Use This 3-Step System to Get More Out of Every Book You Read
I've been doing this for a decade, and it skyrocketed my reading comprehension
*This article was previously published as a guest post on Glasp.
In my day job, I’m the Director of Learning & Development for an international company called Jitasa, where I teach and train employees, managers, and executives how to lead confidently, work efficiently, and communicate effectively.
As someone who needs to keep track of stories, quotes, and ideas for my work and my writing, I depend heavily on digital tools like Glasp (a read-it-later app) and Obsidian (a personal knowledge management tool).
But what about physical books?
I love using those digital tools, but I also read a lot of physical books (over 70 per year).
For years, I struggled to remember takeaways from those books. That wasn’t only inconvenient, it was also embarrassing. If one of my friends asked me about a book I recently finished, I often couldn’t tell them basic info like my takeaways (for nonfiction) or the protagonist’s name (for fiction).
It sucked.
Because my work and my writing both rely on me remembering and acting upon insights from the books I read, I realized I had to come up with a system to get more out of my reading.
So, for the past decade, I’ve been experimenting with tactics to record and remember key takeaways from the 700+ books I’ve read in that time span.
What I’ve developed is an advanced system of margin notes (“marginalia”) that helps me remain focused on the text while noting key takeaways to put into practice later. This process has been so helpful that I’ve continued to expand my book notes system, tweaking it year-by-year to the point that it’s now dialed in for maximum effectiveness.
Countless friends of mine have now adopted this system and raved about how it’s revolutionized their reading and improved their comprehension, so I’m excited to share it with you.
The core of this process is extremely simple, and I’ll share pictures along the way to show how you can maximize each step.
The system
The system I’ve developed breaks down into three components:
Star: Star key passages to quickly find them later
Underline: Underline essential quotes and ideas on each page
Back Cover: Record your biggest takeaways in the back cover of the book
Let’s take a quick look at each of the three steps…
1. Star key passages to quickly find them later
As I’m reading a book, I place an asterisk (*) next to key passages to help me track down those ideas later when I riffle through the book.
For important passages, I circle the asterisk so I can find the material even faster. The circled asterisks are generally the items I record in the back cover of the book (explained in step #3 below).
Here’s an example of a typical page of one of my books. You’ll notice a couple of stars and margin notes that will help me quickly find those ideas later.
2. Underline essential quotes and ideas on each page
As I read, I ask myself the question: “If I were to go back and skim-read this book, what few sentences on this page would I need to read to understand the core concept or the essential elements of the plot?”
The answer to that question determines what parts I underline. Underlining or highlighting is not an exact science. Different ideas and quotes resonate with different people.
Sometimes my wife reads a book that I’ve marked up, and she’s surprised by the types of things I underlined. My notes don’t make sense to her, but they’re not supposed to. Your notes are for you — not for anyone else.
While I read, I also note words I don’t know. For example, the picture above is from the book Stein on Writing by Sol Stein. Page 116 of that book contains the word “antediluvian,” which I had never heard before, so I looked it up and wrote the definition on the page. I’ve been using a backward pilcrow (the paragraph symbol) to designate new vocabulary words, but you can use any symbol you’d like.
The note-taking process may slow you down by 10 percent, but it will increase your engagement and action by 200 percent.
3. Record your biggest takeaways in the back cover
Before using this system, if I wanted to thumb back through an old book to find a quote or concept, I had to scan through every page to find what I wanted.
That seemed ridiculous, and I knew there must be a better way to summarize what I had learned (and where I could find it in the book), so I began using the inside back cover of every book to record my primary takeaways.
This effectively turns the back cover into a one-page “cheat sheet” for the book, which has proved to be the single most effective part of my SUB system.
Here’s a quick peek:
Here’s another example from Walter Isaacson’s biography Benjamin Franklin:
If you look closely, you’ll notice several different types of notes in the image above:
Favorite Quotes — The upper left corner includes page numbers of a few of the author’s best quotes.
Key Takeaways — The main section on the left page includes a page number alongside each core insight or story I learned from the book. I usually choose about 15–25 main takeaways for every book and write ~1 sentence for each item, just trying to jot down enough information to help me remember the core concept when I re-open the book later (even if it’s years later).
Date Finished — The bottom left corner shows the date I finished reading the book. (If and when I re-read the book, I write the re-read date as well.)
Book Recommendations — I write the author’s recommendations in the upper right corner. Most authors are insatiable readers who consume 10–50 books while researching a book. They generally reference those books throughout the text, along with sprinkling in some of their all-time faves. If I want to dive deeper into a topic from the book, their recommendations give me a great starting point.
Personality/Character Traits — Because this is a biography, I also jotted down a few things about what made Franklin successful, what he struggled with, etc.
The types of things I write in the back cover of each book differ based on the type of book. For example, writing notes about someone’s personality traits wouldn’t make sense in a business or psychology book. For those types of books, I record notes like what I plan to apply to my life and work.
Depending upon the type of book, I’ve also begun to write timelines in the back pages of certain books. I primarily do this in histories, biographies, and even some business books. Here’s a picture of my timeline from the Benjamin Franklin biography:
What about fiction books?
At first, I only used this book notes system for nonfiction books. Then I kept running into situations where I wished my memory was better from novels too, like when…
A new movie adaptation came out for a book I read years ago, and I was curious how similar the book and movie were
A friend read a book I recommended and wanted to chat about the storyline
A sequel dropped for a series and I wanted to remember how the last book ended
So I gradually began to also write notes in novels. I’ve found that the notes help me follow along with the plot and remember what happened in the story.
For fiction, I usually write a character list on one of the pages of the book’s front or back cover, like the example below from The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.
Warning: Spoilers below. But hopefully you already read The Outsiders in middle school English class many years ago. ;)
Even though I now use the SUB notes process for every book I read, you should choose when you want to use it based on your reading preferences.
What you’re probably wondering at this point
I’ve talked to a lot of people about this book notes system and they reliably mention the same questions or reservations, so let’s tackle those one by one:
You: I could never defile my books that way! You scoundrel!
Me: I get it. I’ve been there. I used to treat my books no differently than a library book. It felt wrong to deflower the pages with my scribbles, so each margin remained milky white.
But eventually, I realized that what made a book special was not its words, but what those words sparked inside me: ideas, inspiration, and action.
I’ve learned that writing notes in a book enables you to engage in a form of co-creation with the author. Margin notes help you transition from idea to inspiration to action. They help you remember what you’ve learned and apply it to your life.
I also realized that writing in books is actually the best way to honor an author’s work.
Think of it like this…
Let’s say you just wrote your first book. You go on a book tour and your first stop is the legendary Powell’s Books in Portland. Only a few people turn up because you’re a first-time author, but two people come up to you for a book signing after your talk:
Joe gives you his book and it’s in gem mint condition. You’re not sure whether he just bought it, maybe cracked it open once, or read the entire thing.
Bobby hands you his copy of your book. It’s ratty and worn-in—practically falling apart from wear and tear. You open the book to find that it’s overflowing with margin notes. It looks like he’s written on nearly every page of your book.
Which reader would you prefer to meet?
I’m guessing you’d prefer to meet Bobby. He took your work seriously, and it’s clearly impacted his life, which is flattering.
Writing in books is the best way to honor the author, remember their work, and incorporate their ideas into your life.
You: I only read library books, and I can’t mark those up. This idea is useless to me.
Me: I’m a huge fan of the library system, and I’m glad you are too. Borrowing books from your local library is a great way to save money and reuse books.
However, I believe that if a book is worth the time to read, it’s generally worth the money to buy. Headway estimates that the average book takes about 10-12 hours for the average person to read. If you’re investing that much time to read a book, you want to get the most possible impact out of it (especially for nonfiction).
So if you’ve been a library devotee for your entire life, here are a few options you can consider for applying this book notes concept:
Keep using the library but take paper or digital notes outside of the book
Use the library for “fun reads” but purchase any book you think has the potential to change your life (and take notes in that book)
Begin buying books on cheap sites like Thriftbooks.com. (This is what I do. With how many books I buy, I would be in the poorhouse if I wasn’t buying used books, and Thriftbooks’ inexpensive $5-10 books fuel my addiction—as well as my notes.)
Regardless of which option you choose, I encourage you to find a way to jot a few notes that will help you remember and act upon your takeaways—and to do that for at least a subset of the books you read.
You: I listen to audiobooks. I don’t need this system.
How well do you remember takeaways from the books you listen to?
If you remember everything you want to know from your audiobooks, great! It sounds like there’s no problem to solve.
All I know is that whenever I listen to audiobooks, my reading comprehension is crap. Audiobooks don’t tend to stick in my head as well as reading a physical book—not to mention that I’m usually multitasking (driving, exercising, walking, etc.) when I listen to audiobooks, which makes my comprehension even worse.
Similar to what I mentioned about library books above, if you’re an audiobook aficionado, consider occasionally buying impactful books or texting yourself notes from the audiobook to help you remember the core concepts later.
(Pro tip: If I’m listening to a book or podcast in my car, I send myself speech-to-text messages anytime I hear something I want to remember later. Then I later review those texts and type them into a system like Obsidian.)
You: Doesn’t this whole notes thing take way too much time?
It definitely takes longer than just breezing through the book, I’ll give you that. But I’ve found that it leads to a much richer experience of reading the book.
Not only does it provide a written list of key takeaways from the book (the one-page cheat sheet in the back cover is amazing), but the very act of taking notes in the book improves focus and helps you avoid distractions.
The note-taking process may slow you down by 10 percent, but it will increase your engagement and action by 200 percent.
Conclusion
I can’t express how much this system has revolutionized my reading life—and that of my friends too.
As you can probably tell from this way-too-long and way-too-detailed post, I’m a huge book nerd who loves to talk about bookish things, so please don’t hesitate to drop me a question in the comments if you’re wondering anything about this system.
Best of luck putting the SUB system to work in your reading life!
Star: Star key passages to quickly find them later
Underline: Underline essential quotes and ideas on each page
Back Cover: Record your biggest takeaways in the back cover of the book
I take notes like that too. But I usually have trouble post-processing them. I can't bring myself to... organize them somehow after reading them so I can use them in my work. I write fiction and ideas like oh, I want my characters in the story N to also have French butter for breakfast. The books are piling up, and I don't know how to organize a system for storing notes. The idea terrifies me. I'm terrified of how long it will take. I start and then give up.
I like the idea. I need to think on it. I’ve been writing in notebooks but they get separated from the actual book and become useless. Defiling the book will be a big step for me. Hmmm