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One approach I like is to relax and read the book quickly the first time, don’t take notes or anything. If it’s good, read it again (and again periodically). If not, don’t.

This gives natural spaced repetition on the good stuff, and also you pick up different things in subsequent readings.




This is close to what I do sometimes (and I should be more disciplined about doing it all the time, TBH). I'll often read a non-fiction book once, at a leisurely pace, no notes or anything. Maybe I'll stick a few page flags in to highlight things that really stand out to me. Later, if I deem it worthwhile, I'l re-read the book and take notes. After that, I'll re-read my notes and try to consolidate my thinking and distill out the most important elements into a separate notes document. And on rare occasions, I may later re-read the original book a third time and refine my notes even further. If I'm reading a group of books on a related topic, I may open a new document and then read/re-read my earlier notes on each book, and put the synthesis into the new doc.

The biggest problem with all of this is simply that it's very time consuming. But when doing a pointed, intentional "deep dive" into something specific, I've found it to be effective.




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