Setting up a working copy
A book you have marked up properly is a different object from one you have read. Here is a system that takes about a minute to learn.
A four-mark system
Deliberately small. Elaborate annotation schemes get abandoned within a fortnight; four marks survive.
- 01
Underline what you recognise
Only where something describes your actual experience. Not what is interesting — what is true of you. This is the layer you will return to most.
- 02
Star what to try
A star in the margin means an action, not an idea. When you want something to practise this week, you flick for stars rather than re-reading.
- 03
Question mark what you disagree with
Genuinely useful, and most people skip it. Disagreement is information, and it is the best material to bring to a therapist.
- 04
Tab the pages for bad days
Two or three sticky tabs, on the distress-tolerance pages. When things are difficult you will not be able to find them by searching your memory.
- 05
Date the margin when something happens
When you use a skill, write the date next to it. Over months this turns the book into a record of what you have actually practised.
The notebook page that pairs with it
One page per week, kept alongside the book. This is where the exercises go, since the book has no printed response space.
- Week beginning:
- The one thing I am practising, copied from a starred page:
- Three lines a day — what happened, strength out of ten, what I did:
- What I noticed on re-reading last week's entry:
- Anything I want to raise with someone (therapist, partner, friend):
What goes where
The most common cause of an abandoned system is not knowing which surface a thought belongs on.
| This goes | Here |
|---|---|
| Recognition — “this is me” | In the book, underlined |
| Something to practise | In the book, starred |
| What actually happened on Tuesday | In the notebook, dated |
| Disagreement with the text | In the book, question mark, and raised in a session |
| Anything you would not want read | Loose paper, destroyed afterwards — the value is in writing it, not keeping it |
| A pattern noticed across weeks | Front or back page of the notebook, as a running list |
Why marking beats highlighting everything
Most people annotate by highlighting whatever seems important as they read. Six weeks later the book is uniformly yellow and the marks convey nothing, because the criterion was “this is interesting” and nearly everything in a book you chose is interesting.
The fix is a criterion that excludes things. Underlining only what you recognise as true of yourself rules out most of the page, which is precisely what makes the remainder useful — those passages are a map of your own patterns, assembled without effort.
Separating recognition from action matters for the same reason. When you want something to practise, you do not want to re-read a chapter; you want to find the four starred lines. That distinction is the whole reason the system is worth the minute it takes to learn.
The dates are the part people skip and later wish they had not. A margin full of dates is direct evidence of what you have actually practised and when — which is the one thing that reliably contradicts the feeling, on a bad week, that you have never done anything about this.
A page where everything is highlighted contains exactly as much information as a page where nothing is.