I like to consume books (and occasional podcasts), in audio form, while I walk around my local neighborhood. This way I can effectively read while also moving my body. I like to take notes as I read, and so I’ve hacked together this system for doing that with audio-material.
I make a point to engage actively with the material when I read. Generally, my philosophy is that if a book or essay is worth my time at all, it is worth my full, thoughtful, attention. Almost nothing is worth only my partial attention.
I don’t want to “read” in the sense of running some sentences through my working memory, but leaving close to nothing that I will recall a year later. When I’m reading, I want to be carefully parsing the material, having new thoughts, mulling over ideas, flagging confusions and things I don’t understand, flagging arguments that I don’t buy and my counterpoints.
When reading text, I take notes (typically when reading, I’ll have the text open on the left side of my screen and a roam page open on the right) as a way to support this kind of serious engagement.
But this is even more important for consuming material via audio: audiobooks and podcasts afford the illusion of passive learning—I can do something else while letting some material superficially impinge on the edges of my attention, so I feel like I’m learning without coming away with new mental affordances. And unlike reading text, if my mind wanders, the audio just keeps going along ahead heedless that I’m not really with it.
So I want to take notes on audio material, just as I do when reading in textual format: summarizing key ideas, my reactions to them, and tangential thoughts spured by what I’m reading / listening to.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1276544349531017216?lang=en
(Incidentally, I think this is a pretty apt analogy. Drinking your vegetables isn’t necessarily bad. But it is artificial in such a way that you should suspect that you’re missing some of the benefits.)
I take notes while listening by recording myself with otter.ai, while listening in another app.
I use wired headphones with a mic on the chord. If I press the buds firmly into my ears, there’s minimal sound leakage, so the mic picks up my commentary without the background noise of what I’m listening to.
(In the past, merely placing the buds firmly in my ears hasn’t been sufficient for preventing the mic from picking up audio from the headphones. So I also carry headband earmuffs, to wear over my ears and block the sound leakage.)
I’ll frequently use the pause button on the mic, and then summarize what I just heard and/or to lay out thoughts and arguments.
My mind does wander, sometimes following a train of thought from an idea in the text, sometimes seemingly unrelated. I don’t try to stop that. I’ll just pause the audiobook, and narrate my thoughts out loud, where they’re captured on the recording. Sometimes, I have enough of a complete idea that I’ll walk home and write up those up as a short essay.
I take notes as ideas are interesting (or as thoughts occur to me) while listening. As when I’m reading text, I make a point to summarize the key points of each chapter at the end of the chapter.
I put these recordings in an “audio notes” folder in otter.
I wrote / adapted a roam extention that imports the most recent otter transcripts in my “audio notes” and “walking journal folders into my roam database, ever time roam reloads (with a limit of once an hour).