I can already see some themes emerging and that's just with 10 cards. This is a description of Lady Philosophy that Boethius gives. What I'm realizing is that all of the descriptions of Lady Philosophy are, in fact, symbolic of what philosophy is and ought to be. So a few pages later, when there's some verse about the value of philosophy and there's a description of climbing the sky with zeal devout and contemplating the crimson sun, which I wrote both of those down on this note card, I realized that because there is a lot of imagery that involves light, this probably has something to do with the fact that Lady Philosophy is described as having keen eyes in the very beginning of this book. And so I would start grouping those together. The theme that's emerging is the nature and value of philosophy and Boethius is describing it using poetic imagery. And maybe I would find those connections in later chapters of the book as well. And it would be really great if I could find a couple of lines in the book where Boethius has it stated explicitly. So I would have both the symbolic representation of philosophy and an explicit statement of Boethius's view of philosophy. I also have some stuff in here that's not actually all that connected. For instance, Lady Philosophy has a line about Stoicism, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet because it seems to be pretty dismissive of Stoicism about how Stoics don't possess the fullness of the truth of philosophy, which I'm assuming for Boethius is a pretty Platonist kind of conception of philosophy. I don't know what to do with that card yet, but I'm not going to discard it yet. I'm going to see if as I continue on reading this book, I can find other mentions of Stoicism or other endorsements of maybe a Platonist conception of philosophy, and then we can talk about how these different competing schools of philosophy might have written a different book, for instance, something different than Boethius. As you start organizing, you're going to want to keep some blank note cards as well, because on those new blank note cards, you're going to start writing big headers for themes. So for instance, I have this note card which just says, What is philosophy? And I would put that at the top of my thematic stack that I identified earlier. I also want to have those blank note cards so I can start writing down some of my own thoughts. Here are connections maybe to other text. Here are ways that I would want to present it when I'm presenting it to an audience. So I do this usually when I have a project in mind. I use those new blank note cards to start seeding future ideas for myself again, right? So when I go to try and, you know, write my book or write the script for an episode, I can look through my own ideas to see what I wanted to say, and then I can find all of these notes from various books. So, so far, we have focused on taking notes on one book at a time. And that's how this system really begins. But you can continue to expand it for whatever project you're doing. So if you're reading a couple of books and using them all in service of some larger project, how you organize your stacks is going to vary. So you're going to have some stacks that are only from one book, but you're going to have other stacks, which might be about the main theme of the thing you're writing, and you're going to take cards from all sorts of books. There is no goal-neutral way of organizing your notes. You always have to be asking yourself, what is it that you are trying to do? For some of us, that is about writing or producing content eventually. For others, though, it's just about understanding the book itself. So how you organize your note cards is going to vary based on those differences in objectives. It is only after you have done some of the organization of your cards that I would then suggest considering using some kind of app or some sort of digital tool. Because at that point, you have already done the work of synthesizing and grouping and understanding what you've been reading. And now you're going to use that digital tool for what it's really good at, storage and discovery. Note cards have a tendency to get lost or to get damaged, and they can also only be stored in one place at one time. But if you use the right kind of digital tool, you can reuse that text over and over, and you can find connections that you make explicit through some of their functionality. If I could think of one major criticism of this approach to note-taking, it is that it's a lot of work. This is not a hyper-efficient way of doing things, but often we prioritize efficiency over actual understanding, or as the ancients might have called it, over wisdom. This is the note-taking system I've landed on that I think promotes true understanding of the text, helps you to come up with your own original thoughts, and in general, cultivates wisdom. And that's what we're all about at this channel. We don't focus on being hyper-efficient. We don't focus on doing things just for the sake of doing them. What we are trying to do is look at great text and great books and kind of imbibe them properly. And this is a system that would let you do that. Okay, I think that's all I have for you today. If you like this and want to see more content like it in the future, make sure to subscribe so that you can always see new stuff that I'm coming up with. Also, you might want to check out my podcast, The Classical Mind. There's a link down in the description. We're going to be talking about Boethius in January, so you can listen to that episode. And you have enough time to read it, so you could read along with us. And also, let me know down in the comments if there's anything you'd like to see about note-taking in the future. Until next time, take care.