My Journey into Reading and Note-taking 📝

It all started when a friend of mine gave me a book during the pandemic in 2020. I never liked reading, so at first I was dubious. To understand why I was never into reading, Let me take you to my school days 👦

When I was in school, the majority of us aspired to be popular and cool. One of those people who aspired to be cool was me. Because reading books wasn’t regarded as cool, I didn’t like the students who did it. At the time, people who were interested in sports or athletics were hip. Students who enjoyed reading were teased and were referred to as “nerds,” “bookworms,” or “geeks” by popular youth. I regret to say that I believe I was one of those cool youngsters. As I’m typing this, I don’t feel very good. It appears that I have a history of making mistakes.

Me being cool in my school days

Now I hope you understand why I was being skeptical when I was holding a book in my hand and thinking reading? really?
I decided to read anyway as I was bored thanks to covid-19 and also the fact that online classes were a joke 😛
(Should I have waited to post this till I get my graduation certificate?)

So what happened next really blew my mind. When I started reading my first book called Forever is a Lie by Novoneel Chakraborty, I fell in love with it. I finished the book in one day and I was just crazy about reading. I finished another book the next day.

Please do keep in mind that this was a time when I didn’t have to attend classes as it was online and had a lot of free time on my hands. So I spent a lot of my time just reading books.

I initially started with fiction and started to love reading itself. Slowly I became a bookworm. I was ready to read anything. This reminded me about a quote by Naval.

“Read what you love until you love to read.” — Naval Ravikant

Guess I’m a bookworm now :P

Overtime, I realized even though I enjoyed reading. I would learn amazing concepts like building habits, importance of personal finance, discipline only to forget it a few days later.

I knew I couldn’t remember everything I read so I decided to get a notebook so I could write down personal notes from the books that I was reading and I don’t have to worry about remembering the concepts.

As I’m writing this, I’m not sure why the old me wanted to remember everything? Maybe it’s because of the traditional education system where you are supposed to mug up concepts and spit it out in exams.

Anyhow, what was I talking about? Ah, my priceless personal notes. Now I want you to understand these notes meant a lot to me. I used to write down important points from the book I was writing in my notebook and then write how I could relate to and could benefit from in the future.

As time progressed, I had so many book summaries in my notebook. So if I had to reread the book, I can go through my personal book summaries which would just take minutes.

Something dreadful occurred when I was shifting to a new place. I lost my notebook which had all the summaries of books I read. I was heartbroken but I was determined to find another solution regarding taking personal notes.

I found my answer to my note-taking problem when I attended a session about Notion by Ansh Mehra. Notion is a tool where you can collect and organize your notes. I don’t have to ever worry about losing my notes again as I’m saving it on a cloud based tool like Notion.

An example of how I organize my notes on Notion

As time went on, I had another realization. Despite the fact that I’m taking useful notes, I’m not sure how or when to use them. My consuming outweighed my action.

As we live in the age of information overload, Most of us have too much information that we don’t know what to do with it. I feel this is an issue which very few people are talking about.

I found my answer to this when I came across the PARA framework in the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte.

In this article, I’m going to mainly talk about the Project aspect in the PARA framework. However, if you want to know more about the framework in detail, do check out the article below.

The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Forte Labs

Projects — Short term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on right now.

For example, I’m currently working on a personal project which is about designing an entire app from scratch. So it makes sense for me to watch videos related to design as I’m currently working on it.

Prior to knowing about the PARA framework, I would consume videos and take down notes but would never act on it because I didn’t know how or when exactly to use them.

Another example — You’re watching a video on how to make butter chicken because you’re going to make butter chicken tonight (Making butter chicken is the current project you’re working on)

“The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not to get a PHD in note-taking”. This statement felt like a dagger to my heart because I finally realized my problem.

After reading the PARA framework, I intentionally consume the content based on my current goals and organize my notes on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.

Instead of mindlessly consuming informational content, have a reason “WHY” you’re consuming the content. Don’t just consume content/books just because someone told you so.

“The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable or not is not whether it’s perfectly organized but if it has an impact on someone or something that matters to you”- Tiago Forte

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my article. I’ve been wanting to write an article for a long time now and I’m happy that I published it. I do plan on writing more articles in the future, one step at a time.