How I Read Books Using Notion

hi everyone welcome back to the channel my name is david milan i'm an hr professional working in australia today i wanted to talk to you about how to keep track of books that i'm reading and more importantly how i keep track of the things that i've learned from the books that i've read so today i'm going to be covering my setup in notion how i make highlights and notes using the kindle how i use the goodnotes app on my ipad pro i bring them together and then at the end i'll just go through a quick recall and reflect section which is basically a high level summary of everything i'm covering in this video so if you want to skip ahead there's timestamps in the description and it's also on the screen at the moment as well recently i've been trying to get better at taking notes on books that i'm reading i read a great article on a licensed website called how to take smart notes which was based on a book by the same name written by sonke ahrens so i'll include a link in the description to both the article and the book it talks about the importance of making notes with your highlights so highlighting by itself often adds little value you'll come back to your highlights days or weeks or months later and you won't have any context or explanation for why you made the highlight why was it important a different way one that i'm finding a lot of benefit in based on the article and the book is to make notes with your highlights and to try and link them to what you know other things that you're reading or things that you can apply in your life and and to give yourself context as to why you made that highlight so the article in the book have inspired a lot of what i'll be showing in the video today and i'll include a link in the description um to both the book and to the article as well [Music] so my workflow starts with notion i have a readings page built in here under my resources page i'm not going to be going into a lot of detail on how to build uh things in notion uh i recommend that you have a look at marie pollan's youtube channel and her website she's put out an incredible series of videos on how to build things in notion and she has a course as well so i'll include a link in the description to both her youtube channel and to her website one of the great things about notion is that it gives you different ways of looking at the same table so you can really bring out different insights based on views that you're using at the moment this view is showing all of the books that i've put into notion i can also look at books that i read last year in 2019 and also look at books that i've read this year in 2020 and i'm doing that through the use of views for the same table so i'll show you how to create a view i'll just delete 2019 view here and i'll show you how easy it is to create a view based on your overall table based on your overall database so if you click on add a view and i'll call this 2019 i'm going to set it up as a table view there's different options for views that you can set up based on the same data so i'll click on create and this will bring up all of the books that i've read and then i'll add a filter for this view to show only books that i've read in 2019 so then now the view will filter to show only books that i've read in 2019 which i've recorded in this section of the database of the table um in 2019. so you can see here i have year read author non-fiction fiction and rating all set up as select properties so the property in notion when you're building a table a database you get the option to pick different properties if you pick the select property which i've done here it enables you to look at things using the board view which i'll show you how that works so if at the moment i'm looking at all books if i click on board view here it will bring things up according to the select properties that i've inputted so at the moment this view is showing non-fiction versus fiction books if i click here and click on group by i can click on rating this will now bring up books according to ratings and so i'll be able to see all of my five star books four star books three two etc so once i've finished a book and i'm ready to start a new book i'll click on my unread view and have a look at any books that i've added to my notion readings database and i'll click on for example let my people go surfing if i want to read that book i'll then click on year read and click 2020 which will then add it to my 2020 view at the top here i've got a properties section where i can include the day that i started the book and then also include the day that i finished the book as well i like to keep track of how long it takes me to read a book i find that if i try to stick to you know starting and finishing a book within two weeks that's a habit that helps me to stop procrastinating and makes me prioritize reading over other things as i'm reading i'll generally be reading in my kindle and so i'll make highlights and as i mentioned earlier i'm trying to get better at making uh notes with my highlights and so i'll include brief notes of why i've highlighted something how can i apply this in my life what is it linked to so that in the future i can understand why i made the highlight so the kindle interface for recording notes is not the best it lends itself to short notes uh the experience is obviously better in the kindle app both on the iphone and the ipad but i prefer to read things on the kindle [Music] so i've also just started a notebook in good notes which i use to record notes as well on what i'm reading so anytime that i'm making a highlight if i have access to my ipad i'll also make a note and try to reference the location or the page and why i was making that highlight so once i've finished my book i'll export a pdf copy of my kindle highlights and notes and then i'll export a pdf copy of my goodnotes notes and i'll save both of those pdfs into the notion page that i set up for the book so i've got everything in one place which makes it really helpful really useful for when i'm writing a book review so i've created a book review template in notion i record the book in one sentence five big ideas what stood out to me things that i thought were of interest the key takeaway for me in my life how can i apply what i've read and then you'll see here i've got two embed blocks for kindle and good notes so this is an example of a completed book review this is a book that i read earlier in the year book in one sentence five big ideas what stood out to me and then at the end a key takeaway for me in my life and as you can see here i've got my pdf notes exported from kindle and also my pdf exported from good notes so having everything in the one place makes it really easy to reference when i'm writing a book review or also in the future if i want to go back and and reflect on what i read what did i learn it's all in the one place so i read recently that in order for people to truly learn something they need to be given the opportunity to recall and reflect on what they've learned and so i thought i'd just do a quick summary of what i've shown in the video now so as i mentioned my workflow starts in notion i'll then go to my readings page and have a look at any books that i've added that i want to read i'll then download them to my kindle and read the book making highlights as i go what i'm really trying to focus on and get better at is when i'm making a highlight i record a note uh as to why i made that highlight what was the context why did i highlight this thing why why did i think it was important i'll do that either in the kindle itself or i'll do that in my goodnotes app on my ipad pro once i finish those notes i'll export both of them to pdf and then i'll add them to my book review page and i'll write the book in one sentence five things that stood out to me and the key takeaway for me in my life so i've got it all there in the one place ready to reference in the future so i'm really passionate about systems and how we can use them to help us learn and keep track of things i think notion is a fantastic system it's something that i wish i had access to in university high school and even primary school if you have any questions please drop me a line in the comments i hope this video has been helpful and that you've learned something from it thanks for watching

Channel: David Malan

Views: 44,385

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Id: W88_9L5HkRM

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020