5 Best Books How to Take Notes
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More articles:
1) How to Start Journaling;
2) 7 Tips to Organize Your Notes;
3) 11 Youtube Videos About How to Take Smart Notes;
4) Books that change Your Life.
Here are the top 5 books to learn how to take smart notes.
- "Effective Notetaking" Dr. Fiona McPherson;
- "Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples" David Kadavy.
1. "The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Lifei" (Tiago Forte)
Best Sellers Rank: #25,780 in Kindle Store.
- #2 in Business Project Management (Kindle Store)
- #8 in Creativity Self-Help
- #12 in Business Project Management (Books)
Amazon reviews:
""The PARA Method" by Tiago Forte offers a comprehensive and intuitive system for organizing digital information, allowing individuals to manage their commitments while pursuing their goals and dreams. The book provides a clear roadmap for implementing PARA and maintaining it for a more organized and focused digital life."
"Tiago Forte empowers readers with actionable clarity. This book thoughtfully read and simply applied can dramatically enhance productivity. Remove the clutter. Keep the essential."
"Overall, this is a great book for those new to productivity methods as well as for old productivity pros. The PARA method offers a unique insight that is freeing and will help you to have peace of mind and be more productive. I am recommending this book to everyone I know."
Books quotes:
"The key here is to realize that there is a big difference between things you are directly responsible for and things you are merely interested in."
"Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now."
"What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve."
2. "How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking" (Sönke Ahrens)
Best Sellers Rank: #24,512 in Kindle Store.
- #1 in Information Management (Kindle Store)
- #3 in Information Management (Books)
- #15 in Schools & Teaching (Kindle Store)
Amazon reviews:
"Concise, helpful, took lots of notes on takibg notes. A lot of value in a short read. i highly recommend."
"The book delves into the essence of the Zettelkasten method and explores its potential benefits, such as avoiding cognitive biases, enhancing creativity and productivity, and improving the learning and memory recall process. It also provides practical insights on how to integrate note-taking into our daily routines."
"This book offers you a solution that is not easy but will help all fellow readers to make sense of what you read. It creates a system where you think and turned out to be revolutionary for me. Just read it for the first time, but it will not be the last time for sure until I implement the system myself."
Books quotes:
"Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible."
"We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains."
"Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work."
3. "Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential" (Pema Chödrön)
Best Sellers Rank: #12,625 in Kindle Store.
- #1 in Business Project Management (Kindle Store)
- #5 in Business Decision-Making
- #5 in Creativity Self-Help
Amazon reviews:
"I can confidently say that this book has transformed my life. It's a must-read for professionals, students, and anyone seeking to harness the power of their digital world. Building a Second Brain is a treasure trove of wisdom and practical guidance that will undoubtedly leave a lasting impact on your personal and professional life. Highly recommended!"
"Super clear, concise, and useful to properly manage your personal projects. What I liked most is that the author invites you to TAKE ACTION on what you learned throughout the book."
"I have been a note taker through out my life and always dumped the notes in my favorite evernote app. I always assumed that search will produce the results. However i did not realize that there is a great method called PARA which Tiago has created which was an eye opener for me. Being in IT , it is always important to organize information like folders to keep it valuable. But with this method, it will be much better to get to the right information quicker."
Books quotes:
"The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside."
"There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives."
"For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head."
4. "Effective Notetaking" (Dr. Fiona McPherson)
Best Sellers Rank: #225,687 in Kindle Store.
- #60 in Study Skills (Kindle Store)
- #159 in Pedagogy
- #297 in Study Skills (Books)
Amazon reviews:
"This book has so many interesting points on effective ways to acquire knowledge. It describes lots of methods to better highlight text, take notes on lectures, build concepts maps and design good strategies personalized to learn something. It has been the most comprehensive book I read on the subject. Recommend!"
"I found the book very useful for novices. They can improve their academic writing skills and safe lots of time."
"I wish students had time to read books on how to be successful students rather than being inundated with textbooks they struggle to learn. This book is one I wish students could read. It is highly informative in describing strategies in how, when, and why to use them. The research to back these claims is also accurate and up-to-date; it was not based on anecdote or mythology of learning. Finally, this book is accessible and easy to read and follow. It is logically separated into manageable chunks and scaffolds through them quite nicely."
Books quotes:
"Permanent notes are explanations of a single idea, annotated with metadata about the subject of the note, other notes that note is related to, and the source of the note. You usually write permanent notes using literature notes as your source. You take only the most important ideas from your literature notes, and turn them into singular notes you can connect with other notes. Once you have many permanent notes, you can construct a rough draft for an entire article or book."
"Permanent notes are the ultimate destination within your Zettelkasten for the best ideas you have or come across. In fact, your permanent notes are your Zettelkasten. The permanent note is the last stop for an idea before you synthesize it into something new."
"When you take the extra time to re-write, only the clearest and most compelling elements survive – not to mention that you further internalize the knowledge."
5. "Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples" (David Kadavy)
Best Sellers Rank: #230,677 in Kindle Store.
- #60 in Memory Improvement (Kindle Store)
- #139 in Authorship
- #146 in Time Management in Business
Amazon reviews:
"Don’t let the length of this book keep you away. It’s short but wonderfully clear in its writing and has many hard won kernels of knowledge for improving your note making. Mostly directed to writers rather than other PKM uses, but that’s what Zettelkasten is best suited for."
"I love David Kadavy's book! I'm not even sure where I stumbled across Zettlkasten but before I knew it, I was deep in a research frenzy and stumbled across his book. I love that he gives precise examples and descriptions of each part of the system and how it was used originally (paper based) and digitally or how you can combine the two!"
"This book is pretty good for beginners in using zettelkasten.
The most loving thing in this book is authors explanation of note transition from Fleeting notes to Literature Notes to Permanent"
Books quotes:
"Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful Most people believe notes are to provide a written record of information they want to remember, but although that is certainly important, research reveals the main value of note-taking is through its effect on how you encode the information in your brain. That is, the act of note-taking is more important than the result. For this reason, note-taking is effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes2 — in other words, to the extent that you put the information in your own words. Verbatim notes (where you have recorded information word-for-word) are of minimal value, unless of course you are simply using them as a stepping stone and later paraphrase and reorganize them."
"As you'll learn in later chapters, knowing what to expect is a vital factor in getting the most from both books and lecturers"
"research reveals the main value of note-taking is through its effect on how you encode the information in your brain. That is, the act of note-taking is more important than the result."