A Concise Guide to Remember More of What You Read
By: Charlene Annabel
Tags: Books, Reading, Productivity, Productivity Hacks, Self Improvement

1. Start What You Can Finish

Before you pick up a book, use what I’d like to call it the “Three-Pronged Questionnaire”:

What do I want to learn or read? They can be categories such as fiction/non-fiction, self-help, politics, science, relationships, cooking, etc. Why am I reading this? What do I hope to get out of this book?

To help you with that, going through the table of contents, book summary, and reviews give you a wonderful sense of idea what that book is all about.

The list of questions above serves to ensure you’re reading a book that will pique your interest in the long run. If you’re likely to enjoy the purpose of the book, you’ll make an effort to understand the context of what the author has written.

As one of my teachers used to put it, “If you study to remember, you’ll forget. If you study to understand, you’ll remember.” — Which do you remember better: the content in your history textbook or the logic behind why 5+6 = 11?

2. Annotate (The Messy Way)

Scribbling notes on books is not something new, but the way you’re making notes on them make a difference.

Merely underlining or highlighting an excerpt or an idea in the book isn’t effective in imprinting those words in your memory. Instead, I’d highlight a specific sentence or paragraph of ideas, draw a curly bracket beside it, and rephrase it in my own words.

Doing this not only summarises the key points the author is trying to convey, but it also deepens your understanding. It’s the same way of telling someone what you’re trying to remember except you’re doing it for yourself.

Putting something in your own words helps you retrieve that information later on.

Don’t believe me? Try explaining the process of evaporation and revisit the concept a day or two later.

Put tabs on the first page

Sometimes, I’d also annotate striking ideas on the first page of the book. It’s usually filled with a title in the middle of a blank page, so there are tons of spaces left for me to write.

On it is where I’ll write a short subtitle along with the page number relating to a concept that appealed to me. Whenever I want to refresh my memory on some grand ideas or lessons listed in the book, I just need to turn to the page.

3. Create Your Encyclopedia of Book Summaries

Much of my advice here takes a great deal of work on your part but summarising each chapter and its takeaways help in remembering what you read.

I use Notion to compile all book summaries I’ve written. You may not be carrying your pile of books all the time so having an app like this allows you to retrieve information wherever you go.

Here are some useful functions that helped me organised my notes better:

Collapsable drop lists — useful for parking a chunk of the information under the main header of a chapter

Underline, bold , and italicise functions to emphasise various key concepts

, and italicise functions to emphasise various key concepts Colour tags to differentiate the categories of books you’ve read

Embed web links, images, or videos — could be book reviews or summaries by others online that you find useful

Another bonus tip I’d like to share is a compilation of my favourite websites to visit for concise book summaries: