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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Take book notes only when you have a specific purpose for the book, and use "corner marking" as a minimal-friction system: a slash in the page corner, brackets or underlines for relevant passages, stars for standout passages, and numbers for multi-part arguments. Cal Newport calls this the pragmatic school of note taking, in contrast to the Zettelkasten school, which says to always capture notes into an external system. He argues your brain will usually remember why marked passages matter, so he doesn't write detailed commentary.
Key Points
- Newport contrasts two schools: the Zettelkasten school (always take notes into a connected system, as Ryan Holiday does with index cards in boxes) and the pragmatic school (only take notes for a specific project), which he says he follows.
- He sees little need for written commentary on marked passages, saying "your brain remembers things" and can work out their relevance later.
- He describes using about five minutes to skim corner-marked pages before writing, which he says queues up the relevant material in his working memory.
- Marked-up books remain useful years later because the marks reflect your recurring interests, so you can reuse them for other projects.
- He encourages buying extra copies of books and not treating them as precious, arguing that research books are cheap relative to the value of the writing they produce.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Put a slash in the upper-right or upper-left corner of any page with something relevant, so the pages can be found quickly while flipping.
- Bracket the outside of a whole relevant paragraph, without writing commentary.
- Underline a single sentence, name, or important phrase when you don't want to bracket a full paragraph.
- Draw a star on a passage that is exactly what you are looking for, and star the page corner too so you can find it fast.
- For a multi-part argument, write matching numbers (1, 2, 3) beside each part where it appears.
- Before writing, flip through corner-marked pages and skim the bracketed and underlined lines, which Newport says takes about five minutes.
- Read at variable speed: skim background material, slow down for relevant sections, and skip chapters you don't need.
- If you use Kindle, highlight passages and export them as a PDF to your account email, but check whether Kindle locations match printed page numbers, since editors may need page numbers for citations. Google Books search can help find a printed page.
- Newport used this method for research on a book about slow productivity, reading a Jane Austen biography and Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma and buying about a dozen books for one chapter.
- He does not count books he only skims toward his monthly reading total.
Bottom Line
Mark books minimally for a specific project, trust your memory to reconstruct why the marks matter, and treat books as tools to be used rather than kept pristine.
