I’m going to warn you right now: if you’re trying to keep your books pristine, this isn’t the method. In this video I walk through why I love annotating while I read—at the simplest level, it’s just writing in your books—and how it helps me get more out of both non-fiction and fiction. For me, annotation personalizes a book in a way that feels like I’ve truly “consumed” it: my handwriting in the margins, the underlines, the highlights, the questions to myself. It becomes a record of my thought process. I also annotate because time is limited. When I’m building a small library of books I want to revisit, I want to flip back to the meaningful ideas fast—quotes, passages, themes—without rereading everything. The act of underlining and scribbling helps me remember more, and it forces me to contemplate in the moment instead of just receiving the content. I show my actual process at the desk (using Meditations and even Dune), the pens and highlighters I reach for, and the legend of symbols I use—like alpha for “interesting,” exclamation for “remember,” three dots for the main idea, and “CP” to move something into my commonplace notebook.