2004: I was leaving India to come to the US for my Master’s degree. It is common in Indian Culture for elders to give parting advice. My friend’s mom who had never left India told me to write tasks in a book to become effective. I kept her advice in the back of my head but I didn’t act on it till years later.

2008: Productivity blogs were the rage. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders was on the top of my list. I picked up his Hipster PDA system and carried it with me for nearly a decade. Even now, you will find a small stack of index cards clamped between a binder clip in my backpack. This was Merlin Mann’s way of capturing tasks. We were all followers of “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.

2021: I was reading Sönke Ahren’s book How to Take Smart Notes. He talked about the Zeigarnik Effect:

Unfinished tasks occupy and burden our mind. Burden keeps us from being creative and effective at other immediate tasks. Simply writing a task down in a reliable system allows the brain to "think" the task is complete even though it isn't. It frees up the brain to do more tasks.

I follow this up with Cal Newport who adds that the task capture system must be reliable. The brain must be confident that the task in that system will be completed at some time.

I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens