Reading a book has an effect on my head-computer. It’s a new input and it affects the whole brain structure.
But reading a book and making notes is a lot more useful because then I can re-read meaningful (for me) parts of the book several times and it will deepen my neural networks.
Writing out sentences takes a lot of time and I don’t like doing it while I’m reading because then I have to have my laptop nearby and I also have to come out of my reading position.
Instead, I just highlight the sentences by adding square brackets around them and then making a dot on the side of the page so I’d later notice it more easily when going through the book.
It’s super easy to make notes like that. You just read and draw brackets with a pencil. I’d even say it’s too easy and I might make too many notes like that. Because that’s all I have to do – draw brackets and make dots.
But then comes a time to share my notes on my blog. I have to open up my book, find the next highlight, keep the book somehow open so I can type. I can mostly type by not looking at my keyboard but I still have to look sometimes and this makes me lose track of where I was.
I came up with a new process today and it works very well. I’ll just sit down in my beanbag, open the book and start dictating to my iPhone’s AI.
I’m using Notes and it works quite well. It had some occasional problems recognising words, mostly names, and sometimes it didn’t know when to end the sentence.
But the main problem for me was that even though I could say “new paragraph” after each highlight from the book, it didn’t work every time and even if it did, it didn’t scroll down on my iPhone’s screen so I could check if it added a line break or not.
In the end I came up with a solution where instead of saying “new paragraph” I just keep the phone where I can tap the Enter key after each highlight. This makes sure that the line break happens and it will be always scrolled down to the bottom of the screen.
It still took some time to get all the highlights down. I had to say them out loud (which was a great way to repeat important highlights to myself and deepen my neural networks) and then I also had to go through the notes on my computer and fix some small typos like names or splitting things apart into different sentences.