How to Remember What You Know (Without Becoming a Full-Time Clerk)

Wait, you take notes?

Over the years I have read a lot of articles and blog posts on note-taking and knowledge management. I'm an avid reader, and one of my first blog posts was about how I organize my reading lists. That post is 11 years old now, and I like to think I've grown a bit since then (intellectually, that is), but I can confirm that the Trello board described in that old mind-fart of a post is still in use today.

One thing that keeps popping up is the importance of having a system to capture and organize what you learn. Without such a system, knowledge is easily forgotten or lost in the chaos of everyday life. Over the years I have tried various ways of capturing notes from the books I read. It might be true that the best books you read will change the way you think and act in the world without you writing a single note or quote down, but let's be real: those books are few and far between. Most of the time, if you want to remember what you read, you have to write something down and return to it later to refresh your memory.

Handwriting: Great for Memory, Terrible for Retrieval

The first couple of years I used good old notebooks extensively, and to some degree still do. The science is quite clear here: if you want to remember something, writing it down by hand is the best way to do it. The problem with notebooks—apart from being hard to organize and search through later—is that reviewing a book you just read becomes a time-consuming exercise in hunting for squiggly lines and pencil highlights, then transcribing them into a notebook, only to never look at them again. Don't get me wrong, I had lots of nice dates with myself at cafes, writing down notes from books I had just read, but the return on investment was low—and there is frankly not enough time in the day for that (throw in a love for endurance sports and there you have it).

The killer "system"

It's no surprise then that I have gravitated towards digital book knowledge systems over the years, but instead of shoehorning my notes into a generic note-taking app like [fill in your favorite app here that will be gone in 2 years], I have built my own simple solution around Markdown files stored in a Git repository, plus a few small extraction scripts. Throw in a tiny backend for serving them, and there we are. It's simple, it's flexible, it's plain text, and it will outlive most apps out there. The basic building block is this Markdown template:

# Book Title

<![]()>

### Metadata

- Author:
- Full Title:
- Category: #books

### Highlights

-

That's the target template. About 99% of the source material comes from four main sources:

• Amazon Kindle
• Apple Books
• Physical books
• Manual transcription directly into Markdown files

Kindle highlights are by far the easiest to capture.

Whenever I highlight something on my Kindle device or in the Kindle app, it is automatically synced to my Amazon account. When I'm done reading, I send the notes to myself via email using the "Export Notes" feature in the Kindle device or app. The exported notes come in a simple HTML format that is easy to parse. I have a small script that extracts the highlights and formats them into the Markdown template above.

A similar process is used for Apple Books highlights, although the export step is a bit more manual.

The trick is to select all highlights and tap "Share". The easiest approach is to share them to yourself via email to get a standardized format. Again, a small script does the same job as for the Kindle notes.

The last piece of the puzzle is physical books. This is how I read most books, and for a long time manual transcription was the only way to capture notes from them. Thankfully Apple solved this for me in iOS 15 with the introduction of Live Text in photos:

Now I just open the camera app on my phone, select the text in the book, and copy and paste it into the Markdown format I keep in the Notes app. From there it's just formatting and adding metadata. Voilà—note captured.

Random Wisdom on Demand

All my book notes are stored in a public GitHub repository. This makes it easy to search through them later, and if I want to look something up quickly, the GitHub Markdown viewer does a great job.

What I've found to be the real killer feature is the random lookup script I wrote a while back. It's a simple backend that keeps all the notes in memory, with an API endpoint that picks a random highlight from the entire collection and shows it to me. Hit refresh and a new note is selected. It's a great way to be reminded of what I've read over time—and with habitual use it might just help me internalize some of the knowledge I've captured. Or how about some random wisdom to start a new terminal session? curl and bash to the rescue:

randomBookNote() {  
    curl -s https://app.amosti.net/reading/api/notes/random \
        | jq -r '.note + " - " + .authors[0] + ", " + .title'
}

The system and content are open source and available on GitHub.

The example notes from this article are taken from the following books:

• Beyond the Mountain — Steve House
• Training for the Uphill Athlete — Steve House, Scott Johnston, and Kilian Jornet
• Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm
• The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel