I recently finished reading the book How to take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. The book proposes reading with pen in hand which I found to be extremely time consuming. But then I realized the important distinction between Time consuming and Time Wasting activities.
Reading with Pen in hand is extremely time consuming I had to work on this book for months. But not reading with pen in hands is time wasting I hardly remember anything from Sapiens or Thinking Fast and Slow that I read last year.
We tend to avoid time consuming activities, but happily go about doing time wasting activities. This is a kind of a unconscious bias that we need to be mindful about.
Trying to work on a detailed summary of the book, but that is a time consuming activity as well 🙂
Last year (2019) I had been big on listening to audiobooks. I talked about it in my previous blog — How I read 52 books in 2019. Although listening allowed me to consume a lot more content and make use of “dead-time” e.g. commute or doing chores around the house, one thing I found lacking with that approach was the ability to take notes and thus limited retention of the text.
This year I’ve been trying to improve my reading habit and use my Kindle more. As a result, I’ve been highlighting a lot of stuff on my Kindle. Yesterday, I tried to move my Kindle Highlights to RoamResearch, which is a Note Taking tool that I have been exploring recently (and Notion has been taking a back seat as my note-taking tool).
To my surprise, there is no quick, easy and free way to export your Kindle highlights to the note taking tool of your choice. Here are a few choices that you may find available out there, which are either paid or didn’t provide the formatting as per my needs —
Paid options —
Most popular option seems to be Readwise which charges $7.99/month for Evernote export feature.
There is also Clippings.io which charges $2.99/month for a browser extension.
Free options with limited formatting —
There is also a free browser extension from Bookcision that seems to do the job for free, but the output was not in the format that I want.
You can plug in your Kindle into your computer and copy the myclippings.txt file, but in my case that sti
As I am still new to Kindle reading, I didn’t want to spend $8/month on a service that I wasn’t sure how much I would use. So I tried to come up with my own hack and that worked quite well for me. My approach is more focused on Formatting and builds on top of any of the free approaches listed above.
If you are interested in exporting your Kindle highlights for free, feel free (pun intended) to give it a try. Here’s the step by step approach —
Use Ctrl + H — Find and Replace to Replace all “Yellow Highlight | Page: ” with “”
This leaves just the page numbers in the column
Copy the first text line below the page number line and hold shift scroll down all the way. Basically, copy whole document except first page number line.
Copy this to the next column, so that the Page numbers and comments are aligned.
Sort the document by page numbers, this way we’ll have the comment and page number next to each other.
You can delete the extra rows after this.
Create a new column and use a concatenation formula =Concetane(“Pg “,A1,”: “,B1). Apply this formula to each row.
Copy paste this new column to Roam under Kindle Highlights section in a book or to which ever note taking tool you prefer.
To start with a confession, the title of this post is a bit untrue. I did not actually “read” 52 books in 2019, I “listened” to 52 audio-books in 2019. While it may not be as impressive as “reading”, I think listening works better for my lifestyle and I feel it may work for you as well.
This post is geared towards explaining how I achieved this feat (#humblebrag) and lay out some steps for you if you would like to experiment with this idea.
How to get started?
First, make a new year resolution/Set a goal — Just kidding :).. We all know those rarely work. For me, reading 52 books was NOT a goal that I set for myself for 2019.
It was quite serendipitous actually; I stumbled on a post on Product Hunt around “Startup book club” in December 2018. The idea of the club was that every 2 weeks the club members will read a non-fiction book from a compiled list based recommended of the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg etc.
The first book that I read as part of the club was “Atomic Habits” and the next one was “Surely, you must be joking Mr. Feynman”. These two got me hooked and I was surprised that instead of taking the expected 4 weeks, I was able to listen to both of them within 2 weeks. Then on, I stopped following the club’s weekly recommendations, but looked ahead at the bigger list for my next picks.
By June 2019, I had listened to roughly 30 audiobooks. That was the first time I thought to myself, hey I could potentially listen to 52 books this year. So although I did not start the year with that goal, but it did become a goal roughly mid year.
So, to get started you need two things —
A book that you’ll like — If you are not enjoying what you are reading, you’ll find excuses to postpone it. If you need some recommendations, I have a list towards the end of this post.
An accountability partner — The book club served as a accountability partner for me. I didn’t want to be the one stuck behind, when rest of the group was moving on to the next book.
Tips for you to listen to more audio-books in 2020
If you already identified the book and and an accountability partner and are looking for ways to find more time in your schedule. Here are a few tweaks I made in my lifestyle which I feel compounded over time and allowed me to read more books —
Replace podcasts with books — A while back, I had decided to spend less time reading random articles on internet and spend that time reading more books. I applied the same logic to my listening time as well, fewer podcasts and more audio books.
Better dead-time management — There are many windows during the day when you have dead-time — commute is one big example, but there are many others such as doing chores around the house, grocery shopping or waiting in the line for the next iPhone (do people still do that?). I utilized those very effectively and you could be assured if I was running an errand, I would have my headphones on and I’ll be zoned in.
Utilizing Public Library —This is something I feel was a true game-changer. I’ve been a long time subscriber of Audible, but that gives you one audio-book a month for $14.95 subscription. Most popular audiobooks costs more than $20 each, and even though I love books I don’t think I would have spend roughly $100 on books each month. I believe this is also the reason some people may prefer podcasts or audio-books. After all, podcasts are free and for books you have to pay. This is where I discovered that the public library system in US (and I presume in many other developed countries) is AWESOME! Most libraries allow you to use apps such as Libby or Hoopla to checkout books online. Hoopla lets you borrow 5 books each month and Libby allows you to hold up to 8 books at a time, with a checkout window of 21 days. Most of the books I read in 2019 were thanks to the Northern California Digital Library. If your public library provides you this provision, you should definitely be leveraging it.
Have your next book lined up — This is also where the book club helped, but there are a number of other places where you can find great book recommendations. Having a next book lined up will help keep the habit going.
What next
As 2019 is coming to a wrap, I’ve been thinking will I try to do another 52 books next year? The answer is most likely not. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t start 2019 with a goal to read a specific number of books.
In fact once I had set the goal around June/July, I felt a bit of a pressure to finish it and I felt the joy of reading waning a bit. I felt the urge to pick the books that were shorter, in order to get my count up. So for 2020, I’m not going for any specific count. I think I already have the habit/system in place. If I don’t listen to a book for a week or so, I feel something missing. I’ll go with the flow, and see what number I’ll end up with.
Something, I’ll like to change in 2020 is that I’d like to add a note-taking practice. As I am mostly listening to the books while driving or completing another chore, I’m don’t get to take notes or underline important points in the book. I feel this is something I can improve and it is something that’ll help me retain more. If you have any ideas on how I can improve this, please add a comment.
Book Recommendations –
If you are feeling inspired and need help deciding which book to pick up. Here are Top 5 books that I feel made the most impact on my life in 2019
Atomic Habits — Science of habit formation distilled into one book. Loaded with practical advice to introduce a new habit in your life.
Dot Journaling — A practical guide — This book helped me build a BulletJournal practice that was my go-to way for managing my projects, to-dos this year.
Why We Sleep — I used to be proud of being able to survive with less than 6 hours of sleep. This book changed my perception of that and now I strive to find more time for sleep in my schedule.
Don’t lose out, work out — I never lifted weights in my life, until 2019, and this book pushed me to do that.
When breath becomes air — Autobiography of Paul Kalinathi, a surgeon who lost his life to lung cancer. A heart-touching memoir that will leave you with tears in your eyes.
If you are interested in checking out the other books I read, you can see the complete list on my Notion page here.
Lastly, if you have some book recommendations, please leave those in comments.
Bangalore traffic can be killing.. You never know if it’s going to take you 15 mins or 1.5 hours. And it’s such a huge waste of productive time. Moreover, I got sick of all the Real Estate ads on the radio.
But recently driving has sort of become the 2nd best part of my day. Playing with Gungun being the best, of course. All thanks to the audiobooks. I used to listen to podcasts earlier, and recently started listening to audiobooks. Podcasts were also fun especially Stanford ETL, Freaknonimics, Tim Ferriss Show and others.
Now I have switched to Audiobooks. I had an Audible membership earlier and had downloaded couple of books including Lean Startup, Innovator’s Solution, Alchemist and more. Currently I have Delivering Happiness – by Tony Hsieh play and am almost close to finishing it. Thanks to Audiobooks I have finished more books in last 3 months than I have ever read in my life.
Image courtesy – Jeff Daly – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalydose/
I also found out that Books 24×7, which is probably one of the most under-utilized company resources has tons of Audiobooks available. I had access to Books 24×7 for 7 years at IBM but never ever used it once. But now I am using it regularly. I finished Seth Godin’s Tribes and Purple Cow already and now onto Ziglar on Selling.
If you dread traffic as well, try using Audiobooks or Podcasts. I am you would wait to begin your commute everyday..
