Zettelkasten

The Heist – How to Process a Practical Book Quickly

If you don’t master the exploiting way of reading, you waste a lot of time and energy.

Not every book should be processed in the same way. A novel contains different elements than a non-fiction book. But you also need to consider your own interests. For example, we read some books purely for the actionable information they contain. This requires an efficient and selective reading mode.

Now the question is: what are we actually selecting for?

Image by Nel Botha from Pixabay

We want Action Item Marginalia (AIMs)

We want to know what we should do and why. We read for action items. Action items are traditionally understood as tasks or projects. Tasks define actions that bring us closer to a desired outcome. Projects define the desired outcome in the world.

I add two more types of action items:

Workflows define solution paths for types of tasks and projects. Example: The workflow template for writing a blog post (“Collect ideas, write outline, check outline for certain properties, write first draft, revise draft, add illustrations, publish”).

Templates (Templates) define a type of result of tasks and projects. Example: Templates for training plans (“warm-up, main exercises, secondary exercises, supplementary exercises, warm-down”).

I use the following marginalia, i.e. markings in the margins of books when reading:

  • ☐ = Make it a task
  • ● = Information
  • R = Something to reflect on
  • TL = A template, or “Make a template out of it”
  • WF = A workflow, or “Make a workflow out of it”

“Goal-Oriented” Means That Goals Are Defined

I read the book Primal Branding. Primal Branding is a thinly written book about designing a brand.

“Thinly written” means that the action items and hard information are embedded in narratives and anecdotes. But it has a good structure, which is reflected in the table of contents. My impression is that this book is written by and for people who are passionate and interested in the subject of “brand” and “marketing”. I don’t have that passion. Therefore, my interest in auxiliary information is low.

A reverse example would be my reading of Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. I was surprised that someone commented that the connection between the village and the curse of King Haggard’s castle was needlessly distracting from the plot and even detrimental to it. I didn’t get excited about the book because of its plot, but because of its masterful treatment of the psychological level of fairy tales. My counterpart, on the other hand, read the book as a plot-driven story.

The relationship between you and the book determines the way you should read, and how you should later process the book.

The Act of Reading Must Reflect the Purpose of Reading

Reading takes time. This means that we should consider how we spend that time. If I am reading a book on a topic in which I am only interested in for utilitarian reasons, I want to identify exactly those action-relevant knowledge building blocks and action items as quickly as possible and prepare them in such a way that I can process them efficiently into my Zettelkasten. However, if I’m reading a book whose topic I like, it makes sense to spend more time reading it.

One of the typical mistakes when reading is to mix these two motivations. In my experience, this is especially true with self-development books. For example, there is a class of books that do nothing but illustrate a core message with countless anecdotes and illustrations. Often, each chapter is introduced with a story, briefly interrupted by a rather superficially researched block of factual explanations (recognizable, for example, by second-hand citations), only to then return to the story. The entire reading of the book provides few action items. Such thinly written books deliver few AIMs per page. If you read such books for enjoyment, you are at least pursuing a goal if you read the book word by word. However, if you are interested in something actionable, reading should be practiced as an efficient search for knowledge building blocks and action items.

That’s exactly what I did with Primal Branding. I didn’t read it thoroughly. If a paragraph introduced an anecdote, I just skimmed it. After the first couple dozen pages, I had a good sense of when the author was actually delivering knowledge and when he was just telling a story.

You could think of reading as the highlighting of pre-products that I process into action items and their background information.

Decide What You Will Use the Book You Read for Based on Your Motivation

The mere act of reading is the most superficial way of processing texts. Even highlighting passages and placing marginalia does not help much to increase the depth of processing.

When I have finished processing the book Primal Branding, I would like to end up with the following results:

  1. A thematic structure sheet on how to build a brand.
  2. One structure sheet each about the brand “Zettelkasten” and the brand “ME-Improved”.
  3. Two projects for building the brand. One for “Zettelkasten” and one for “ME-Improved”, which I fill with tasks based on the theory of Primal Branding.
  4. Improvements to some templates for writing content.

Primal Branding has a good structure. Therefore, I do not need to create a structuring aid (e.g. my own table of contents) when reading. I rely on the structure of the book when creating the thematic structure sheet on how to build a brand.

Principles, methods, tools and resources for practice

Prepare your reading with the following questions:

  • Decide if you want to enjoy the book or if it is just a means to an end. Only if you are clear about your motivation for reading will you get the most out of your time.
  • Be clear on your desired outcomes. The more precise your idea of what you want to produce from the intermediate product of the book you have read and pre-processed with markers, the more purposeful you can make your reading. Sometimes, however, you will need to work out your plans while reading.
  • Make a short list of possible publications and specific projects that would benefit from reading If you don’t want your notebook to be a hobby project, you should never lose sight of its role as a tool and a way station to your actual goals. You read for ways to extract specific information from the book. You process it into notes for understanding, publishing and action.
  • Use marginalia to mark action items. The book you read and made markings in serves as a tool to generate action items. This is exactly what the marginalia in the book are for. So use action-oriented marginalia.

Implementation using the example of Primal Branding:

  • Purpose of reading: I’m not personally interested in the content. I read such books because I have to read them to build up entrepreneurial knowledge. The book is purely a means to an end.
  • The result of the reading: The result of the reading should prepare me to a) develop an initial understanding of how a brand works, b) a series of tasks whose completion will lead to a better representation of the brands of Zettelkasten.de and me-improved.de, and c) workflows and templates for marketing projects.
  • Concrete projects:
    • In the Zettelkasten: Improvement of the structure notes “Brand Zettelkasten”, “Brand ME-Improved”, “Create inventory for an article”
    • In the task management: Project “Create plan for brand management” and “Become a next level marketing person”. Improvement of templates “Article with translation” and “Article with video”

Final words

I used to read every book because I wanted to learn something. For some of my books, that meant wasting time. Now I read books like Primal Branding with a better purpose: I’m not looking for blocks of knowledge, but for meaningful tasks. So I don’t just read books like this for my notepad, but also for my task management system.

Christian’s Comment: When I was trying to learn to read properly at the beginning of my University studies, I didn’t quite understand what I could improve when reading every word from a book from beginning to end, except becoming as fast as possible. But speed didn’t help. Continuing to read the wrong thing, but faster, improves throughput a little. But setting a specific goal, and finding tools like AIM’s, may increase efficiency by an order of magnitude because you find the right things to read. Reading for the recognition of specific schemas, as Luhmann put it in “Learning How to Read”, has absolutely improved the process for me.