
Ask HN: How do you organise your book notes? - zabana
I&#x27;m curious as to what system you guys use to effectively organise the various notes you write on certain books.<p>Is it better to use markdown and break down notes by chapter, or to gather all the notes in one place a write a large summary in a pdf format ?<p>Thanks for your tips
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erhserhdfd
Love the question. I would be curious to hear others' feedback on my method
and understand what others do.

Assuming we are talking about technical writing and nonfiction, my preferred
method is outlining. I will typically have one section per chapter. My next
level of bullet points will be the major conclusions that the work draws from
that chapter. The level below that will be the supporting evidence for each of
those conclusions. In the case of math/cs work, that is where I will put the
proofs.

Additionally, I will use several notations to indicate items of special
interest. I will write "TODO" to indicate future tasks I want to do inspired
by that section of the book. Examples of this typically include researching
other papers, looking up the definition of a term I do not understand, etc. I
will then change this to DONE once complete and update the relevant section of
the notes.

I also will tag items as "IDEA" for potential areas of future research,
product ideas, etc. The advantage of using these tags is that I can keyword
search them in the future easily.

For statements I deem particularly important, I will informally cite them with
PN<page number> (for example, if something was on page 55, it would read PN55)
to indicate exactly where in the work I found that fact.

I tend to take my notes directly in Evernote and I tend to write them while I
am reading, versus writing a large summary at the end.

The big downside of Evernote is that Evernote does not support LaTex. I have
read some hacks online where people claimed to get this working via various
methods, but I could never make it work for me. In the cases where I need to
write detailed equations, I will use a simple online latex editor and paste
the resulting image into the appropriate section of Evernote. This
historically has been the part of my system that causes the most frustration.

In graduate school, I was an adamant paper note taker. Now I have a dozen
large binders containing years of work that I am reluctant to get rid of ("in
case I need it some day"), but that manage to annoy my partner by taking up
valuable closet space.

~~~
twright
The rare cases where I had to put some LaTeX into Evernote I'll render it,
take a screenshot, and attach it as a picture to the Evernote doc.

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gxqoz
I take notes for the purpose of translating interesting facts into quizbowl
questions (a type of trivia question, see quizbowlpackets.com). For this
purpose, my system of recording info is pretty simple. It's just highlighting
where in the paragraph the interesting bits start. I do this with a pen for
paper books/magazines and the highlight feature in Pocket for digital stuff.
For audiobooks, I'd love to have the text available to directly highlight but
since I usually don't, I'll try to put some approximation or exact quote into
OneNote. I'll later see if I can do a Google Books search for that passage,
and if not I'll see if I can get the physical book from the library or buy it
if needed.

Anyway, once I have these, I periodically go back and turn these facts into
questions or parts of questions. Sometimes my highlight is just for one word
or idea that I want to expand. Other times there's enough content there to be
a paragraph-long (or more) question on its own. Because I'm usually
supplementing what I've highlighted with other information about the topic
(Wikipedia, Google Books, paper encyclopedias I have, online library
resources, websites), it's a slow process. But it's good for retention
purposes. I save these things in OneNote and they eventually become full
questions. Some right away, some from repeated versions of this process over
years.

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ChanningAllen
I almost always get the "gist" of a book just by reading it (and even when I
don't, I can quickly reference the Wikipedia page on it), so I'm not very
concerned with outlining or summarizing works in their entirety.

Instead what I try to capture with book notes are memorable or densely
insightful passages. I use Notion to store these notes, since Notion's
database feature (similar to Airtable but more powerful) makes it easy to
connect useful passages to other metadata for quick reference later on. For
example, I have a database called "Quotes" where I create a new record for
each insightful passage I come across. Each quote record is connected to
records from the following other databases: Books, Authors, Topics.

It's not very lightweight, but the payoff is immense. I routinely think,
"Damn, what was that Paul Virilio quote about second-order effects again?" And
I'll quickly open my Authors database on <Paul Virilio> or my Topics database
on <second-order effects> and find my quote: "When you invent the ship, you
also invent the shipwreck."

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olegious
Here's my workflow:

I read on the Kindle, as I'm reading I'm highlighting or making notes in the
book.

After I'm done reading, or sometimes if the book is long or complex, when I'm
done reading a chapter, I make an outline using the table of contents in Bear
using Markdown. I then go through all my highlights and notes to fill in the
outline. If the outline is longer than a page or 2, I take the key ideas and
summarize them into a single page "Summary" file linking to specific section
in the master outline to make it easy to get more details on something.

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twright
As I'm reading the book I put small sticky notes on paragraphs or sections I
like or want to remember. When I'm done with the book I go through each sticky
note and transcribe the section with the page number(s) into Evernote.
Sometimes I'll add my own comments or notes to each section or about the book.

I do the same thing with articles in Instapaper except I highlight sections
and then I can export them. This is really the only reason I use Evernote.

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srijanshetty
My personal system is to create Anki flashcards as I'm in the habit of
reviewing them everyday. My issue with other systems is recall and an inante
understanding that I will never come back to them in the future due to the
lack of context.

Anki has worked really well for me as I end up revisiting micro-concepts
depending on how well I recall them.

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jho35
Group Up Similar Categories. This effective strategy helps to find things
quickly and easily. And sticky notes sounds great! Sticky notes build on the
idea of sketches by providing an easy way to identify and organize supporting
ideas. Add just one idea or supporting detail to each sticky note, then attach
the sticky notes to your “big picture” sketch or the index cards for each of
your blog posts

~~~
zabana
interesting tip ! Very clever, thanks !

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thanpro7979
I'm using Notes of iPhone and LassPass

