I love to learn. At any one time, I am reading through a handful of books. Most of the books I read are in the non-fiction sector. Every once in awhile I will pick up a fiction book just for pleasure reading.

Most of the time I am reading about time management, goal setting, leadership, self improvement, and Bible studies. When you read a lot of books like I do, you can quickly begin to forget what you have read. Many times I am reading and thinking:

• I need to apply this to my life
• I need to stop doing this
• This would make a great blog post
• That is a great quote
• What an awesome story/illustration

I don’t know if you are like me or not, but I often read great tips, ideas and strategies only to forget about them days later. One of my goals this year has been to deliberately put things into action as soon as possible.

4 Habits I Use When Reading a Good Book

Knowledge is useless unless it is put to action. Putting feet to your knowledge is called wisdom. I want to live this life walking in wisdom. I want to share with you a few habits I have been doing, and a few new habits I am trying to developing when it comes to reading and learning.

Highlight and mark anything that stands out. Whether it is a quote, idea, illustration or something I need to apply to my life, I mark it in someway. With hardback books, I simply underline or place brackets around it. I then do what John Maxwell suggests, I make a simple list on the inside front cover of the book. I label the topic and place a page number. With the Kindle, I just use the highlight feature.

Capture the highlights into Evernote. Evernote is extremely powerful. With my hardback books, I just photocopy the page with the Evernote App for the iPad. Since the words in the picture can be searched, it saves me from typing them out. As far as the Kindle, you can get to all of your highlights for a book by logging into your Amazon account on your computer. From there, I simply copy and paste into Evernote.

Add the things you want to apply to your to do list. I will also write “Apply” next to the things I highlight that I want to apply to my life. These end up on my to do list. This helps me take action on what I have learned.

Consider using a MindMap or WorkFlowy as a capture tool. This is one additional step you might want to consider. This is especially helpful if I am watching a webinar or video series online. I will either use WorkFlowy or MindJet to capture things I am learning.

There is my process for turning reading into action. How about you?

Question: Do you have any tips or advice on how you turn reading into action?