How do I read non-fiction books? My Actionable Reading Method
This is the post where I share how I facilitate an actionable reading method to improve my learning performance from the non-fiction books
Starting from the book's first page, spending hours and hours to understand the meaning beyond words, and trying to improve my capabilities with these skills and knowledge are typical scenes before I adopted an actionable reading method for my learning and professional studies. These circumstances are shared among all the readers I know in college and the workforce. However, it is not an effective way to read non-fiction or personal development books. An actionable reading method doesn't care how many books you finish this year or this month. Instead, it focuses on the actionable takeaway you can learn from the books you read. It bridges the concepts in books with the challenges or projects you are working on. Don't just count on how many books you have read. Quantify the improvement and transformation you must accomplish through learning from the books. And that is the guiding principle for actionable reading.
And what exactly is an actionable reading method. An actionable reading means your design and take actionable projects from the book you and it, and reading. It will stimulate your brain to learn and reflect deeply on your reading content reading. Reading non-fiction books, especially business or productivity topics, aims to improve our performance and leverage our thinking capability in our daily life and work life. Therefore, instead of passively reading it and trying to memorize the critical concepts of the book, we can think of what actionable projects or to-dos we can incorporate into our work and personal life to improve our career outcomes.
Therefore, I would like to share how I use Notion to build my actionable reading goal tracker to manage and leverage the outcomes from learning these valuable lessons in books.
Here you can see that there is an existing template you could use here.
With years of experience reading non-fiction books, I found that counting how many books you finished a year or a month is not an effective way to measure what did you learn from the book; instead, it will be much more effective and efficient for us to read, reflect, and take actionable projects to leverage our careers and personal life.
