Reflection on note writing discipline

I started to write some notes on this blog a month ago to summarize my thoughts when reading and found it quite helpful overall.

I have set up a simple rule for myself to write the notes when I started this process, which are just:

1. One note to summarize one book
2. A week for a note
3. Note should be published This supposedly motivates me to finish the book within a week and make progress, and make me publicly accountable.

I’ve come to realize these rules are actually not optimized for my own knowledge intake and digest. I’ve missed last week and didn’t write any and I’m going to miss this week’s note as well if we are to follow the rule above. I am still reading, but the book that I’ve picked was quite thick (“SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard”) and I wasn’t able to finish it in 3 days. Not only that, I was also reading another book at the same time as I felt the need to read something else in between.

I reckon that once I’ve finished the book, I would have already lost plenty of context of the content already and leave a fuzzy impression. In fact, that’s what is already the case for the starting chapters of SPQR. This is exacerbated by the fact that the book is in paper and not an electronic one where I can easily highlight and find all the highlighted texts.

Hence there is a need to adjust the rules a bit. Instead of writing a note for every book, I should either write a note for every sensible chapter / break, or a note for every week. The notes may not be in a publishable form, which has the downside of not holding myself accountable in public records, but this is better in terms of preserving the context.

There are two open questions in this newer model.

When to write note? Considering that different books arrange their chapter differently and the way I read are not always consistent, I will set a loose rule - after a chapter is read, then I will need to write a note that day. This allows me to read multiple chapters in a go when they are short or not lot of content to jot down, but forcing myself to still jot them down the same day to minimize context loss.

When to write a publishable note? To make myself accountable, a time based one is still good and it does not need to be coupled with finishing particular contents. For this reason, I will make it so that I will publish at least 4 notes every month. This is based on the intention to publish 1 note every week, but allowing some buffer and flexibility.

TL;DR:

1. Write at least a note the day I finish a chapter of a book.
2. 4 publishable notes every month.

Let’s review the result in another month.