I'm looking for strategies/techniques/habits for reading non-fiction effectively and efficiently. I'm looking for methods to help me retain concepts, locate main ideas, make connections, etc.
Has anyone posted about this on Less Wrong previously?
Can anyone point me to relevant resources that have worked for them?
Any skills/systems that you've developed personally would also be helpful.
As I read textbooks, I summarize the most important concepts (along with doing the exercises, if there are any) and write them in a notebook and then later (less than a week) enter the notes into Anki as cloze-delete flashcards. I don't have an objective measure of retention, but I believe that it has vastly improved relative to when I would simply read the book.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.