All right, so I thought, Jesse, we should do a habit tune up segment. We've been doing these off and on. I think people have been enjoying them. These are segments where I just take a piece of advice or a strategy from my productivity canon, things I've written about in my books or in my newsletter over the years, and just get into it a little bit, tune up or refresh people's understanding of that habit.

So in today's habit tune up, I want to talk about the corner marking method for taking book notes. So the general topic here is taking notes on the books you read. Now, before we get into the specifics of what I do, we've got to make it clear that there are two general schools of thought among those who think about reading, two different schools of thought about the role note taking should play when you are reading books.

Now these are my names, but I think most people would agree with these general categories. The first is what I call the Zettelkasten school of thought. So inspired by the Zettelkasten note taking system, this school of thought says you should always take notes on books you read, regardless of why you're reading them or what you're reading them for.

You should take notes. You should capture that information into some sort of smart system so that it can be fuel for this external brain that is cybernetically augmenting your cogitation. So if you're a big Zettelkasten, for example, adherent, you would be putting notes on in Rome or in Obsidian or in, what's the other one, Notion, and they would be connected with semantic links to other notes and forming this web of knowledge that you could later pull from.

There's all sorts of variations of the similar philosophy. Ryan Holiday, for example, copies quotes from books on the index cards and he categorizes them in these big boxes and he can then go back later and find index cards by boxes to get the quotes and stories he needs for his book.

So it's this whole notion of this is fuel for your external brain. Get the information into some system where it can form connections, be retrievable later, but also help you generate new ideas. That's the Zettelkasten school of thought. The other school of thought on book note taking is what I call the pragmatic school, which says only take notes on a book if you have a very specific purpose for which you're using that book.

Those notes should be serving that purpose. So for example, if you think this book will be relevant for a book chapter you are currently writing, then you would take notes on that book for use in that specific book chapter. On the other hand, if you're just reading a book because it's interesting, then there's no notes to be taken.

It's better to focus on reading as much as you can and just enjoying bathing in knowledge. That's the pragmatic method. It's very focused. I am a believer in the pragmatic method. I'm not saying it's best. I'm just saying this is what I happen to do. So let me make this concrete for you.

As we talked about earlier in the show, working on a new book, a book about slow productivity, I was just working on the opening to a chapter on the principle of doing fewer things. And I wanted to tell the story of Jane Austen and Andrew Wiles. Andrew Wiles is the Princeton professor who solved Fermat's last theorem back in the early 1990s.

And for various reasons, their stories interleave. What I vaguely remembered of them is their stories interleave in interesting ways, and they do a good job of exemplifying the power of actually reducing the number of things in your play as compared to other people in your same circumstance. So that was a general idea.

So I got a biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomlin's biography, which is excellent, by the way. And I got a book on Fermat's last theorem, Simon Singh's book, Fermat's Enigma, which tells the whole story of Andrew Wiles. It also tells the whole story of Fermat and et cetera. But it's the most comprehensive story of Andrew Wiles and his tackling of the proof.

I bought those books to write these chapters. One of them I already owned, but the other one I bought. And I went through and I took notes on those books specifically aimed at what I knew I was going to read. Then a couple of days later, I went through those notes and I used it to actually help my reading.

So that's an example of pragmatic note taking. How do I take those notes in this circumstance? Well, this is where I use the before mentioned corner marking method, which is a method for taking notes that focuses on minimizing friction as quickly as possible. How can you get the information you need at the fastest possible speed?

Because that is the mindset I'm often in when I'm book writing, because there's a lot of books I need to get through. So I thought what I would do here is load up our Magic Telestrator. So again, if you're listening, you can find this video at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. So Jesse has loaded up here just a sample page from a book.

This is a page from our friend Greg McKeown's book, Effortless. And I'm just going to use the marking tools to actually show you what my marks look like. All right, so over here on the right, we see a sample page. If there's something in this page that I think is relevant, I put a slash in the corner.

So imagine that slash I just drew is in the corner of the page. Why in the corner? Because when you're flipping through the book, you can quickly identify which pages have the slashes. It's right there in the upper right corner or the upper left corner. So you can very quickly identify where you have information.

All right, and then what I do on the actual page is very simple. When I find something that's relevant, I'll do one of two things. I'll either bracket, so I'll bracket off a paragraph, at least I'll try to. So for those who are watching online, you can watch me struggle with the pen.

So again, I'm just bracketing on the outside a paragraph that I think is relevant. I'm not writing commentary about it. I'm not writing down why I think it's important. I'm not putting a lot of notes down. I trust my brain that when it sees that bracketed paragraph later, it'll know why.

The other thing I'll do is underline. So like here, I'm underlining if there's like a name or something that seems important, or a sentence I particularly like, or it's a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, I don't want to bracket a whole line. I want to get the sentence, I'll underline it.

That's really about it. Now, there's two other exceptional things I will do with corner marking. Since I know why I'm taking notes, I know why I'm taking the notes. If there is a passage that I think is just a home run perfect type of thing I'm looking for, it's not background on example, but like this is what I'm looking for.

I'll put a star. And for those watching at home will see that I drew a perfectly symmetrical star there and are impressed by my graphic design skills. And then I'll often then star the corner. So now when I'm flipping through, if I see a star in the corner that I say, oh, that is that's the page with the really good stuff.

So I can get to that really quickly. And the only other thing I'll sometimes do in corner marking is occasionally I'll be looking at an argument I think is important that I want to remember. Often arguments and books will be in multiple parts. It'll say here are the three reasons why, you know, whatever this method doesn't work.

And so in that case, I'll actually draw numbers next to those reasons where they show up. So then I can very quickly know that all of these things I've numbered are part of the same argument. So we have a one somewhere and a two somewhere else, et cetera. Okay, that's it.

So it's dead simple with no commentary, nothing copying to another system, no note cards going into a box. Now I can tell you from experience. I'm on my eighth book now. Your brain remembers things. So if you flip through these things and you see underlying passages, you see bracketed passages, you see numbered pieces of arguments.

Your brain is really good at being like, oh, that's really interesting. How can we use that? How is that relevant? And it figures it out, right? You don't have to treat your future brain like it's going to somehow be significantly impaired. It need to be helped along a lot.

If you're writing a chapter about doing fewer things and you come to a bracketed off paragraph in a Jane Austen biography about the way that her sister Cassandra and her mother were helping her take on taking chores off her plate after they moved to Charlton house in the early 19th century, you know why that's relevant.

You don't have to write a note to yourself about it. So it's a very low friction approach, but it works very well. It's like I over two days, I read the Austin book. I marked it up. Then a couple of days later I was writing. It took me about five minutes to go through every corner mark page and skim the bracketed and underlying lines.

So in five minutes I have queued up in my brain everything relevant about Jane Austen and is right there in my working memory and I can pull the right lines I need for the thing I'm writing in the moment. The system works really well. The overhead is minimal. I have relied on it for a long time.

The only other cool thing I'll say about this system is that if you mark up a book for one project and I know this from experience and you come back to that book many years later, probably what you marked is still the most relevant stuff for whatever you're working on.

It's the stuff that's interesting to you and the type of things you normally work on. So I will often go back to already marked books and go through and say, this is all the cool stuff I need anyways. It'll be relevant to another project I do. Now something people are worried about is defacing books.

I want you to get over that. All right. Books are incredibly efficient but rich compressed collections of knowledge. The whole point and I'm talking nonfiction here. The whole point is to make use of that knowledge to make functional the knowledge in that book. So adding your markings is part of you decompressing, extracting and putting into use all of the knowledge captured in this codex.

Now what if you mark up a book for one reason and now you have a completely different reason why you need the book and these marks are no longer relevant. Here's my suggestion. Get ready to clutch your pearls. Buy another copy of the book. We treat books too preciously.

Not buying a car here. It costs 15 bucks. You should buy more books. I have already bought just to be, let's make this concrete for this one chapter I'm writing in slow productivity. I have already bought seven books as part of my research for this and I am three out of six.

So about halfway through. So I'll probably end up buying, I don't know, 10 books, maybe an even dozen. That's three or $400 well spent if I get 10,000 really good words out of it. I mean, well for the price of lunch at Panera, you could have the polished compressed wisdom of a scholar who spent 20 years working on a topic.

I mean, it's the best bargain in town. We should buy more books. And obviously as an author, I have a bias here, but we should buy books, mark up books, buy other copies of books. I'll buy second copies of books. I'll have multiple copies in different formats of books.

I'll own it, get rid of it, buy another copy. We should have books being a much richer part of our life, a much more common part of our life. We shouldn't worry so much about having too much books or keeping the books really precious. They're meant to be used, so mark them up.

So do you do, it's all hard cover, hard copy books? Whatever, I mean, so you mean versus Kindle or hard copy versus paperback? Versus Kindle. I'll usually, I prefer to have the physical because the corner marking method is very efficient. Yeah. I'll do Kindle. How would you go about, you just look at your note, your bookmarks?

Yeah, so in Kindle you can highlight using your finger and then you can export. So when you're done highlighting a book, you can export and it will actually send to the email address that's associated with your Kindle account, a PDF that has everything you highlighted put, actually pretty nicely formatted.

Right? So it's actually kind of nice, right? A couple of problems with it though. The 25% or something? Well, so, so some books, some books will correlate Kindle locations with page numbers in an actual printed edition. Some don't. So I do not like, and my copy editors and fact checkers do not like when I'm trying to cite something from a book and all you have is a Kindle location.

Right? So I think that's problem number one. Some books don't have this problem. Some do. I mean, there's ways around it. Like not to, not to, again, to give away secrets of the trade, but I know like New York, New Yorker fact checkers often because they don't want to buy every book you used.

And I used to send them photos of the page or whatever. They use Google books often. So you can use Google books and search for the particular line and you basically will get a image of the page and you can see like, oh, this is exactly the way the line looked in the books.

There's a way you can go from, let's say Kindle highlighted quotes and actually get the page number. But it's nice just to have it to, I use my library like a library, you know, so I like to be able to pull things off. I do this all the time.

I pull things off the shelf and use it for different projects. That's harder with Kindle. I mean, I know a lot of people are more minimalist about books. Like why do we drag all these books around and they just take up so much space and they're heavy. I actually use my library like a library.

I'm constantly pulling books off of it. So, so I like having the artifact, but I'll do Kindle, especially if I don't want to wait like, oh man, I got to write this right now. And I think this book has a chapter in it I need, I'll just buy the Kindle thing so I can have it.

Um, it's, by the way, it's not uncommon for me to then buy a hardcover paperback version of a book I had in Kindle, you know, I'll get some notes out of it. I'm like, this is useful and I'll buy the book. So I have it for my library as well.

So again, I'm happy to buy a book multiple times. Do any of these books that you're reading count for your May books? I'm not reading them. I'm not counting any of them towards the May books. Like for the, for the Austin biography, I'm turning the speed knob up and down.

So I'm kind of skimming and then I slow down when things are really relevant and then I speed back up. Now that's enough for me to have a pretty nuanced understanding, I would say of like Austin's life and the social and economic circumstances in which he lived and the dynamics of her family.

Like I now know a lot about Jane Austin, but you know, I didn't read every detail, so I don't count it towards the May book. For the Fermat's book, I was just reading the chapters about Andrew. So I don't count it towards the May books. So but if I, if I read every page, then I will.

When you're doing book, I mean, if I'm going to read a dozen books for this chapter, I'm not going to read every line of those books. You're going to be in and out. You're going to skip chapters. You get really good at variable speed skimming. And if you do it well, you can learn a ton.

You get a lot of context pretty quickly.