One of the more common questions we get at Asian Efficiency is how to effectively read, learn from and implement a non-fiction book. This is a topic that comes up in our productivity community, The Dojo, as well.
There are many different systems for reading and successfully implementing a book. This is the system and process that we’ve developed at Asian Efficiency – it works for us, and we’ve been using it for years.
Note: this mostly applies to non-fiction. Sure, you can learn things and be inspired by fiction, but this process is better designed for “information” books on business or say personal development.
The first thing you want to do is to learn to speed read – it’ll just make everything that much faster.
Outline
Here’s the steps of effectively read and implementing a book:
- Skimming.
- Reading, highlighting and taking notes.
- Mind mapping.
- Implementing via processes.
- Reviewing at regular intervals.
Skimming
If you aren’t familiar with the term, “skimming” is a way of reading a text without actually reading the whole thing. What’s actually happening is that your eyes and brain are actually picking out keywords, key phrases and big ideas as you move quickly through a text. The point is to get a “general idea” of the subject matter, not to memorise all the details.
Here’s how you systematically skim through a book:
- As we mentioned in our article on speed reading, start with an objective in mind. In this case, it is likely to read, understand and implement the ideas in the book in your life and business.
- Start by examining the cover and blurb if you haven’t already done so.
- Look through the table of contents.
- Have a flick through the index.
- Skim through the chapter headings and some of the subheadings. If something catches your attention, read a bit more about it.
The key with this process is not worry about “getting ahead of yourself” in the learning process – that’s just a silly, irrational fear left over from our education system where they punish people for trying to “rush ahead”.
The main objective of the skimming process is to familiarize yourself with the concepts of the book and to begin getting a conceptual overview of the material before you even start reading it. If you have access to a summary of the book (or if the book includes one), you can and should read that. If not, you can just skim through the concepts and form a first impression that way.
One important thing to keep in mind is that lots of books are written with extraneous details – essentially filler and fluff designed to make books longer than they need to be.
Towards the end of the skimming process, if you start to form a good high-level understanding of the concepts, you may want to start a mind map. Simply open a new map, put the title in the middle and then list the concepts as your first-tier nodes.
If not, don’t worry – we’ll get to mind mapping in a bit.
Reading
The next step is to start reading the book. You can either speed read it or read it normally – it doesn’t really matter.
While you are reading, be sure to stop and highlight important sections, and make notes as you need to.
If you’re doing this on a Kindle or a tablet, highlighting and taking notes is a breeze.
You can read either start-to-finish or you can read the sections that are just interesting to you, in the order that you like. Remember: one of the easiest ways to cut down on reading time is identifying what you don’t need to read and skipping past it.
Mind Mapping
When you’re done with reading, take the book or load it up in the Kindle App on your desktop, and start a new mind map (or use the one from the skimming step). Take notes as relevant, to the level of detail that is appropriate for you.
This mind map is to be for your later reviews of the material in the book.
You can organize the ideas by chapters (author’s choice) or by concepts (your choice). If the book is really well-organized or well-written, organizing by chapters is usually fine. I personally prefer to organize by concept – it takes a little more time, but then I end up with a mind map that is custom-tailored to the way that I organize ideas.
If you are unsure about how to mind map properly, check out our mind mapping page.
Implementation
This is the step that most people miss when reading books – taking action and implementing ideas.
Simply put, it isn’t enough to read something and “keep it in mind” – you need to do something to lock in the idea and make sure it is implemented in your life.
From the mind map you created you should be able to pull out things to implement – you can either highlight these on the mind map, or you can create a separate text file of action items and list them out there. You then want to take this list and process and implement them in your business or your personal life.
The question of how to implement really varies depending on what it is you want to implement – keep an eye out for future Asian Efficiency articles on different forms of conceptual implementation.
Reviewing
The last step in this reading-learning-implementing process is the review. You want to set up a regular review schedule to look over the mind map you have created, and to make sure that your implementations of ideas and concepts has actually been successful.
Here’s the review schedule we recommend:
- 3 days.
- 3 weeks.
- 3 months.
- 1 year.
- 2 years.
- 3 years.
- 4 years.
- 5 years.
Note: you can easily set up reminders for these in any task manager.
Reviewing at each of these time frames is simply a matter of opening up the mind map, reading through it and seeing if any new ideas leap out at you, or if the things you have highlighted for implementation have successfully stuck.
Next Actions
- Pick a book to read, learn and implement.
- Run through the above process.
- Remember to implement and review!
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