The Imperfectionist: How to Forget What You Read
Oliver Burkeman
You don’t need to try to retain everything you read. Forgetting filters what truly matters and keeps reading enjoyable and productive. Use low-effort note habits and read for the experience, not just future gain.
9 Nov 2025
It’s obviously easier, and thus less of an invitation to avoidance, to keep any notes you do take in a not-too-organised system (as opposed to, say, a complex hierarchical system of folders and tags). But for reasons I still can’t fully explain, keeping my notes messy seems to keep them more alive, too: it makes them more fertile, as a source of ideas, than if I were to lock them down into any more rigid structure.
By all means let your reading shape your thinking over the long haul, and generate or improve your ideas for future projects. But consider also the possibility that spending half an hour reading something interesting or moving or awe-inspiring or just amusing might be worth doing, not only for some other, future reason, but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.