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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Documenting thoughts when reading books

In this tutoring video (around 1:58:00) Elliot says something to the effect of *when you're reading a book and get to a dealbreaker, a major problem, write down the quote*.

What I've been doing is this: when I'm reading a book and get to a part that is interesting (like let's say it's a sentence that I conclude is the main point of the chapter), or I have a doubt about the ideas, or I think something is wrong (even a small thing like a misuse of a word) or I'm not fully clear on what something means, then document the quote and my thoughts about it.

Lately I've been doing more than that. I've been writing down my thoughts plus editing them to make them worthy of review by other people, all directly in a blog post. 

I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing. Another thing I've tried re book reading sessions is this: read, take notes directly in the digital book, then when done reading make a blog post and use the notes to remind myself of what to write about. I'll call this my 2-step method and the previous method (described in previous paragraph) my 1-step method.

I see pros and cons with both methods.

A pro with the 1-step method is that I'm less likely to forget what I was thinking (including context from the book) when I was reading the book. The 2-step method is ok for this because I'm using notes as reminders, but it's not as effective at this than compared to the 1-step method.

A con with the 1-step method is that there are much longer interruptions between reading phases because I'm putting more time/effort into my thinking during those interruptions. [1]

At this point I think overall the 1-step method is better.

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[1] I didn't explain why longer interruptions is a downside.

1 comment:

  1. FYI you can link to a particular location in a YT video via the "share" button and the "Start at XX:XX:XX" checkbox. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/VXzZrot.png

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