Underlining, notes in the margin, post-its.When I went to school, we did not write comments about the important, interesting or useful information about our reading on the document. There was no highlighting (or highlighters) and certainly no post-its. The readings we did were on mimeographed copies with purple print. If we were lucky enough to receive a damp copy right from the machine, the entire class would give the paper a simultaneous sniff to catch a whiff of the strange chemical odor which emanated from the paper. More frequently, the purple readings came on dirty, dog-eared packets that seemed like they had been used since the Kennedy administration. If the condition of the readings did not communicate their continued use from year to year, the necessity of their use for the next year was expressed on the top of the page as it screamed, "LEAVE NO MARKS!"
For most of my life, I did the usual checking out books from the library, reading them and returning them. I thought it was a revolutionary idea for me to choose a reading theme during the summer and read as many books about a topic as I could. I read books on Geronimo, survival, and adventure before moving on to World War II (which lasted for about four summers).
In 2007, I started taking classes for my Master's degree in education leadership, which pretty much consumed my reading time. Again, I thought I had another unique was of operating when I conceived of going to the bookstore, finding the required books and then going to the university library to request those books. The librarians found them at university libraries across the country and I was delighted. The rub was for my whole college career I had bought books, highlighted them and wrote in the margin, just like everyone else. As an undergrad, I skimmed through the used books to find a book the previous owner who had highlighted it to my standards. Using my new method of acquiring books as a grad student, I knew I had to develop a new system for keeping track of important elements since a book from the Fordham University library did not include pre-highlighting. That was when I came up with the idea of using post it notes to keep track of important stuff. I could then take the notes out at the end of the semester before returning the book. What a perfect system!
During my grad classes, read some great books that I would have read on my own, if I had known they existed. Then I encountered Daniel Pink's Out of the Right Mind. What a great book! After reading a few chapters, I knew I didn't want to give it back, so I bought it on Amazon (who pretty much exclusively sold books). I continued with the post it notes, but now they could stay in the book and I could refer to them later! Once I received my degree, I went back to my theme reading, but first, I wanted to read Daniel Pink's new book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. My intent to focus on a theme was overwhelmed by my excitement about this life changing book. Instead of reading for a different theme each year, my reading topics has morphed into a decade of reading books on business, entrepreneurship, leadership, creativity, critical thinking, and education (specifically how to change it). The use of post-its has continued for the last ten years or so. I have hundreds of books annotated with them. At some point, I raised the bar when I figured out to use color coded post-its: blue for connections to other books or ideas, pink for memorable quotations, orange for regular notes of interesting information and bright yellow or green for revolutionary ideas.
My latest iteration of note taking has come from reading a book on note taking. Not only did it feel a little weird buying a book on note taking, but the fact that it held such revolutionary ideas about note taking was surprising. In his 2016 book How to take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens traces the note taking strategies of Niklas Luhmann who, according to Ahrens, published over 400 articles (12 of them posthumously along with over 50 books using his note taking method.
His note taking method blew my mind! Instead of highlighting and underlining to be able to return to his ideas later, he made a quick note of what he found on which page number, then returned to it later in the day to provide a clearer picture of it. Not only did he have great quotations and thinking of the author, he made notes about his thinking about the passage. Each note included his thinking about one idea. Instead of taking his notes and organizing them into categories, in a top down strategy (like my color coding), he connected his notes to other ideas he had from the bottom up using a code he developed on the top of the note cards. It was then I realized that all my color coded note post-its were only about 5% of what I could have done with the information in the books.
One of the other revolutionary ideas was that he made all of those notes by only reading what he was interested in. If he became bored with a topic, he moved on to something else. During his reading, he made over 90,000 note cards with one idea on each one. I spent some time lamenting all the notes I had taken over the years, and how much information and thinking I could have compiled. I even looked back at some post-its in my books from before Obamacare and I couldn't figure out why that passage (or many others) resonated with me. Then I realized how great it is that I encountered this idea now and going forward, my note taking is not limited to reading books. I can capture my thinking by making smart notes about anything I read or hear. What an energizing and amazing concept!!
