As you can see, consuming information in a just-in-time manner with a strong reason to do so is the first and most important step towards retaining more of it. That said, once you’ve decided something you’re about to read is important, you’ll want to boost your memory to the max.

Here’s how.

A Complete Guide to Remembering What You Read

When I look at the process from reading to retention, I see five phases. Let’s walk through them, break them down and optimize our behavior along the way.

1. Previewing

In 10 Days to Faster Reading, before she covers any speed reading exercises whatsoever, Abby Marks-Beale reveals the most powerful way to read more:

Read less of the stuff you don’t need to.

Before you even begin to run your finger across the paper or your eyes from pixel to pixel, ask:

1. Why am I reading this?

2. Why do I need the information that’s in here?

This is your chance to truly live up to the “Read It When You Need It” motto. Once material passes the most important filter, you can do what Mortimer J. Adler called an inspectional read in his 1940 masterpiece How to Read a Book.

The goal of an inspectional read is to answer two more questions:

1. What is this book about?

2. What kind of book is this?

You can do this by skim-reading the following sections:

The title page.

The editor’s blurb.

The cover text.

The table of contents.

Introductory sections and important paragraphs of chapters that interest you.

This equips you with one of the most important enablers of information:

Context.

Having an idea of the overarching theme of a book, as well as the purpose its author had in mind, while writing it, will significantly improve how you catalogue its contents.

“Content is king, but context is God.” — Gary Vaynerchuk

2. Reading

The most common reason a book gets frustrating and we throw in the towel is that it takes too long to read. Let me clarify: It takes us too long to read.

Hence, Adler suggests you read the book cover to cover on your first pass through, but don’t look up things you don’t understand. Even without perfectly aligning every single piece of the puzzle right away, remaining aware of the context will allow you to arrange the final bits and details later on.

That said, there is one, massive counterpunch to be thrown here, which will strike a balance:

Pause after every paragraph.

This idea stems from Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Let me explain.

In a paragraph, all the emphasis lies on the first and last few words. Therefore, a paragraph instantly exposes what the author thinks is important. It’s like listening to someone talk while paying attention to which words they pronounce more clearly, more slowly, and which ones they repeat for emphasis.

The best way to catch these accents of importance and reflect on them is to think of paragraphs as literary breathing guides. When you start a new one, you slowly breathe in and then gradually exhale as you read on and on, before coming to a full exhale upon the last word.

Might be longer than a mile, though.

Breathing in sync with paragraphs gives your reading a nice rhythm, and reveals what makes a good paragraph: too many one-liners and you’re hyperventilating, too many drawn out walls of text and you’re out of air too soon.

I guess the metaphor to use is to think of a book as a long, winding road with the occasional set of speed bumps. You don’t want to fly over them, as it’ll damage your car, but you don’t want to come to a full stop at each hump either.

3. Note-Taking

The question is not whether you should take them, but when. Two options come to mind:

While reading

Given our conclusion in the previous section, we’ll want to keep on-the-go note-taking to a minimum, which, even if done in the book, is distracting.

However, one thing that won’t block your flow and will be of huge benefit later, is highlighting.

A sample page with my highlights from Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is The Way.

While reading, some sentences naturally feel more important than others. Phrases pop out, paragraphs demand: “Remember me! I’ll be important later.”

Follow your gut. Be spontaneous. Let your subconscious do the work, your eyes point out the result and your fingers make the mark.

After reading

Speaking of subconscious, while I’m sure you’re eager to take notes right after closing the last chapter, waiting for a few days until you extract a book’s lifeblood comes with a few advantages.

The following two I found in Benedict Carey’s book, How We Learn.

First, there’s the Zeigarnik effect, which is your brain’s tendency to remind you of things you’ve left unfinished.

In learning, this means while you’re taking a break after a 4 hour hardcore math session, your subconscious keeps processing the last problem you got stuck on and the solution might come to you in the shower the next morning.

Letting the impressions of a good book sit for some time holds them in your subconscious and makes later drawn conclusions stronger.

Second, the spacing effect rushes to your side, which indicates learning works better spaced out over time, rather than limited to a single event.

Ever forget someone’s name right after they introduced themselves? That’s because mumbling it over and over again right away doesn’t help. It just makes your brain bored. Your brain needs breaks to remember things.

Sending yourself a reminder with John’s name two days after you heard it the first time will be much more efficient. And so will leaving the book on the shelf.

Third, this gives you the opportunity to explore other, topically similar books in the meantime.

Why is that helpful? As Nat Eliason points out, reading related books, or select chapters of them, allows you to identify universal constructs. After all, timeless philosophical advice won’t be written about just once. This is what Thomas C. Foster refers to as intertextuality, the dependency of all texts upon one another, in How to Read Literature Like a Professor.

By the time you get back to your original book, you’ll have a solid idea of which concepts have stood the test of time so far.

Keeping these advantages in mind, two note-taking systems in particular deserve your attention:

System I: Question/Evidence/Conclusion

Designed for streamlining note-taking in non-technical college classes, this system designed by Cal Newport translates well to non-fiction books.

The concept is simple: instead of transcribing exactly what the professor says, capture the big ideas. To do so, reduce your notes to a series of questions paired with conclusions. Between each question and conclusion should be a collection of evidence that connects the two. — Cal Newport

What’s remarkable about this idea is that it lets you file almost every sentence into a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive classification scheme.

More from The Obstacle is The Way.

In the upper example, the question “What is up to us?” is paired with the listed evidence to arrive at the conclusion that those things resemble our playing field and are therefore under our control.

You can do this on paper or directly in the book, as I did, but will either way arrive at a big set of interconnected conclusions.

System II: The Morse Code Method

Another contribution Cal Newport has made to the note-taking world, this method is designed to take notes fast.

Dot or dash — what’s it gonna be?

Instead of a lengthy alphabet though, the Morse Code Method only relies on the original elements — the dot and the dash — to denote ideas and support for those ideas.

1. If you come across a sentence that seems to be laying out a big, interesting idea: draw a quick dot next to it in the margin. 2. If you come across an example or explanation that supports the previous big idea: draw a quick dash next to it in the margin. — Cal Newport

Yup. Ryan Holiday. Again.

In this example, the idea is that failure can be a good thing. The support is presented in the form of questions, which, if answered, will provide a learning benefit. Additionally, Holiday says failure pressures us to think — which is a good thing.