How I Take Notes From Books  ## Metadata - Author: [[Danny Talks Tech]] - Full Title: How I Take Notes From Books - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [NoteTaking, BookSummaries, LearningTechniques] - NoteTaking - BookSummaries - LearningTechniques Author: Danny Hatcher Source: [How I Take Notes from Books, YouTube Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc) Reference: [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc) date created: 2024-09-14 20:15 --- # Title: How I Take Notes from Books ## Table of Contents: 1. [📝 Summary](#summary) 2. [📖 Main Content](#main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#notes) 3. [📖 References](#references) 4. [🗣️ Paraphrase](#paraphrase) 5. [📰 Newsletter](#newsletter) 6. [✅ Action Items](#action-items) 7. [🧪 Hypotheses](#hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#methodology) - [❓ Questions](#questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#future-research) - [💡 Implications](#implications) 8. [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#learning-styles-assessment) 9. [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#accessibility-assessment) 10. [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#deib-assessment) 11. [✅ Logical Validity](#logical-validity) 12. [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#seo-evaluation) 13. [🎯 Conclusion](#conclusion) ### References: - Danny Hatcher, [How I Take Notes from Books](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc) --- ## 📝 Summary: In this video, Danny Hatcher explains his method for taking notes on physical books using the note-taking app **Obsidian**. He walks through the structure of his note files, which include sections like "Planning," "Sources," and "Points." He emphasizes the importance of connecting ideas from the book with his personal experiences, thoughts, and other materials, creating a rich web of notes. This method allows him to retain, reflect, and apply what he reads in practical ways, including video projects and essays. --- ## 📖 Main Content: Danny Hatcher's note-taking system for physical books revolves around breaking down content into manageable sections and customizing the notes to fit his understanding and experiences. He explains how he uses headings like **Planning**, **Sources**, and **Points** to categorize his notes, focusing on summarizing key ideas rather than copying entire passages. His method is flexible, allowing connections to other media (e.g., YouTube videos, academic papers) and enabling cross-referencing within Obsidian. He also reflects on how this process ties into broader learning strategies, emphasizing how these notes help him build knowledge *about* topics rather than memorizing facts. Additionally, Hatcher touches on the use of **Brilliant.org** for interactive learning, particularly in areas like math and data, and how this supplements his reading. ### 🗒️ Notes: - **Planning**: Before reading, Hatcher identifies the purpose of reading the book, often asking questions or establishing the "hook" for his interest. - **Sources**: As he reads, he tracks relevant references, including YouTube videos and articles that connect with the book's themes. - **Points**: Key ideas and personal reflections, often linked to video projects or other notes within Obsidian. - **Cross-referencing**: Hatcher frequently ties new readings back to previous ones, creating a layered and interconnected set of notes that help deepen his understanding. - **Summarizing**: His notes are concise, often distilling chapters into a few lines or key quotes, which he can reference later. - **Brilliant.org**: Hatcher endorses the interactive learning approach of Brilliant, which emphasizes problem-solving over memorization. --- ## 📖 References: - Danny Hatcher, [How I Take Notes from Books, YouTube Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc) --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. Hatcher begins his note-taking by creating a "Planning" section in his note, where he outlines why he is reading the book and what he hopes to gain from it. He adds questions and reflections as he goes, which help guide his reading and ensure he stays focused on his original purpose. 2. As Hatcher reads, he connects the material with other resources, such as YouTube videos or articles he's encountered. For example, while reading about variability in human movement, he recalls a chess video about creativity and notes it down as a reference, showing how interdisciplinary connections enrich his understanding of the topic. --- ## 📰 Newsletter: 📚 **Mastering Note-Taking with Danny Hatcher's System** In this issue, we dive into Danny Hatcher’s incredible method for taking notes from books using **Obsidian**. His approach is flexible, practical, and highly efficient, turning books into active learning tools. Whether you use Obsidian or a simpler app, you can adopt his process to enhance your own reading. Plus, Hatcher’s insights into cross-referencing, concise summarization, and real-world application of knowledge will transform how you take notes! Check out the full video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc). --- ## ✅ Action Items: - **Explore Obsidian for note-taking**: Try out Hatcher's approach to creating a structured, interconnected system of notes. - **Connect ideas**: Don’t just take notes on a single source—tie it into other content you're reading or consuming. - **Summarize for clarity**: Rather than transcribing pages, reduce content to concise summaries that reflect your understanding. - **Incorporate interactive learning**: Consider using tools like Brilliant.org to supplement your reading with hands-on problem solving. --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - **Hypothesis 1**: Cross-referencing new content with older material enhances retention and understanding. - **Hypothesis 2**: Using short, concise summaries improves recall compared to detailed transcriptions of text. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Memory Retention Study**: Conduct a study comparing individuals who take detailed notes with those who use Hatcher's method of concise summaries and cross-referencing. - **Cross-Referencing Experiment**: Explore the impact of integrating outside sources (e.g., videos, articles) on the depth of knowledge retention and synthesis. ### ❓ Questions: - How does summarizing notes in a concise format affect long-term memory retention? - Can interdisciplinary references enhance comprehension of complex topics? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Explore how note-taking apps like Obsidian influence knowledge retention in comparison to traditional pen-and-paper methods. - Study the effectiveness of integrating external media (e.g., YouTube videos, podcasts) into the note-taking process. ### 💡 Implications: - Leveraging cross-referencing and concise summaries could lead to more effective knowledge retention and deeper understanding of complex topics. Future research could influence how educational systems incorporate interdisciplinary learning. --- ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: 1. **Visual Learners (Spatial)**: - **Present**: Hatcher's use of hierarchical headings and linked notes helps visual learners see the structure of information. - **Improve**: Add flowcharts or mind maps to visualize the connections between books and external references. 2. **Aural Learners (Auditory-Musical)**: - **Present**: Videos and podcasts are integrated into the note-taking process, providing opportunities for auditory engagement. - **Improve**: Include audio summaries or reflections in the notes. 3. **Verbal Learners (Linguistic)**: - **Present**: The method involves extensive use of concise writing and summarization. - **Improve**: Incorporate more storytelling techniques when reflecting on the content. 4. **Physical Learners (Kinesthetic)**: - **Present**: The act of summarizing and connecting ideas engages some physical learners. - **Improve**: Add hands-on exercises related to the book’s content, encouraging kinesthetic interaction. 5. **Logical Learners (Mathematical)**: - **Present**: Hatcher’s method includes organizing information in a clear, logical manner, particularly in connecting ideas. - **Improve**: Incorporate more decision trees or step-by-step problem-solving frameworks for logical learners. 6. **Social Learners (Interpersonal)**: - **Present**: Social engagement is limited, though external media may include collaborative sources. - **Improve**: Encourage peer review or group discu - Document Tags: [[Book notes]] [[notes]] [[pkm]] - Summary: The text discusses how the author takes notes from books using the Obsidian note-taking tool. They share their process of summarizing and connecting ideas from different sources while reading and watching related content. The notes help them understand, analyze, and apply the information they gather for their projects and learning. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ry9s3OkAc thank you brilliant for sponsoring this video I've been reading through a lot of physical books recently you can see this is the most recent one it's about 300 pages long I'm going through this now and what I want to do is share how I'm taking notes on those books in obsidian and then turning it into something that I can remember and use in whatever it is that the book is talking about now I personally use obsidian as my notetaker if you don't want to use obsidian this would work with Microsoft Word or Apple notes or anything else you can see I've got this file and at the top of the file I've got the name of the book this is that I did before I should probably mention that the books I'm reading so this is the one that you just saw I'm turning them into video essays to help my own learning so if you want to see them I'll I'll link it up there but at the top of the file I have a main heading so a heading one called planning and this is just planning to scope out and understand why I'm reading the book like what is the point of me reading the book now I recognize packaging sounds YouTube specific but it's adding a task constraint to reading the book what am I hoping to get out of reading the book or what is the point of reading the book what I got wrong about repeative practice how blacksmiths should have changed education but it didn't work or The Ultimate Guide to repetitive practice there are various ways or narratives that I could describe the point the reason behind reading the book this title for example was written before I'd started reading the book and then this one was in chapter 3 when it started talking about Bernstein's repetition without repetition so there might be a title or a piece of packaging when I start reading the book but as I read through the book things may emerge and these are the highest level notes that I would take on a book it's not notes about the book it's notes about my reasoning behind reading the book The Hook options section is mainly to help me understand in future okay is there a question is there a statement is there a story behind why it is that I'm reading the book most of the time with academic textbooks and I'm just going through the long list I don't want to hook option but for shorter books so for example these two books you've got conscious coaching and there and the Talent Code they're shorter books I had hooks for them like what what is the hook for the reason to reading this book The Talent Code if I have a question what is Talent OR conscious coaching is there unconscious coaching or is it just conscious and the burning questions is similar uses but because I know how we learn to move I know the author and I've read a lot of his work already I don't really have any burning questions cuz I knew what to expect in the book and even though I know what's in alli's book because I helped him in the writing process I'm still going to add questions at the start because I don't know what it is that I really want to get out of reading the book and I'll get the questions from the chap so I can see Chapter One play Chapter 2 power chapter three people and that's part one energize so I'll ask questions about play what is play is that deliberate play is that players in fun in activities is that players in the way that we perceive play how is he defining play so before I start reading the book I'll have questions that I want to try and answer as I go and read through in the next section I have sources this is a main heading so you can see we've got the outline on the right we've got the planning which is what we've just gone through sources this is mainly just added to as I'm reading through the book If there is a video mentioned or a figure mentioned or a story mentioned or an academic article that's mentioned or another book I make sure I add the source in if it's interesting to me at least and so that I can reference it and actually go and have a look so this book had 68 references that I found useful but as you can see 67 Gotham chess that's a YouTube video that wasn't actually in the book and this is where as an ecological psychologist I would use terms like representative practice and constrained practice because as reading the book it's not isolated it's connected to all of the other learning experiences I've had so while I was reading the book I was also watching things on YouTube and Gotham chess did a video and he was talking about creativity in the game of chess now creativity is a chapter in the book I think it's chapter 11 or 12 no I just counted it's chapter 10 I was close but they were talking about creativity in the book and I watched a video from Gotham chess about creativity and there was a connection there so I added the source inside of the book file because Gotham chess's video is related to the practice the thinking that I was going through whilst reading the book so a lot of the sources aren't actually in the book They're things that I may have thought about whilst reading the book or other sources that I had already read consumed captured in some way beforehand brought it in as a reference and then used it in the script in the script project notes of writing the book and this is where the next section comes in points if there's something I'm reading about during the book that I think about then I'll add it in the points whether it's in the book or just related you can see there's a YouTube timestamp here so this is a link to a timestamp of a video that I watched probably whilst during reading the book so maybe I read the book in the morning then I watched YouTube and this became relevant as I watched it in the evening so I added the point here and that's the same for these other videos there's a screenshot of different videos in here and these are points that I thought might be relevant to this book project for those familiar with obsidian you can see drills and technique is actually a link it's a back link so if I zoom in you can see back bracket back bracket so the square brackets and this links to another file inside of obsidian and for me it's a project file I can tell because there's a little camera there so it's a video project if I have a look at the top you can see how we learn to move that's a video project so I'm going to turn it into a video essay and they are stored in my projects folder so I have a file called drills and techniques you can see the outline is exactly the same we've got the planning with the hooks the questions the sources we got a couple of sources in there and then points and the reason I've added this in here is because I think this video project this project about drills and technique and what drills and technique mean or don't mean in different sports different practice design inside of school learning Etc how all of these ideas relate to the book topics how we learn to move and as I scroll down in the point section you can see there's loads of other points that I've thought about but I've actually finished the script for this project yes this is a video but I still write scripts on books that I'm not putting into videos because it's my note not about the book so for these two books I have a script but they're not up on YouTube they're not videos they're just book scripts it's exactly the same as the one that I'm showing you except it's just not on YouTube yet and if you're wondering well what am I going to do with all of these points that aren't in the script well there's a reason why these points aren't in the script and each of these points will have different reasons for them not being in the script but what will likely happen is when I go to the drills and techniques video essay here is because it's linked so if I go to this file and I go to the linked mentions you can see how we learn to move when I go back to this as I'm writing it then I will see oh maybe by fications is related maybe I want to talk about the noise and pink Noise White Noise Brown noise and add that into drills and techniques so I keep them in the book project file because they're points related to the book but they're not points that I would want to have in my notes when I'm trying to explain understand or think through the topics discussed during the book now when you actually have a look at the chapters I'm going to try and show you as many chapters as I can there you can see there's 15 but the chapter names are long and I want to make sure that I know what the chapter's talking about for me so as an example the second chapter we are built to produce and detect variation I've renamed that to variability is everywhere you can see we've got the hook which isn't actually a chapter in the book that's me explaining my reasoning my understanding of why I'm reading the book The chapter one which is one technique which is quite similar to the books chapter which is the myth of the one correct repeatable technique so I've just just shortened it but chapter 2 variability is everywhere for me means something different to we are built to produce and detect variation and then I expand on what this means to me during the notes of the chapter so you can see I do have some quotes from the book and I make sure I put the page in so I know what page the quotes is from and then any other quotes that come from other sources you can see I've added in the number to the source so this is just two square brackets surrounding a number 14 so when I go shift right arrow key I've now opened up the file tce and I can jump all the way to the top to the list and then you can see 14 so that's Nadal 2012 Rafa my story so that's a quote from the book that I read from a different book but I make sure I Source the original source that the quote actually came from so I can actually go and find it and if I do decide I want to read the book I can and the rest of these words you'll notice they are short sentences and what I've tried to do is abbreviate I tried to shorten down the book into words that make sense for me so I've explained the entire chapter of the book in about 500 words in this case and some of them are quoted but even though there are less words for me this is more dense with information because I've removed all of what I would class as filler words as an example this line here heart rate variability or HRV is a good thing in the book that's almost a page so to give you a practical example one that I'm working with right now from the book that I'm reading this one there is 14 pages at the start before chapter 1 and when I come into the active notes that I'm taking on the book you you can see this is chapter 1 status quo and all of these words here represent 14 pages now I know for me what Alex's story is when it comes to basketball and learning basketball and I've made a couple of notes here for me that explain what his experience was if I drag this over to the side so you can have a comparison this one line will probably be a lot of this together then this line will probably be these things together this will likely get condensed into a line we then have a quote another line a quote qu and then probably one more line so I've summarized 14 pages in what seven lines and two quotes and for me this is more representative practice because I'm thinking through the ideas through my own experiences rather than through Alex's writing to add some clarity to that what I'm doing is I'm thinking about my experience what Alex is writing about his experience coaching basketball and then trying to match them up so I know Alex's story he talks about stretching then drills then a game I had the same experience so I will use that when I'm summarizing my notes to say I remember doing static stretches at the start of a session and Alex did the same thing so I'm creating connections between my experience and the reading my experiences coming from either my practical experiences playing the sport or experiences watching videos like I mentioned with the Gotham chess and even though I'm already 2 and a half pages into this first chapter I haven't written any notes because there's nothing significant to me that I would want to write about which begs the question what is significant to me and this is again where I'm going to use some terms from ecological psychology the organism environment relationship so me within the environment that relationship will shift and is dynamic throughout time so what's significant to me as I read that chapter may be different from when I read the next chapter which is actually why when I'm writing my notes inside of obsidian I may add a note to chapter 1 chapter 2 when I'm reading chapter 7 or 8 because I've thought about something that was mentioned in those earlier chapters that I didn't really y grasp the importance of until a later chapter as an example in the how we learn to move book you can see here in Chapter 2 so variability is everywhere I'm talking about injury now when I first read this stuff about injury knee pain I thought okay yeah whatever I've heard all of this before adding variability decrease pain yes fine but it wasn't until the last chapter of the book where Rob goes specifically into detail about ACL injuries and some of the more complex reasoning and studies behind in prevention that I thought this relates to that information in Chapter 2 which was down here so I added the notes in Chapter 2 after reading chapter whatever the last one is 13 15 for those people familiar with this channel you may be familiar with this book I did a video essay on this about a month ago and while I was reading through the how we learn to move book I actually thought oh that reminds me of the study in chapter 12 in this book which is about bab and baz tugging on the jaw because of synergies and motion so even though I finished the essay I finished the project on this book reading through the how we learned to move book I was referencing this one and the ideas from this one inside of the file so I've just done a very quick search I just did a contr F4 bab because I know there going to be a word and there it is that's in the boss of the body the central executive there's the reference 22 so shift right arrow go up to the list go down to 22 it's there that's the Kelo study so that's not the study that was in the book which was this uh this video essay so you can see this is a a much longer video essay there's some setup points some questions but you can see if I search for bab there it is there's the word bab and in this one the reference number is 16 but I know what the reference is cuz I remember bab and I also remember baz but this is where I'm arguably duplicating information because it's in two files it's in this project file and this project file but to me they mean different things because in the how we learn to move one it's talking about perturbations and variations of coordination whereas in the first video essay it's talking about not being anatomical movement patterns for motor coordination so the significance changes with the relationship between me and the book and the environment that I'm working in the context I'm in essentially so I'm taking notes all the way through reading the book and after reading the book but of course everyone takes notes slightly differently this is how I take notes on physical books and also articles and Kindles it's just the not taking is obviously I can highlight things and bring them in in automatically rather than having to type them out all the time but reading a book helps my knowledge about something not knowledge of something so when I'm actually doing something practicing things such as using this book transforming basketball it's coaching Sports so how am I putting that into practice well into my coaching so when I'm coaching trampoline it's putting it into practice it's using the information in interactive ways and that is what brilliant the sponsor of this video try and do with their lessons they have interactive lessons for you to explore various different topics their focus is on problem solving Hands-On problem solving not focused on memorizing the answers to questions or wrote repetition but solving problems yourself doing the practice engaging in the thinking brilliant also encourages consistent engagement building habits or daily practices with looking at various elements of different materials whether it be maths or data and for me even though my field is ecological psychology and psychology you wouldn't think is very mathematically inclined a lot of the data when it comes to predictive processing active inference and the models used to describe how the brains work uses base rules and Bas in statistics which I'm using brilliant to help me understand to try everything brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org Danny talk Tech you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription but if you're interested to see what these videos actually turn into what I'm actually learning from the reading the books then maybe have a look at my second Channel which I link over here, How I Take Notes From Books, Danny Talks Tech, 01hyzq1hv3m5e8sq4yb4qqtv5v.