![]() ![]() Therefore, I recommend going to the next step of either using an app like Readwise.io which automatically exports notes and highlights out of Kindle and other major apps such as Instapaper and makes them searchable or going to the extra effort of exporting your notes and highlights and importing them into your note taking app. This is better than having not highlighted my reading at all, however Kindle’s search function is limited to searching for book titles and authors which is not useful when you cannot even remember which book you read something in. I can either look at the notebook in my kindle app or even see my Notes and Highlights via Kindle Cloud Reader. Having done just this step my notes are now easier to find. Kindle has four highlighter options, so I dedicate the third colour to definitions and the fourth to quotes. One system is to highlight main points in yellow and secondary points in green or blue. So, when we read, we should take the time to highlight and make notes on the most valuable bits of information. ![]() Searching every book, we have in our digital library is going to create a lot of false positive results and just like my Google search, finding the exact information we want may prove to be time consuming. However, we still want a level of curation. Today we live in the age of search where entire documents can be searched in a second. David Allen the creator of Getting Things Done says, “your minds are for having ideas, not holding them.” For us to spend the time and effort to read and understand things, but then not to capture them in a trusted system is wasteful and a tragedy. According to Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve we experience a deep drop in retention soon after learning if we don’t take active measures to reinforce the learning. Unfortunately, most of us are terrible at remembering information, when we need to retrieve the knowledge we’ve learned we’ve either forgotten it entirely or in my case with Aristotle’s three tiers of friendship, I had forgotten all the important details. They usually started with an index which would be regularly updated so the author could later easily find valuable information they had recorded. Creators of commonplace books range from English philosopher John Locke to modern day writers such a Ryan Holiday. A second brain is a commonplace book for the digital age, it is a personal knowledge management system that you use to capture all your important notes and thoughts so they can be later retrieved.Ĭommonplace books have a long history of being used by the world’s greatest minds to record vital information, quotes, notes, and thoughts that can be later retrieved. This is exactly what I was inspired to do after reading Tiago Forte’s excellent book Building a Second Brain. For the record I use OneNote, but any note taking app with a powerful search functionality works. My book highlights would be easy to retrieve and available to me with only a quick search and I wouldn’t have to remember the particular book the information was originally found in. But I tried that, and it turns out that Aristotle had a lot to say about friendship and finding the specific bit of information I was looking for needed more than a quick search.īut what if after having read a book, I had taken the time to copy my highlights and notes from my Kindle and into my notetaking system. Some might say, ‘just do a Google search’. This involved me having to look through several possible books I’d read in the last 12 months. Eventually, mostly due to luck I rediscovered my highlights in Massimo Pigiliucci’s book How to be a Stoic. ![]() Unfortunately, I could not remember the details of what those categories were and where I had read about them. I knew I had read somewhere that he had divided friendship into three categories. ![]() Recently I attempted to recall the three tiers of friendship named by Aristotle. ![]()
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