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