How to Take Smart Notes- A Step-by-Step Guide - Nat Eliason⁠↗

The core idea of Smart Notes is that purely extracting highlights is generally a waste of time. A highlight speaks to you when you take it, but if you don’t capture the idea that the highlight gave you, you’re unlikely to remember the importance of that highlight later. Or even if you do feel some spark when revisiting the highlight, it might be a different interpretation.

But why physical notes? When you have to write your notes by hand, you’ll be a bit more thoughtful with them and be forced to put things in your own words. With typing, it’s easier to just re-type what you’re reading (or worse, copy & paste), and not capture the whole context of the idea.

There are two kinds of notes to upload: References, the highlights that I got ideas from and want to extract Ideas, the thoughts that I had while reading the book For the References, I’ll use Readwise to scan them in from the physical book or export them from Kindle. For the Ideas, I’ll re-type them from my notebook and expand on them to make them into coherent thoughts. I’ll start by just listing all of these out under an “Ideas” heading, but this is temporary.