When I am wearing my academic hat, my technique is to first gather an enormous, excessive amount of material, including every book, paper, file and website I can download or haul from a library and skim abstracts, tables of contents, and titles to get a map of the topic in my head. I may only really read one or two of these references in detail. I sometimes put high-value nuggets of information in Anki. One critical thing for me is that this process is highly active and I must be feeling energetic. Reading technical material is not a sedate, passive experience for me, and if I am bored, my interest and thus my retention drop to zero. Thus, it is essential that I be sufficiently curious about the topic at hand that my curiosity powers me through the process. For me this is a critical part of my process.
I'm looking to build up a “tool-box” of 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.
If anyone has posted about this topic previously, please link to the post.
Please point to relevant resources that have worked for you; additionally please describe skills/systems that you've developed personally.
An example of a useful comment I got posting in an open thread, from Jayson_Virissimo
“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.”
Here is an example of an existing resource that I found useful:http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/
Here are some questions/prompts that may spur your thinking:
Describe the setting where you read.
Do you schedule reading time? How?
How do you decide what to read next?
Do you write notes by hand, on a computer?
Do you wear noise-canceling headphones?
Do you skim texts?
Do you reread texts?
How often do you reread “foundational” texts, or texts that shifted your paradigm?
How often do you decide not to finish a book?
I may do a series of posts on this in discussion, and if other users find it interesting/useful I may eventually make it into a post for the main page.