This post goes into detail why I started my blog to publish summaries of interesting books, articles, podcasts or audiobooks I consume.

Day in, day out, I read many articles and books, listen to podcasts and audiobooks in every free minute and try to remember all of those inputs somehow.

The Beginning

Several years ago, I did not write anything down. That lead to not remembering anything I read or listened to. Consuming interesting content felt somehow worthless to me. I read about productivity tips, intriguing people’s lives and much more. All of this went into my head, got me interested, might’ve changed a little aspect of my life, but everything else was lost and forgotten. Even though one cannot remember everything one reads, a little higher of a return on invested time would be something important for me, especially for reading non-fiction books.

The Move to Digital

This led me to reading on a Kindle and exporting my highlights to a service called Readwise. It showed me my highlights on a daily basis.
I’ve read through them on a daily basis. I remembered many more aspects of the books I’ve read. But somehow this procedure stressed me.
I’ve only read short snippets of big ideas. I did not connect them enough. It felt meaningless.
Furthermore, just reading digital let me miss the good old paper books. I love how they smell, how they look at my bedside table and how I can just pick one up and read into it without going to the Kindle library and entering a random page number inside a random ebook.
Using the Kindle, I also got the feeling that the great overview of a book missed. In a print book, you can get a quick glimpse over the structure of the book and your progress by just leafing through it.
Using the Kindle with its minute estimates, it just pushed me to reading faster to finish the chapter before going to bed. This led to me remembering even less from what I read.

The Move Back to Print Books

Even though my Kindle and the corresponding app offered me some advantages, like reading everywhere on my phone, this year I’ve finally made the switch back to mainly purchasing print books. I did not regret this decision.

How to Document the Gained Knowledge

This left me with the question: How do I document what I read to remember it and get a higher ROI for my invested time?
From this started another odyssey into several articles, YouTube videos and podcasts on how to remember what you read. Some suggest using an analogue Zettelkasten, others to jot down all information in mind maps, others to just take notes in Obsidian and connect everything in a Personal Knowledge System. Or just highlight the most important parts in the book and write the key learnings down onto empty pages of the book.
I tried different approaches, but nothing really stuck (besides highlighting stuff in books to see the most significant points while skimming through a book).

The underlying problem

Then, after one another try to find the ultimate solution for taking notes from all the books, articles, podcasts, audiobooks etc. I’ve consumed, I finally found the underlying problem which caused this deep unhappiness in me: Yes, I’ve written down numerous lessons learned. Yes, I did highlight lots of stuff in my Kindle library. Yes, I’ve bookmarked several interesting snippets in Audible. And yes, I’ve sometimes even wrote them down in my Personal Knowledge System (first in Obsidian, then moving to Apple Notes to stop tinkering with the system and instead focus on the stuff I want to write down).
But all the time, something felt amiss to me. Currently, I think that not sharing anything of my knowledge with others was my issue (maybe I’m wrong, but still this will be a nice blog post to write).

The blog and my current process

So that’s the story of how I got into starting my blog. And currently it still feels wonderful to write for someone apart from me. Slowly but surely, I notice visitors besides me on the blog, which is amazing.

To end the post with some actionable content, I will describe my current process on how I manage my gained knowledge.

Podcasts

Due to the short duration of them, most of the key learnings I take with me stay in my head. After I’ve finished listening to a podcast, I will write down the most important aspects into a new note in Apple Notes (or nowadays often also Ulysses).
From this, I will post a short recommendation post (right now called “Stuff Worth Sharing” (SWS)) and share it via my blog and some socials.
I’ve also tried the podcast app Snipd, but I’ve never got really warm with it. My goal is not to have an AI summarise the podcast I listen to, rather myself to keep all the key learnings better in my brain.

Audiobooks

I listen to audiobooks on Audible. There I use the bookmark function and sometimes write down some special snippets into Apple Notes. After finishing the audiobook, I proceed the same way I would with a podcast. It just results in a longer blog post.

Articles

I read plenty of articles and get many recommendations, via newsletters, other articles, colleagues, friends, RSS feeds etc. All of them I store in Raindrop.io. There, I also highlight all of my articles and tag them with a blog tag.
For interesting long-form articles, I write a dedicated blog post summarising the article and including most of the highlights I’ve taken in Raindrop.io.
With short-form articles, I mostly share them only via posts on social or occasionally via a SWS Snippet post on my blog.

Books

Coming to the elephant in the room: books. Currently, I highlight my books with a highlighter and a pencil. After some chapters, I try to write down a short summary in Apple Notes of everything that happened in the previous pages. This also keeps the most important aspects in my mind. Which is quite necessary, as I most often read up to 5 books in parallel and forget lots of information after switching books.
Right now, I have not published a summary of a whole book on my blog, but I hope I will. I’ve used the process for some long-form essays, and it did very well.
Once I’ve written everything down, I will glance over it again if it feels cohesive. Then, I will publish it on my blog as well as on Substack and Medium (even though not many people read my posts yet).

Wow, this was written in a one-take session. I hope this article makes sense. Even though I would normally keep this text in Ulysses to read and reread over it many times, I feel like I should publish this as it is. Maybe you guys appreciate it. In a time when so many people use AI to write their posts, a little authenticity with some grammar and writing mistakes might feel like a welcome change.
Please keep in mind that I’m no native speaker and thus there might be some logical issues with my language or some errors. If that’s the case, please leave feedback so that I can improve.

Thank you for reading this far 🙂 If you like posts like this, please share this post or subscribe on Substack, Medium, Bluesky or Mastodon. This would mean a lot to me 🙂