Sticky Note-Taking

When you’re reading to learn, the note-taking options seem endless. 

Is highlighting or underlining enough?

Should I jot down notes in the margins?

What should I do at the end of each chapter?

What should I do at the end of the book?

While there’s no one right way to read and process a book, I do have a strong recommendation: engage with the information while you’re reading it.  Don’t wait until the end of the book before you start processing what you’ve read.

While I was reading the The Psychology of Money, I focused on one chapter at a time, first with reading and underlining, and then with a single page of notes to capture the key ideas from that chapter with short phrases and little sketches.

Here’s what those chapter-by-chapter notes looked like:

When you look at that pile as a whole, it feels a bit overwhelming. That was precisely my experience when I was reviewing those notes with the plan of making a video sharing some of my favorite ideas from the book.

So I decided to take the filtering process one layer deeper, with some new materials (sticky notes) to provide the useful constraint of size

As I looked back on those chapter notes, I pulled out the ideas (usually just one per chapter) that still resonated with me, and gave each idea a single sticky note. 

The resulting 16 sticky notes made my task of video creation much more manageable. I simply pulled out the ones that I was most interested in talking about, knowing that around six is all that’d I’d reasonably be able to fit within the constraint (there’s that word again) of a single piece of poster paper.

Here’s how that video turned out:

A few months later, while reading and sketchnoting The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, I skipped the larger sketchbook pages and went straight to the sticky notes after reading each chapter. Applying a bit stronger of a filter earlier in the process was helpful, especially considering how short each chapter is within that book.

When it came time to make a video about the book, I reviewed those sticky notes and identified three topics I wanted to focus on: the phases of creative work, tuning in, and time. Here’s where you can see me sketch out and talk though those three topics:

No matter the specifics of what it looks like, I encourage you the leverage the energy of the first read. Do something with those ideas while the excitement of the first exposure is still fresh.

For more support developing your visual thinking skills, check out the Verbal to Visual Curriculum.

Cheers,

-Doug