The goal is not to take notes—the goal is to think effectively. Better questions are “what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?”, “how can I shepherd my attention effectively?” etc. This is the frame in which Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work makes sense: Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate.

If you want to deeply internalize something you’re reading, the best way I know is to write about it:

For deep understanding, it’s not enough to just highlight or write marginalia in books: there isn’t much pressure to synthesize, connect, or to get to the heart of things. And they don’t add up to anything over time as you read more. Instead, write evergreen notes as you read.

Collect passages that seem interesting and thoughts that emerge while reading: How to collect observations while reading

Process clusters of those passages and thoughts into lasting notes:How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes

It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply, but it’s distracting to switch back and forth between reading and writing polished notes. Instead, collect insights in a lightweight way while you read. You can put them in A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes. That'll Close open loops, and you’ll process them later (see How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes).

Annotations—even inline marginalia which include your own writing—have very little informational value. They’re atomized; they don’t relate to each other; they don’t add up to anything; they’re ultra-compressed; they’re largely unedited. That’s fine: think of them as just a reminder. They say “hey, look at this passage,” with a few words of context to jog your memory about what the passage was about.

Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. You wouldn’t want to rely on that long-term, since then you’d just have a huge pile of hooks you’d have to “follow” anytime you wanted to think about your experience with that book.

When processing these observations, you’ll want to be able to see the big picture and see clusters of ideas, so it’s helpful to collect annotations in a manipulable fashion.

First: what notes should even get written? We’ll write Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented, so what are the key concepts? You need to take a step back and form a picture of the overall structure of the ideas. Concretely, you might do that by clustering your scraps into piles and observing the structure that emerges. Or you might sketch a mind map or a visual outline. The structure you observe does not have to match the book’s structure: it’s whatever makes sense relative to your own personal ontology (Do your own thinking).

Here I’ve summarized Christian Tietze’s process, which I’m presently adopting / adapting:

Some of them do very simple things—jotting a few key references on the back page, or writing intermittently in the margin—but none of them implements any kind of consistent practice like the one described in Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply. It’s not that they’ve so deeply internalized and automatized those practices that they seem invisible: they’re just not doing those things.

They’re all expert readers, though, in their own way. They read for a purpose; they discuss what they read with others; they use what they read as part of creative projects; etc. So they’re not more effective than other readers for no reason at all.

In fact, the negation almost seems true: most note-taking fanatics seem to actually be quite ineffective thinkers. This should give one pause that it’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply! I suspect that the key issue here is “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”; such people are focused on “better note-taking.” People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use.

That said: Many eminent thinkers need a writing surface to think.

It seems that most people can remember only a few high-level details of a book weeks later—if that. A typical reader might spend hours finishing some serious non-fiction—then maybe it comes up at a dinner party, and they find you can remember like three sentences. Basically no detailed recall. Barely the gist!

What’s more: people seem surprised when this happens. They seem to consistently overestimate how much they’re absorbing from a book.

See How rapidly do people forget practical knowledge?

This observation is unfortunate for many reasons, but among them: Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals and Complex ideas may be hard to learn in part because their components overflow working memory.

For common objections: Many people view memory as unimportant to deep creative work.