Most notes are written once and never opened again. The point of taking a note is not to capture information, it is to make a future version of you able to use it.
Analyzing data from more than a thousand social entrepreneurs at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, I learned this the hard way. Early notes were just copied facts: useful in the moment, meaningless three weeks later because I had not written down why they mattered. The notes that held up over time were the ones where I forced myself to add one sentence in my own words, what this means, or what it connects to.
A note without your own interpretation is not a note, it is a quote. The interpretation is what your future self actually needs, since the original source will usually still be there if you need to go back to it.
Before you close any document or article you are reading, write one sentence in your own words about why what you just read matters to you. That single sentence is worth more than pages of copied text.
