Best Ways to Learn from Books

Since the start of my career I have been reading books, I have read hundreds of technical books of all types. My problem was always how to keep this knowledge and avoid losing it by the time. This was hard to accomplish.

Throughout the years I have devised a technique that helped me keep a minimum of the information I gather from books, and in case I forgot some parts, I was able to quickly recover them with a relatively small time.

This technique is not big secret, however it needs devotion and commitment and seriousness at work. All you need to do is to summarize the book!

If you think you can go that far, here are the details of how to do it:

Open your book whether a hardcopy or an eBook and grab a pen and a notebook. Read one chapter comprehensively and then do another pass while stopping at end of each paragraph; write down in your notebook what have you understood from this paragraph and move to the next one. I know the task is daunting and time consuming in comparison to just reading one time. But remember, if you are reading a technical book, it means that you are determined to learn from it and not to read it for fun as it was a novel.

The summary must not exceed 15% of the original book size. So a 400 pages book can be reduced to 60 pages only. These 60 pages are stripped from all the fat content that usually comes with each book. They constitute what you have understood from your reading, and are written in your own style. For this reason, you can get back to them and refresh your memory at any time, in a very quick manner. It looks like that you have reread the whole original book in just one hour.

Here is a list of Do’s and DON’Ts:

• Don’t copy/paste from an eBook to a Word document because you won’t be writing in your own style.
• Read while sitting in front of your desk because it will be easier for you to take notes. Don’t read in bed or in the train.
• Don't use markers to highlight paragraphs on the book itself, because you won't be able to locate them rapidly in the future.
• Write in a notebook and not on separate sheets because you will lose them very easily.
• Don’t take notes directly on your PC because you will not be able to resist copy/paste for a long time.
• Read one chapter a day or two if their size is not big.
  

This technique has helped me a lot in keeping important information from fading away over the time. But it should be noted that those that will be instantly available in your head are those that you are applying in practice.