(ARSCI) My Note Taking System

A system for getting the most our of physical books - how to take notes and act on what you read.

Books. 

I loved books as a kid. My parents actually built a floor to ceiling bookshelf in my room to store all my books. The shelves were so deep you could double stack the paperbacks. They were hidden, but that didn't matter, I knew every book on that bookshelf because I had read them all 3-5 times. Some more than 10 times.

But there is something important to note about that bookshelf. These weren't non-fiction books. In fact, they were as far as you could get from reality. They were fiction and fantasy from authors like David Gemmell, Patrick Rothfuss, Matthew Reilly, Philip Pullman and Jim Butcher, just to name a few. Because while I loved those kinds of books.

I hated other books.

I genuinely couldn't stand non-fiction books. I didn't read a non-fiction book cover to cover until my dissertation at university, and even then it was only one. But things eventually changed. It started with biographies, technically non-fiction but deftly telling compelling stories. Sure, as with any biography or autobiography, there is probably some poetic license. Perspective changes, and glossing over things - but they were the closest I got.

At the time, I was just beginning my entrepreneurial journey, so I started consuming all the entrepreneurial biographies I could. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Phil Knight, Richard Branson, J.D. Rockefeller (that was a long one) and Mark Zuckerberg to name a few. These people were legends in their own right, and they all had something to teach in how they lived and live their life.

These books opened the door to the realm of non-fiction and thank-fuck they did. Books are the cheat code to life. They get you on the motorway while everyone else is left on the dirt track thumbing for a lift. 

Books are incredibly useful, but a lot of the time you read them. You put them down and then you never look at them again. Sure, occasionally, one is so powerful that it genuinely changes how you look and perceive the world. Why We Sleep was one of those books for me. It fundamentally changed how I structured my day.

But for most books, that is not the case. They're good. They have great information, but they just don't stick. So, finally, how do you make stop their secrets from slipping away moments after you close them? This post shall cover the note-taking aspect of reading books. Subsequent posts will cover the database and knowledge hub methods I use to maintain and order my notes.

Please note, this method refers primarily to physical books. There is a different process for ebooks.

Concerning tools and whether pen, pencil, highlighter or crayon is the best method, I'd suggest using what you are most comfortable with. You are marking up the text. Writing on the pages, scribbling notes in the margin etc. That book isn't going to offer high resale value, unfortunately. Books are tools to impart knowledge and should be used as such.

Obviously, hardly bares worth saying, don't mark up other peoples books. If the book is particularly valuable (1st editions, etc.) or old also don't use those ones. Get another. Amazon often has second-hand copies of books that you can get for a discount, and then you don't have to feel distressed about scribbling in a fresh new copy (if you do).

I'll be using the words highlight and underline interchangeably during this post. They mean the same thing, marking a passage or sentence so that you can easily find it later.

Intent & Purpose

Typically there is a reason you read a book. There is a purpose behind it. Your partners' friend might have recommended it to you, but there is a reason you actually sit down and read it. If there wasn't, then you probably wouldn't read it just because someone said it was good.

Finding this reason is vital as it will define the structure of your notes in the book. For example, if you are reading a book about personal finance, the purpose might be to improve your spending habits, to start investing or saving for the deposit on a house.

Or if it is a book about fitness, you might want to get fit, learn how to run faster, improve your stamina. The more specific a reason, generally the better. By being particular, you are giving yourself an aim and intent behind the information in the book. You are looking for specific things in the book that can help you achieve your goal. Let me say that again.

You are looking for specific things in the book that can help you achieve your goal.

This intent solves the most significant problem I head when talking to people about note-taking and learning from books. They don't know what to highlight, what to underline or what information to take out of the book. I had the same problem when I first started making notes.

Back to the personal finance book, I would be underlining passages or sentences that help me improve my savings. Tips like riding a bike to work, or taking detailed looks at spending habits and breaking them down would make sense to make a note of. But also the concepts of cumulative interest and how saving value is multiplied massively over time.

Now, if you are just reading for the broad intent to learn, your purpose behind that is to find out things that you didn't know before. The general nature of this intent makes it hard to make specific notes. But highlighting things that achieve that goal is a starting point. We'll talk more about establishing connective tissue in the post about systems for storing your notes.

Categorise Notes

You know to make a note of things that are in line with the reason you are reading the book in the first place. So as you go along the book is starting to be added to. Underlines here, scribbles in the margin there, stars jotted about with the occasional exclamation point. And this is fine. I started off doing this. But over time, I built up an exact and consistent system that I used when reading a physical book. It lets me quickly understand the notes I made and how they relate to the general intent.

Indicators

The first thing I use is indicators. These are the capital letters in the title (A, R, S, I/C). Pronounced together as "Ar-see" It was generally a happy accident that the letters have such a memorable form. Here is what I use them to indicate.

Action (A)

Denotes a specific action that I should take or should consider taking. Whether it be, eat more leafy greens as they lower the levels of cholesterol in your body, or run twice a week at a faster tempo to improve your long-distance running pace.

These actions are typically the most important things to extract from the book. As it talks about in the Slight Edge, every habit and improvement you cultivate has a cumulative advantage on your situation. Obtaining one affirmative action from every book and implementing it into your life will slowly and then what will appear very rapidly increase your fortunes. 

Note that I included reasons to undertake actions in the notes. These may or may not come in such a natural note-form. If they do not, i.e. the text says "eat more leafy greens", but it was on a different page describing why you should eat them, just write under the A that reason, keeping the reason and the action together.

Reference/Research (R)

What is better than a recommendation on what to read from your cousin's oddball girlfriend? A direct reference or inclusion from the author you are already reading. Most books are written by people who are very successful in their field. They know what they are talking about. If they recommend something to read or reference a particularly exciting study to support more about what they are saying, then it is worth taking note.

I typically get 30% of my reading list from other books I've read. Smarter Investing by Tim Hale was a recommendation from Set for Life by Scott Trench for example. Keeping track of these recommendations and being able to quickly find them by scanning for the R makes it easy too look back through at the end and add it to your own reading list.

R also stands for research and can be used to denote ideas and thoughts that you want to learn more about. For example, the author might, in casual passing mention a historical event that you'd like to learn more about. Often when looking into the subject, you'll find more resources and research that you will want to read hence why they are under the same indicator.

Summary (S)

This denotes an excellent summary of an idea or theory. Summaries are usually larger chunks than other notes, but they do a great job summarising what has previously been written. If you read them on their own you would be able to understand 80% of the original, lengthier explanation.

A good author will always summarise the key ideas in their writing at the end of the chapter or section of the book. Some might even put them in bullet points for you making the identification of these summaries even easier. 

If there is no summary at the end of the chapter, take what you've read and summarise it yourself on the back of the chapter page in bullet points. Condensing information is what makes it more memorable and more convenient to digest. You will always remember more if you turn summaries into your own words. 

As a quick aside, there is an added benefit of extracting the summaries into a quick one-pager about the book can be a great way to 'reload' the book's contents back into your head at a later date.

Connection (C)

This has been a more recent addition to the system, so it is less tried and tested. It works primarily on the principle of connecting information between multiple sources. If you highlight a sentence because you can see a connection between what you read there what you have read elsewhere you would indicate that with C.

I usually write at the very least part of the connection or the source of the link in the margin to make sure that at a later date, I can easily remember what connected the two points. Connection notes are indispensable for improving your understanding of the book and helping you memorise the key points.

Memory is like a tree, all the little leaves of facts and knowledge are connected by branches and twigs. The stronger the connections between these leaves, the easier it is to recall things later. Similarly, creativity is most active at the intersection of ideas. Novel concepts are created when you combine existing ideas in new ways or modify them with previously unconsidered perspectives.

Interesting (I)

Probably the easiest one, this simply indicates a fact or thought that you find interesting. If you're reading the book only to discover or learn new things, then the pages might be full of these I's. They are the easiest to add can quite quickly take up a lot of the book before you know it. It is a good idea to try and keep them to only the most interesting facts. Think 3/4 per chapter.

I always remind myself that I have to type up these notes at the end of the book. So if I keep adding things only for the sake of it, the longer it is going to take.

So those are the letter based indicators that I use to make sense of the reasons I have underlined different parts of the book. I find myself, most often with the actions, adding a few words of context to the indicator, making it easier to remind myself why I thought implementing such a move would be a good idea.

For example, if it comes to savings, I might include the amount that I was thinking to save at the time when I read that part of the book. It is common when not in the books headspace, i.e. being swept along by the arguments of the author to not understand exactly why you thought doing something might be a good idea. The longer it goes between reading the book and consulting your notes, the more prominent this effect might have. Providing a sentence of context or explanation goes a long way to reducing this.

Non-Letter Indicators

Corner Folding

There are two other indicators I use to denote certain things in physical books. Firstly, folding corners. The top corner of any given page indicates that there is an action, that I might want to take on that page. This makes it incredibly easy to find those actions after you've finished reading them.

Naturally, this also prevents you from using the traditional corners to mark how far you are in the book. I personally use a pen, nestled into the spine of the book (the same one I will take notes with) as a bookmark. But any other solution will suffice.

The bottom corner of a page is reserved for all other indicators. This makes it quick and easy to find the notes I have made within the pages.

If the reason you're reading the book isn't to derive actions, or if that is not the most essential thing you extracted from the book. Make the top corner something else and relegate actions to the bottom corner. If you're reading for purely research purposes, perhaps as a student or academic, then you might want to fold the top corner on all R indicators, for example.

Stars

The classic scribbled star. This is to be used after having read the book to go back through and mark the particularly vital notes. It is an excellent tool for cutting down on the number of notes you end up typing up or transitioning to your 'knowledge hub'.

You may want to combine this with corner folding so that you only fold the corners of the pages that have starred indicators. This might make it easier, depending on how many notes you have taken, to find the most critical points in the book for checking out later.

Idea generation

During the course of reading a book, especially if you have a goal, you might stumble across a specific insight or idea that excites you. Or simply sets sparks flying in your mind. Either way, rather than jotting them down in a separate notebook or on a scrap of paper I would suggest writing them in the back of the book.

The inside cover is the perfect place to write these kinds of notes for three reasons. One, it is right there, no need to grab anything, no need to carry anything else with you. There is no context switching, no matter how small. In other words, you don't need to distract yourself from the idea you just had to make a record of it. You can almost immediately begin writing it down as soon as possible.

Secondly, if you never type up your notes, and let's be honest, you might not. That great idea you had will always be in that book you read. It will always be there rather than in one of the 15 different notebooks you've had over the years separated between different living spaces. It is far less likely to be lost. That being said, of course, the best thing to do it type of the notes, so you have a digital copy stored on the cloud accessible from anywhere. But we will get to that.

Lastly, you don't have a tonne of space in the back of a book. In fact, there might be barely any room at all. This is a good thing because it makes you condense your thinking. No long windy sentences (like those that make up this post), you have to be specific. You have to get to the point. Plus, if you use up too much space at the back before you get to the end of the book, you might not be able to add more to the idea as the book progresses, or simply include other novel ideas.

Learning to condense or be selective with how you process knowledge is a requisite skill if you want to learn a lot about many different subjects.

By writing in the back of the book instead of on an infinite canvas* you're challenging yourself and your brain to condense that information. During that process, you are increasing your chance of memorising that information. Active engagement with a topic, like condensing and processing increases how much of it is retained at later dates.

While we've covered physical books, how I approach taking notes on a tablet or e-reader is a different ball game which I'll cover in a separate post. The fundamentals of the ARSCI model is still in use, however.

*I'm not referring to an actual infinite canvas, just the concept of having nearly unlimited space to write an idea almost always results in excessive usage of that space. When trying to condense a 200-page book down to its core ideas to remember, an infinite canvas is not useful.

This post will be updated as time goes on to include more useful tips and reworkings if I find better solutions.