One of my favorite adult learning, leadership, and brain research books is Brain Rules by Dr. John Medina. This is must reading for leaders who want their communication to stick. Dr. Medina tells us that if you want your brain to remember well, especially if you are reading, you must engage as many of the senses as possible.

I have been in the habit for years of making specific notes in non-fiction books as I read them. This helps my brain to stay engaged with the writer, ask questions, summarize, create next action items, and even identify presuppositions and ideas I disagree with.

My long time Virtual Mentor, Michael Hyatt, recently posted a simple template designed to be used for taking notes while reading non-fiction books. Whether you use Evernote, Word, Pages, Workflowy or even, paper, this InSIGHT template with greatly enhance your non-fiction reading. This template will guide you in tracking 8 elements as you read. You can get a free download of the template of your choice at Michael Hyatt’s website here: https://michaelhyatt.com/maximize-non-fiction.html

Using this template enables you to engage many more sensory inputs than just visually reading words, which will lead to much, much higher retention of what’s important to remember.