How Professional Writers Take Notes on Books | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, so I thought, Jesse, we should do a habit tune up segment.

00:00:05.560 | We've been doing these off and on.

00:00:06.720 | I think people have been enjoying them.

00:00:09.040 | These are segments where I just take a piece of advice or a strategy from my productivity

00:00:14.560 | canon, things I've written about in my books or in my newsletter over the years, and just

00:00:18.160 | get into it a little bit, tune up or refresh people's understanding of that habit.

00:00:25.160 | So in today's habit tune up, I want to talk about the corner marking method for taking

00:00:32.120 | book notes.

00:00:34.280 | So the general topic here is taking notes on the books you read.

00:00:37.320 | Now, before we get into the specifics of what I do, we've got to make it clear that there

00:00:41.440 | are two general schools of thought among those who think about reading, two different schools

00:00:47.940 | of thought about the role note taking should play when you are reading books.

00:00:53.820 | Now these are my names, but I think most people would agree with these general categories.

00:00:57.240 | The first is what I call the Zettelkasten school of thought.

00:01:01.160 | So inspired by the Zettelkasten note taking system, this school of thought says you should

00:01:06.960 | always take notes on books you read, regardless of why you're reading them or what you're

00:01:11.420 | reading them for.

00:01:12.420 | You should take notes.

00:01:13.640 | You should capture that information into some sort of smart system so that it can be fuel

00:01:20.720 | for this external brain that is cybernetically augmenting your cogitation.

00:01:29.120 | So if you're a big Zettelkasten, for example, adherent, you would be putting notes on in

00:01:36.600 | Rome or in Obsidian or in, what's the other one, Notion, and they would be connected with

00:01:45.520 | semantic links to other notes and forming this web of knowledge that you could later

00:01:49.360 | pull from.

00:01:50.880 | There's all sorts of variations of the similar philosophy.

00:01:53.120 | Ryan Holiday, for example, copies quotes from books on the index cards and he categorizes

00:01:58.200 | them in these big boxes and he can then go back later and find index cards by boxes to

00:02:03.000 | get the quotes and stories he needs for his book.

00:02:05.240 | So it's this whole notion of this is fuel for your external brain.

00:02:09.640 | Get the information into some system where it can form connections, be retrievable later,

00:02:14.060 | but also help you generate new ideas.

00:02:18.960 | That's the Zettelkasten school of thought.

00:02:20.680 | The other school of thought on book note taking is what I call the pragmatic school, which

00:02:26.200 | says only take notes on a book if you have a very specific purpose for which you're using

00:02:29.840 | that book.

00:02:30.840 | Those notes should be serving that purpose.

00:02:33.160 | So for example, if you think this book will be relevant for a book chapter you are currently

00:02:38.400 | writing, then you would take notes on that book for use in that specific book chapter.

00:02:44.200 | On the other hand, if you're just reading a book because it's interesting, then there's

00:02:46.560 | no notes to be taken.

00:02:47.920 | It's better to focus on reading as much as you can and just enjoying bathing in knowledge.

00:02:53.800 | That's the pragmatic method.

00:02:54.840 | It's very focused.

00:02:56.680 | I am a believer in the pragmatic method.

00:02:58.640 | I'm not saying it's best.

00:02:59.880 | I'm just saying this is what I happen to do.

00:03:03.640 | So let me make this concrete for you.

00:03:05.280 | As we talked about earlier in the show, working on a new book, a book about slow productivity,

00:03:11.320 | I was just working on the opening to a chapter on the principle of doing fewer things.

00:03:19.840 | And I wanted to tell the story of Jane Austen and Andrew Wiles.

00:03:25.600 | Andrew Wiles is the Princeton professor who solved Fermat's last theorem back in the early

00:03:33.600 | 1990s.

00:03:34.600 | And for various reasons, their stories interleave.

00:03:37.120 | What I vaguely remembered of them is their stories interleave in interesting ways, and

00:03:41.720 | they do a good job of exemplifying the power of actually reducing the number of things

00:03:45.560 | in your play as compared to other people in your same circumstance.

00:03:48.080 | So that was a general idea.

00:03:49.840 | So I got a biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomlin's biography, which is excellent, by

00:03:53.600 | the way.

00:03:54.840 | And I got a book on Fermat's last theorem, Simon Singh's book, Fermat's Enigma, which

00:04:00.560 | tells the whole story of Andrew Wiles.

00:04:01.880 | It also tells the whole story of Fermat and et cetera.

00:04:04.220 | But it's the most comprehensive story of Andrew Wiles and his tackling of the proof.

00:04:08.880 | I bought those books to write these chapters.

00:04:11.560 | One of them I already owned, but the other one I bought.

00:04:14.160 | And I went through and I took notes on those books specifically aimed at what I knew I

00:04:18.520 | was going to read.

00:04:19.520 | Then a couple of days later, I went through those notes and I used it to actually help

00:04:23.960 | my reading.

00:04:24.960 | So that's an example of pragmatic note taking.

00:04:26.620 | How do I take those notes in this circumstance?

00:04:28.360 | Well, this is where I use the before mentioned corner marking method, which is a method for

00:04:35.620 | taking notes that focuses on minimizing friction as quickly as possible.

00:04:41.120 | How can you get the information you need at the fastest possible speed?

00:04:45.700 | Because that is the mindset I'm often in when I'm book writing, because there's a lot of

00:04:49.560 | books I need to get through.

00:04:51.820 | So I thought what I would do here is load up our Magic Telestrator.

00:04:54.700 | So again, if you're listening, you can find this video at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

00:05:01.760 | So Jesse has loaded up here just a sample page from a book.

00:05:06.920 | This is a page from our friend Greg McKeown's book, Effortless.

00:05:10.120 | And I'm just going to use the marking tools to actually show you what my marks look like.

00:05:16.040 | All right, so over here on the right, we see a sample page.

00:05:20.040 | If there's something in this page that I think is relevant, I put a slash in the corner.

00:05:25.160 | So imagine that slash I just drew is in the corner of the page.

00:05:28.160 | Why in the corner?

00:05:29.160 | Because when you're flipping through the book, you can quickly identify which pages have

00:05:32.040 | the slashes.

00:05:33.040 | It's right there in the upper right corner or the upper left corner.

00:05:35.240 | So you can very quickly identify where you have information.

00:05:38.600 | All right, and then what I do on the actual page is very simple.

00:05:43.760 | When I find something that's relevant, I'll do one of two things.

00:05:48.040 | I'll either bracket, so I'll bracket off a paragraph, at least I'll try to.

00:05:56.160 | So for those who are watching online, you can watch me struggle with the pen.

00:05:59.740 | So again, I'm just bracketing on the outside a paragraph that I think is relevant.

00:06:04.600 | I'm not writing commentary about it.

00:06:06.400 | I'm not writing down why I think it's important.

00:06:08.920 | I'm not putting a lot of notes down.

00:06:10.240 | I trust my brain that when it sees that bracketed paragraph later, it'll know why.

00:06:14.240 | The other thing I'll do is underline.

00:06:16.720 | So like here, I'm underlining if there's like a name or something that seems important,

00:06:22.600 | or a sentence I particularly like, or it's a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, I

00:06:26.520 | don't want to bracket a whole line.

00:06:27.760 | I want to get the sentence, I'll underline it.

00:06:31.040 | That's really about it.

00:06:32.080 | Now, there's two other exceptional things I will do with corner marking.

00:06:35.800 | Since I know why I'm taking notes, I know why I'm taking the notes.

00:06:40.340 | If there is a passage that I think is just a home run perfect type of thing I'm looking

00:06:46.300 | for, it's not background on example, but like this is what I'm looking for.

00:06:50.780 | I'll put a star.

00:06:54.300 | And for those watching at home will see that I drew a perfectly symmetrical star there

00:06:58.700 | and are impressed by my graphic design skills.

00:07:01.560 | And then I'll often then star the corner.

00:07:06.340 | So now when I'm flipping through, if I see a star in the corner that I say, oh, that

00:07:10.500 | is that's the page with the really good stuff.

00:07:13.780 | So I can get to that really quickly.

00:07:16.120 | And the only other thing I'll sometimes do in corner marking is occasionally I'll be

00:07:22.860 | looking at an argument I think is important that I want to remember.

00:07:26.200 | Often arguments and books will be in multiple parts.

00:07:28.420 | It'll say here are the three reasons why, you know, whatever this method doesn't work.

00:07:35.040 | And so in that case, I'll actually draw numbers next to those reasons where they show up.

00:07:41.060 | So then I can very quickly know that all of these things I've numbered are part of the

00:07:46.020 | same argument.

00:07:47.020 | So we have a one somewhere and a two somewhere else, et cetera.

00:07:52.940 | Okay, that's it.

00:07:54.200 | So it's dead simple with no commentary, nothing copying to another system, no note cards going

00:08:00.780 | into a box.

00:08:01.780 | Now I can tell you from experience.

00:08:03.300 | I'm on my eighth book now.

00:08:05.960 | Your brain remembers things.

00:08:07.740 | So if you flip through these things and you see underlying passages, you see bracketed

00:08:13.700 | passages, you see numbered pieces of arguments.

00:08:16.200 | Your brain is really good at being like, oh, that's really interesting.

00:08:18.100 | How can we use that?

00:08:19.100 | How is that relevant?

00:08:20.100 | And it figures it out, right?

00:08:21.900 | You don't have to treat your future brain like it's going to somehow be significantly

00:08:25.220 | impaired.

00:08:26.220 | It need to be helped along a lot.

00:08:27.560 | If you're writing a chapter about doing fewer things and you come to a bracketed off paragraph

00:08:34.720 | in a Jane Austen biography about the way that her sister Cassandra and her mother were helping

00:08:43.400 | her take on taking chores off her plate after they moved to Charlton house in the early

00:08:48.400 | 19th century, you know why that's relevant.

00:08:52.160 | You don't have to write a note to yourself about it.

00:08:54.880 | So it's a very low friction approach, but it works very well.

00:08:56.760 | It's like I over two days, I read the Austin book.

00:08:59.320 | I marked it up.

00:09:00.320 | Then a couple of days later I was writing.

00:09:01.920 | It took me about five minutes to go through every corner mark page and skim the bracketed

00:09:08.000 | and underlying lines.

00:09:09.000 | So in five minutes I have queued up in my brain everything relevant about Jane Austen

00:09:14.920 | and is right there in my working memory and I can pull the right lines I need for the

00:09:18.320 | thing I'm writing in the moment.

00:09:19.760 | The system works really well.

00:09:21.600 | The overhead is minimal.

00:09:23.080 | I have relied on it for a long time.

00:09:25.060 | The only other cool thing I'll say about this system is that if you mark up a book

00:09:28.200 | for one project and I know this from experience and you come back to that book many years

00:09:33.360 | later, probably what you marked is still the most relevant stuff for whatever you're working

00:09:39.080 | on.

00:09:40.200 | It's the stuff that's interesting to you and the type of things you normally work on.

00:09:44.200 | So I will often go back to already marked books and go through and say, this is all

00:09:49.560 | the cool stuff I need anyways.

00:09:50.720 | It'll be relevant to another project I do.

00:09:53.640 | Now something people are worried about is defacing books.

00:09:56.480 | I want you to get over that.

00:09:59.160 | All right.

00:10:00.760 | Books are incredibly efficient but rich compressed collections of knowledge.

00:10:07.120 | The whole point and I'm talking nonfiction here.

00:10:10.240 | The whole point is to make use of that knowledge to make functional the knowledge in that book.

00:10:16.720 | So adding your markings is part of you decompressing, extracting and putting into use all of the

00:10:22.640 | knowledge captured in this codex.

00:10:24.440 | Now what if you mark up a book for one reason and now you have a completely different reason

00:10:27.920 | why you need the book and these marks are no longer relevant.

00:10:30.400 | Here's my suggestion.

00:10:31.400 | Get ready to clutch your pearls.

00:10:33.520 | Buy another copy of the book.

00:10:37.000 | We treat books too preciously.

00:10:39.240 | Not buying a car here.

00:10:40.240 | It costs 15 bucks.

00:10:41.640 | You should buy more books.

00:10:45.000 | I have already bought just to be, let's make this concrete for this one chapter I'm writing

00:10:49.520 | in slow productivity.

00:10:50.520 | I have already bought seven books as part of my research for this and I am three out

00:10:58.520 | of six.

00:10:59.720 | So about halfway through.

00:11:01.720 | So I'll probably end up buying, I don't know, 10 books, maybe an even dozen.

00:11:06.760 | That's three or $400 well spent if I get 10,000 really good words out of it.

00:11:10.480 | I mean, well for the price of lunch at Panera, you could have the polished compressed wisdom

00:11:17.160 | of a scholar who spent 20 years working on a topic.

00:11:19.640 | I mean, it's the best bargain in town.

00:11:21.120 | We should buy more books.

00:11:22.320 | And obviously as an author, I have a bias here, but we should buy books, mark up books,

00:11:26.960 | buy other copies of books.

00:11:27.960 | I'll buy second copies of books.

00:11:29.800 | I'll have multiple copies in different formats of books.

00:11:32.560 | I'll own it, get rid of it, buy another copy.

00:11:35.880 | We should have books being a much richer part of our life, a much more common part of our

00:11:40.120 | life.

00:11:41.120 | We shouldn't worry so much about having too much books or keeping the books really precious.

00:11:45.600 | They're meant to be used, so mark them up.

00:11:50.000 | So do you do, it's all hard cover, hard copy books?

00:11:54.920 | Whatever, I mean, so you mean versus Kindle or hard copy versus paperback?

00:11:59.580 | Versus Kindle.

00:12:00.580 | I'll usually, I prefer to have the physical because the corner marking method is very

00:12:05.040 | efficient.

00:12:06.040 | Yeah.

00:12:07.040 | I'll do Kindle.

00:12:08.160 | How would you go about, you just look at your note, your bookmarks?

00:12:11.840 | Yeah, so in Kindle you can highlight using your finger and then you can export.

00:12:18.000 | So when you're done highlighting a book, you can export and it will actually send to the

00:12:22.900 | email address that's associated with your Kindle account, a PDF that has everything

00:12:27.280 | you highlighted put, actually pretty nicely formatted.

00:12:29.840 | Right?

00:12:30.840 | So it's actually kind of nice, right?

00:12:33.080 | A couple of problems with it though.

00:12:35.560 | The 25% or something?

00:12:37.440 | Well, so, so some books, some books will correlate Kindle locations with page numbers in an actual

00:12:45.440 | printed edition.

00:12:46.800 | Some don't.

00:12:48.020 | So I do not like, and my copy editors and fact checkers do not like when I'm trying

00:12:51.880 | to cite something from a book and all you have is a Kindle location.

00:12:55.240 | Right?

00:12:56.240 | So I think that's problem number one.

00:12:57.600 | Some books don't have this problem.

00:13:00.240 | Some do.

00:13:01.240 | I mean, there's ways around it.

00:13:02.960 | Like not to, not to, again, to give away secrets of the trade, but I know like New York, New

00:13:07.480 | Yorker fact checkers often because they don't want to buy every book you used.

00:13:12.520 | And I used to send them photos of the page or whatever.

00:13:16.720 | They use Google books often.

00:13:18.000 | So you can use Google books and search for the particular line and you basically will

00:13:21.760 | get a image of the page and you can see like, oh, this is exactly the way the line looked

00:13:26.520 | in the books.

00:13:27.520 | There's a way you can go from, let's say Kindle highlighted quotes and actually get the page

00:13:31.560 | number.

00:13:32.860 | But it's nice just to have it to, I use my library like a library, you know, so I like

00:13:38.040 | to be able to pull things off.

00:13:39.040 | I do this all the time.

00:13:40.040 | I pull things off the shelf and use it for different projects.

00:13:42.640 | That's harder with Kindle.

00:13:44.440 | I mean, I know a lot of people are more minimalist about books.

00:13:47.040 | Like why do we drag all these books around and they just take up so much space and they're

00:13:50.200 | heavy.

00:13:51.200 | I actually use my library like a library.

00:13:52.440 | I'm constantly pulling books off of it.

00:13:54.120 | So, so I like having the artifact, but I'll do Kindle, especially if I don't want to wait

00:13:57.840 | like, oh man, I got to write this right now.

00:13:59.640 | And I think this book has a chapter in it I need, I'll just buy the Kindle thing so

00:14:04.060 | I can have it.

00:14:05.060 | Um, it's, by the way, it's not uncommon for me to then buy a hardcover paperback version

00:14:11.020 | of a book I had in Kindle, you know, I'll get some notes out of it.

00:14:14.140 | I'm like, this is useful and I'll buy the book.

00:14:16.940 | So I have it for my library as well.

00:14:18.540 | So again, I'm happy to buy a book multiple times.

00:14:21.020 | Do any of these books that you're reading count for your May books?

00:14:25.780 | I'm not reading them.

00:14:27.580 | I'm not counting any of them towards the May books.

00:14:29.060 | Like for the, for the Austin biography, I'm turning the speed knob up and down.

00:14:34.660 | So I'm kind of skimming and then I slow down when things are really relevant and then I

00:14:38.060 | speed back up.

00:14:39.340 | Now that's enough for me to have a pretty nuanced understanding, I would say of like

00:14:44.020 | Austin's life and the social and economic circumstances in which he lived and the dynamics

00:14:48.340 | of her family.

00:14:49.340 | Like I now know a lot about Jane Austin, but you know, I didn't read every detail, so I

00:14:53.180 | don't count it towards the May book.

00:14:54.700 | For the Fermat's book, I was just reading the chapters about Andrew.

00:14:57.740 | So I don't count it towards the May books.

00:15:01.300 | So but if I, if I read every page, then I will.

00:15:05.380 | When you're doing book, I mean, if I'm going to read a dozen books for this chapter, I'm

00:15:08.740 | not going to read every line of those books.

00:15:10.500 | You're going to be in and out.

00:15:11.500 | You're going to skip chapters.

00:15:12.500 | You get really good at variable speed skimming.

00:15:15.780 | And if you do it well, you can learn a ton.

00:15:17.380 | You get a lot of context pretty quickly.

00:15:19.740 | [MUSIC]

How Professional Writers Take Notes on Books | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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