▲ ▼ Retain key lessons from non-fiction titles
Without access to synchronous book clubs or study groups, our options are limited to note-taking, self-refelction - pen and paper or apps like Notion - to retain key, actionable information, quotes and lessons from great nonfiction psychology, sociology and business titles.
Apps like Blinkist offer professional summaries but it is not the same as really reading and absorbing it yourself and applying the lessons to work and life.
I sometimes re-read the title but this means finding the physical or digital copy, or audio book and the time to read/listen again.
We built Sivv - https://www.sivv.io/ to help people more easily access and retain the key takeaways from books, articles and research. We summarise actionable insights from the latest publications and publish these through our knowledge feed (https://www.sivv.io/feed) then curate these into thematic guides that contain the best and most actionable ideas - https://www.sivv.io/guides . Perhaps this can help?
To add to this needgap, I would love a solution if it was plastic enough to use for research articles. And if the notes/comments were searchable.
I read numerous journal articles for school and its cumbersome to keep a stack of papers the size of my head with large takeaways written across the top to remind me what notes I left inside. I have meet people who use excel/google sheets like op for research articles and its really inefficient.
Have you tried knowledge-graph tools like https://roamresearch.com/, https://obsidian.md/ (or) their self-hosted/open-source alternatives like https://github.com/athensresearch/athens (or) https://joekroese.github.io/tiddlyroam/ ?
They're far better than normal spreadsheets for research purposes and for retention I haven't heard anything better than spaced-repetition as I've mentioned in /comments/1137 . Perhaps a knowledge graph + spaced repetition tool is what you're looking for?
I have my own DIY solution to copy/paste the Table of Contents to Google Sheets to mark chapters read and reflected on with a column for my own notes - but it is cumbersome.
Have you tried any spaced-repetition tool like https://apps.ankiweb.net/ ? Since it's designed for retention of anything which can be put into it, It can work for storing content from non-fiction books/articles as well.