I ones had a conversation with a friend about the habit of short daily reading. While I greatly advocated for it, my friend was not exactly convinced. He tried doing it a few months before the conversion and found out that he retained none of the information from the book.

In a few week after reading any book, you will remember only 3% of the information. In this case, simply reading books is a complete waste of time. The exact same amount of information can be acquired though a quick youtube video which doesnt require hours of your time. In order to retain more long term from what you read, a system of information retention should be applied.

This technique is described in great detail in the book “Building a 2nd brain” by Tiago Forte, so I highly recommend you to read it to fully understand how it works.

To put it simply, make highlight of the main points of a book, then make highlights inside those highlight. This leaves you with a very small extract that contains the main essence of the book. The great part is, if you make a mistake and highlight poorly (which will happen, especially at the start) you don’t loose any compression of the material, as you can just ignore the highlights, read the entire extract again and regain full clarity.

After finishing reading a book, I extract all the highlights from it into a markdown file. When I feel like I need the info from that book, I open the file and start to make highlights in it while rereading the information inside. Its generally recommended to make 2 layers of highlights on top of the extracts from the book. Each layer should cover 20% of the previous one. This leaves you with extremely condensed 4% of your initial highlights, which cover the absolute gist of the book. By rereading the final layer of highlights, you can remind yourself of the main points of the book in just a few minutes, while also reading around the highlights for additional insights. Note that adding a 2nd layer of highlights is only needed if you have a lot of notes form the book, and should be applied only if you find yourself returning it it often.

This system, requires constant improvement of the highlights. I recommend to only make highlights or changes to the highlights when you reread the notes from the book. Never take time out of your schedule to do it unless you believe that there is important insight to be gained from that.

I apply this method to my daily reading extremely effectively, in fact, the only reason this article exists is due to me effectively applying this method to my reading.

I recommend everyone to try this method of distilling of information, as it make book reading far more productive and enjoyable.