In this post, I want to share with you how I read, annotate, organize, and summarize the web.
Here are the benefits I have gained:
- I read with pleasure.
- I remember more and can re-find the important info I come across on the web.
- I save a ton of time.
Most of us who read online waste enormous amounts of time: We hook our brains up to massive news streams to keep up with things. Unfortunately, even most of the information that matters to us and could help us in our life gets drowned out and is forgotten the next day, or at best a few days later.
It doesn’t have to be that way!
Yes, a lot of what we consume doesn’t really have an impact on our life; it is purely for entertainment and distraction, so it makes perfect sense to forget it.
But what about the really important information bits you come across while reading? Do you forget these too?
And if you remember these nuggets, can you quickly reconnect to the web pages where you found them? Can you remember the ideas you had when you read an article?
Simply bookmarking all “worthy” articles you come across, or worse, clipping them and putting them in a giant archive doesn’t solve the problem.
If you do that you will often have to re-read the whole page to remember why it was important.
Most of the information in your archive, you will never look at again, yet it will become a burden and demand time and effort to be maintained.
My two most common reading scenarios:
- Reading to answer a specific research question, such as “does NAC help with sleep?”
- Capturing information nuggets and the thoughts I had while reading the daily news or following a subject that interests me.