How to Decide What to Highlight in Ebooks

Choosing what to highlight in an ebook is less about capturing everything and more about marking the few moments that add genuinely new, counterintuitive value. While reading on a Kindle app (with dark background and infinite scroll enabled), Tiago Forte highlights headings to preserve the book’s structure, then deliberately skips large stretches of text—especially chapter openings that function as story preambles rather than essential takeaways. The guiding rule is simple: if a passage feels obvious or unsurprising, it’s unlikely to teach anything new to future readers (or to the person taking notes).

The most useful highlights, in Forte’s approach, tend to be assertions that create a clear chain of logic, not just descriptive details. One early example comes from a chef-and-cooking argument: chefs and cooks can’t “wing it,” because fulfilling a promise of readiness requires the right resources, tools, personnel, and—crucially—everything must happen before the first order arrives. That timing constraint leads to a broader conclusion: planning must come before cooking, making chefs “planning machines” as a prerequisite for “cooking machines.” Forte connects this directly to productivity writing, arguing that the parallel between cooking and knowledge work depends on establishing that planning is more central than people assume.

He also treats sequence as a highlight-worthy idea. Cooking steps form nested tasks—stock depends on roasting bones and cutting vegetables; roasting depends on a hot oven; the oven doesn’t turn on without the kitchen experience that gets it ready. For Forte, this is the kind of universal lesson knowledge workers can use: unpack complex work into component actions, then put those actions in the right order. He contrasts this with other passages that may be accurate but less transferable—like scheduling down to 15-minute increments—because knowledge work doesn’t map neatly onto that level of granularity.

Another theme is “bookmarking” rather than note-taking. Highlights function like tabs: they point back to a sentence or concept that can be revisited later for more context, without forcing the reader to summarize entire stories. Forte estimates he saves roughly 10–15% of the text, often far less, and he avoids highlighting exercises at the end of chapters when they feel like generic teaching add-ons. Still, he makes exceptions for practices that can be translated into his own workflow—such as a daily “mise en place” style routine, or distinctions like calendars versus to-do lists.

Ultimately, the method aims to preserve reading enjoyment and flow. The goal isn’t to interrupt comprehension with constant annotation, but to capture a small set of “surprising and counterintuitive” gems—signposts that let the reader recreate much of the book’s value later. Forte argues that ideas are fractal: you can zoom in on key points without needing every setup, story, or example to retain the overall pattern. The result is a highlight strategy that balances retention with the pleasure of reading.