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I don't use a particular system. I am using Evernote to take all my notes because I take notes on many machines and when I started note taking Evernote was the only one I found with multi-device support.

Rarely, when I come across an interesting sentence structure or a great way to express an idea I write the exact words that is in the books.

Usually, I paraphrase what I have read, and jot down why I find it worthwhile. If the idea leads to new ones I follow those as well. I used to skip these thoughts because I thought reading the book was more important, but now I am focused on getting the most out of a book and following my thoughts, and thinking about the information is part of it.

Before, the title of the notes used to be the book's title and I would organize my notes based on titles. But for a couple years I have been taking notes around subjects. Since I also read around subjects, my note taking and my reading support each other nicely. If you consider starting to take notes while you are reading, I'd suggest going with subject based organization. If a note can be part of more than one subject, I copy the note to the other notebooks.

This subject based note taking also helps with understanding my interests, because some subjects grow dramatically while others grow marginally.

It also works as an early alert system when you are slacking off on areas you have to know but skip because you find them boring. This early alert system is extremely important for people with ADHD. I don't know about you, but I tend to over-focus on areas that I find interesting and don't touch areas that I don't. Then I try to make the areas that are important more interesting.




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