When it comes to reading, I'm a dabbler. I'm always in the middle of multiple (as in, double digits) books, e-books, audio books, and magazines. Most of them are non-fiction, which lends itself well to dabbling. I rarely read more than one novel at at time because, once I enter the world of characters I care enough to keep reading about, I don't want to mix up their lives with anyone else's.
Since so much of what I read is non-fiction, I typically read with a pencil or highlighter in hand, and Post-it Note flags and scissors (for magazines) within reach. After I set everything aside, I'm left with a collection of ideas, thoughts and, if I'm lucky, inspiration.
But what do I do with all of it? If I keep the books in my personal library, it's easy enough to flip through the pages and/or follow the flags to locate the information I'm seeking (provided I can remember which book had which idea). For the magazines, I have a clipping file.
This tenuous, imperfect, sort-of system was working for the most part, but it wasn't terribly efficient. Then, when online reading joined the game, it quickly became the tipping point, and the notion that my system did anything but generate clutter went right down the drain.
When I discovered Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, I tore through the first few chapters. Not only did it promise to help me build a system, but it also reminded me why I was gathering all this miscellany in the first place. Even better, I was delighted to discover that those with some of the best minds in history had notebooks filled with highlights of what they'd read. Though I have no delusions that I have one of the best minds in history, it was nice to know I'm in good company.
I've been chipping away at Forte's book for several months now. I haven't lost interest; I just didn't want to wait until I finished the book to put his ideas to work. So far, I've personalized his ideas by pressing the Notes app on my devices into service to organize my online finds and I've created a "Book Notes" notebook to capture ideas from any book I decide not to keep in my personal library. These small steps (purely my interpretation of the intersection of Forte's ideas with my own habits) have helped me to feel (a bit) less scattered because my finds are a bit more curated. I'm also creating a library of notebooks (which take up less space than books), and I've discovered that as I collect and curate, I pay a bit more attention to why I'm selecting the information that I decide to keep. Sometimes I don't have a specific reason, or perhaps I can see numerous ways that the information will be useful -- that's where the creative potential part comes in -- and that's also why it's so important to save the information in a way that makes retrieval as easy as possible.I want to make it clear that my system is my take on how Forte's ideas work for me. Although his books provide a framework, he's very clear that one size does not fit all, which is one of the things that has made this book such a good read.
Meanwhile, I persist in my goal of finishing two books a month -- a small, reachable goal that ensures that I don't just skim the surface of 10, 000 ideas. Perhaps even better, it affords me the freedom to continue the sampling and dabbling I so enjoy.