I recently blogged about taking notes from the books I read. I’ve been experimenting on a note-taking system lately. Back when I was still reading lots and lots of print books, my habit was to use a 3X5 index card as a bookmark and take notes from there. Sometimes I would also write on the margins of the book, underline the statements that strike me and put big exclamation marks on the pages that get to me.
But these days, I’m reading ebooks most of the time. I have a Kindle Fire 8.9 and I have the Kindle app installed on my laptop, my desktop, and in my Android phone.
I’m trying a new way of taking notes–I want to gather the highlights, comments, insights, and questions that occur to me while reading a particular work… and put them here in the blog. For PinoyYuppie.com, I will post notes on books related to business, career, and anything about a young professional’s life. If you want to check out my notes on any other book I read, you may need to check out my personal blog, MightyRasing.com.
For each book notes blog post here, you should expect the following types of notes:
Quotes [Q] – Direct statements and actual words used by the author in explaining the ideas in the book. I hope to build my own library of quotes that may or may not be popular to the rest of the Internet.
Insights [I] – These insights would, most likely, be my reactions and “Eureka” as it relates to my own life and the work I do. Some of these insights might be applicable for yuppies, or they might not. They may be specific to me only. But nonetheless, I will put them here in the blog for discussion and/or reference.
Questions [Qu] – Obviously, I will not agree with everything I read. In fact, I actively try to look for loopholes and other problematic areas that I need to investigate and read about further.
Related Works [RW] – I would like to believe that I am a wide-reader with a really wide set of books in my reading list. Chances are, I may have encountered a similar, related, or tangential book to the one I’m presently reading. They will be labeled this way for easy reference.
Action Item [A] – Lastly and most importantly, I need to look for practical, actionable item. As I said in a previous post about books, ideas are a dime dozen; what changes lives and moves the world are not ideas, but well-executed ideas.
My Kindle app made doing all these so much easier. All I need to do is to go to my Kindle account and check out my Highlights, Notes, and Bookmarks, and I can easily export, sort, and eventually publish them here in the blog.
If you want, you can also follow my reading and check out the notes I take, I suggest following me in two sites:
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/23968682-mighty-rasing
Amazon: https://kindle.amazon.com/profile/Mighty-Rasing/30178345
You’ll need to create an account in each of these websites. Just a fair warning: I read a lot of totally unrelated stuff. For fiction, I tend to read lots of Science Fiction and Fantasy. You’ve been warned. 🙂