I wrote an earlier version of this post in 2023, partway through my doctoral program. Looking back at it, I can see the problem immediately: it reads like a summary of advice I’d read somewhere, not advice I’d actually lived.
Four years into my dissertation, near the finish line, I want to rewrite it properly. Not a listicle of tips. Not a summary of what PhD students are supposed to do. An honest account of what actually works — for reading comprehensively, retaining what matters, and building the kind of knowledge base that holds up under the pressure of original research.
Some of this applies only to doctoral work. Most of it applies to anyone who reads seriously and wants to remember what they read.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s the dirty secret of academic reading: nobody reads everything. Not the students, not the professors assigning the reading, not the scholars whose bibliographies look like small libraries.
The volume is genuinely impossible. A serious doctoral seminar can assign 300–500 pages a week. A comprehensive exam reading list might run to 150 books and several hundred articles. No one reads all of that cover to cover and retains it. The people who try to are usually the ones who burn out.
The skill isn’t reading everything. The skill is reading strategically — knowing what you need from a text before you open it, finding it efficiently, and processing it in a way that makes it retrievable and useful later.
That’s the entire game. Everything below is in service of it.
Three Modes of Reading (And Why They’re Different)
Not all reading has the same purpose, and trying to use one approach for everything is where most people go wrong. I work in three distinct modes, and switching between them deliberately has been one of the most important adjustments I’ve made.
Reading for Understanding
This is your slowest, most deliberate mode. You use it on texts that are foundational to your work — the sources you need to actually understand, not just reference. Dissertations are built on a handful of these. Everything else is commentary.
For this mode:
- Read the introduction and conclusion first. For a book, this tells you the argument before you encounter the evidence for it, which makes the chapters comprehensible in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.
- Read chapter by chapter, pausing at the end of each to write a single paragraph — not a summary, but what I now think because of this chapter. That’s the difference between reading and learning.
- Read footnotes selectively. They’re where scholars conduct their real conversations with each other — where they agree, dispute, complicate, and qualify. Some of the best sources I’ve found were in footnotes.
- Write in the margins. I use Blackwing pencils for this — erasable, smooth, and they force me to be deliberate because space is limited. I use sticky flag tabs to mark pages I know I’ll return to.
Reading for Retention
This is reading you do with the explicit goal of remembering it months or years from now — for comprehensive exams, for situating your research within a field, for the kind of conversational fluency about a body of literature that you need to have by the time you defend.
Retention is not a passive process. Passive reading produces passive forgetting. What actually builds long-term memory:
Active recall over re-reading. After reading a section, close the book and write from memory what you just read. Not copying — reconstructing. The effort of reconstruction is what encodes the information. This is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point.
Note to your future self, not to the text. Most students write notes that are essentially paraphrases of the source. These notes are almost useless for retention because they still require the source to be meaningful. Write instead what you think the argument is, why it matters, and how it connects to things you already know. This takes longer and produces fewer words — and those words are worth ten times as much.
Spaced return. Come back to your notes on a source a week after you wrote them, then a month after. Add anything that wasn’t there before. The gaps reveal what you didn’t actually understand.
Reading for Research
This is your fastest, most surgical mode. You have a specific question. You need to know if this text addresses it. You don’t have time to read everything.
The tools here are underused by most students:
The index is your first stop, not the text itself. Establish your key terms before you open the book, then go directly to those entries. A 400-page book might have four pages that are genuinely relevant to your specific question. Find them in five minutes instead of reading everything, hoping to stumble across them.
Ctrl+F/Command+F for PDFs. Academic articles as PDFs are searchable. Use it relentlessly. The phrase you need is in there somewhere.
Introduction and conclusion first, always. Most academic books make their central argument in the first and last chapters. Read those before anything else. If the argument isn’t relevant to your project, you’ve saved yourself hours. If it is, you now know what you’re looking for in the middle.
Citation backward. When you find a source that’s directly relevant to your project, look at its bibliography. Follow the citations backward. This is how you map a field efficiently — one key text leads to the three texts it’s in conversation with, which each lead to three more, until you’ve traced the lineage of an idea.
The Note-Taking System That Actually Works
I’ve tried most things. The Cornell method, plain Word documents, elaborate Evernote hierarchies, and more. What I’ve landed on is a hybrid system that I’ve described in more detail in my Zettelkasten post, but the core principle is this:
Notes should capture what you think, not what the source said.
When I read something worth keeping, I write a note that answers three questions:
- What is the argument?
- Why does it matter — to the field, to my project, to how I think about this topic?
- What does this connect to that I already know?
That last question is the one most people skip. It’s also the one that determines whether the note is useful six months from now or just another thing you vaguely remember reading.
The Physical Layer
I use 4×6 ruled index cards for permanent notes — one idea per card, written by hand. The physical act of writing slows me down enough to think about what I’m actually trying to say. A date stamp goes on every card when it enters the system. Cards live in a card box organized by loose topic clusters.
For quick capture — ideas mid-reading, thoughts in a seminar, connections that occur to me in the car — I use a Field Notes notebook in my pocket. These are temporary. Their job is to get the idea out of my head. I process them into permanent notes later.
The Digital Layer
Notion is where my system lives at scale. Every permanent note that survives the physical card stage gets entered into Notion with tags, source references, and links to related notes. The search capability is what makes this invaluable — finding a note about a source I read two years ago takes seconds. (Affiliate link)
I’m currently experimenting with Obsidian as a complement, specifically using it with Claude Code to surface connections across my note vault that I haven’t made manually. If you want to go deep on this, Andrej Karpathy recently published a pattern for this — the LLM Wiki — that’s one of the most interesting developments in personal knowledge management I’ve seen. More on that in the Zettelkasten post.
What to Do With Academic Articles (The Specific Workflow)
Articles are different from books, and they get short-changed in most reading advice. Here’s my workflow for a journal article that matters to my project:
- Read the abstract, then the introduction, then the conclusion. In that order. This tells me the argument, its context, and its implications before I’ve read a word of the actual analysis.
- Skim the section headers. Most academic articles are structured to be easy to navigate. The headers tell me where the argument lives and where I can move faster.
- Read the parts that matter. For most articles, this is 40–60% of the text. The literature review often rehashes things I already know. The methods section may or may not be relevant. The analysis and discussion sections are almost always.
- Write the note immediately. Not after I’ve read three more articles. Right now, while it’s fresh. The note I write in the twenty minutes after reading an article is worth more than the note I write a week later from memory.
- Record the full citation before I close the tab. This sounds obvious. It is obvious. I’ve spent more time tracking down sources I didn’t fully cite than I care to admit.
The Tools
Physical:
- 4×6 ruled index cards — for permanent notes
- Field Notes notebooks — for fleeting capture
- Blackwing pencils — for annotating books and writing on cards
- Sticky flag tabs — for marking passages to return to
- Zebra Mildliner highlighters — smooth, bleed-resistant, categorizable by color
- Date stamp — for timestamping cards when they enter the system
Digital:
- Notion — for the searchable permanent note archive
- Obsidian — for graph visualization and the LLM Wiki experiment (free)
- Zotero — free reference manager; essential for tracking citations across a large project
Books:
- How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens — the best theoretical foundation for the system I’ve described here (affiliate link)
- Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte — broader personal knowledge management; practical and accessible (affiliate link)
- They Say / I Say by Graff and Birkenstein — the best book I know on reading scholarly texts as arguments rather than as information (Amazon affiliate link)
The Honest Part
Here’s what nobody who writes these posts usually says: the reading load of doctoral work is genuinely brutal, and no system makes it easy. There are weeks when I’ve read 400 pages and felt like I retained almost none of it. There are other weeks when a single 30-page article reshapes how I think about my entire project.
The difference isn’t usually reading speed or technique. It’s engagement. When I’m reading something I’m genuinely curious about, my retention is dramatically better. When I’m reading something I’ve convinced myself I “should” read, it evaporates.
This isn’t an argument for only reading what you want. It’s an argument for finding what’s genuinely interesting in even the readings that feel like an obligation — the question that hasn’t been answered, the argument you disagree with, the footnote that opens a door you didn’t know was there. Active curiosity is better than passive discipline every time.
Four years in, near the finish, what I’ve learned is that the reading never stops being hard. You just get better at finding the parts that matter, connecting them to what you already know, and making something out of them.
That’s the whole skill. Everything else is tools.
The physical tools I use for reading and note-taking — notecards, Field Notes, Blackwings, date stamp, highlighters — live on my Favorite Gear page. The deeper dive into the Zettelkasten system I use for organizing all of this is here.
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