[itsautomatisch]

I regularly buy a lot of books and go through periods where I read a lot or don't read much at all. Like most ADHD folks I think it's related to hyper-fixation most of the time, but sometimes it's just plain old motivation. One thing that helped in the past was buying an AlphaSmart on Ebay and just taking notes in Markdown on that. If I have the ebook I usually do a side-by-side with Ulysses or emacs open to take notes since it's a pain to deal with the AlphaSmart and an ebook reader, but for physical books it's quite easy to just cover up the page I'm not using as a stand. I generally keep technical notes organized by larger topic, then sub-topic, and then a separate file for each specific thing.

I tend to prefer physical books for long-form reading that isn't really focused on having you write code and ebooks for when it's more of a tutorial/project-based thing, and I think the multi-tasking aspect of taking notes or writing code while reading helps me from getting distracted, as I notice I tend to get bored quicker when I'm focused on one task for took long versus having a passive task to keep me busy. Lately I've decided to try doing something different, and instead of taking notes I am just highlighting stuff. I used to hate highlighting and marking up books, but once I got over it I found it's almost as effective as taking notes with the added bonus of being able to just sit outside or going somewhere quite with just the book and highlighter.