This article was captured from the You Are Here audio collection by Oliver Burkeman in the Waking Up app.

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, about embracing limitation and finally getting around to what counts. For many years, he wrote a popular column on psychology for The Guardian, “This Column Will Change Your Life,” and has reported from London, New York, and Washington, DC.

These days, in the world of productivity and personal development, you can barely move without bumping into someone offering advice on how to remember everything that you read. All these people, to be believed, suggest lots of us are yearning to discover the perfect technique for capturing all the information that we encounter in books, online, and elsewhere—plus all the ideas that pop up into our heads while we’re taking a shower or riding the subway. And then storing all of that in the ideal note-taking system. This is the increasingly fashionable field that goes by the name of “personal knowledge management.”

I want to be honest and say that while I’m going to criticize it a bit here, I do that as someone who is a huge sucker for note-taking apps and digital systems that promise to store all my information so I can call it up whenever I need to, helping me see unexpected connections within it that I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. My own history as a productivity junkie is littered with the wreckage of all the short-lived systems that I tried to implement in order to conquer the challenge of getting a handle on all the information I consume. I’ve lost track of the times I would resolve, say, to read for at least 30 minutes every day and then spend another 30 minutes taking notes on my reading, apparently oblivious to the fact that this would require me to locate an additional 60 minutes in an already overcrowded day—which meant it never actually happened.

So many of us try to retain and remember everything we read, listen to, or watch. It’s a very understandable response to the information environment in which we find ourselves. After all, there’s just so much useful and interesting stuff out there and so little time to consume it. And I think a lot of us do feel a kind of pressure to take ownership of what we manage to read, watch, or hear, either by literally memorizing it or, perhaps more realistically, by storing it in some well-organized external system. Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time?

I’m increasingly convinced that a much more relaxed approach to knowledge consumption and note-taking is not only more enjoyable but actually more useful, too, in terms of using the information you encounter to help you in your quest to become more creative or more professionally successful. There are three basic reasons I think we shouldn’t struggle so hard to retain everything we read.

The first reason is that forgetting is a filter. That is, when something you read resonates with you sufficiently to recall it without effort, that means something. It means that it connects with your existing ideas and experiences in some relevant way. If you forget it, on the other hand, that’s fairly likely to be because it wasn’t worth remembering. And if you replace this natural filtering process with a more conscious, willpower-based system for retaining information by packing it all into a notebook or app, you risk losing the benefits of that filter. As the writer Sasha Chapin put it, “Your natural salience filter is a great determinant of what’s most alive for you. If you begin to rely on any other filter, you will increasingly record what seems like it should be interesting according to some pre-existing criteria, rather than what organically sticks to your mind.”

The second reason—and this is a universal law of personal productivity, really—is that the more effort a technique requires, the more likely you are to avoid doing it. If your system requires you to take detailed notes on everything you read, then you probably won’t. If you’re like me, that doesn’t mean that you’ll pick up an important book but fail to take notes on it. It means you’ll avoid that important book altogether in favor of something that matters to you less, because you tell yourself you’re going to keep the book for some other time when you’re feeling more energetic or engaged. Or maybe you’ll end up listening to a podcast that you don’t especially want to hear because you’re too tired to make notes on the podcast that you really do want to hear and now probably never will. It’s very similar to working out: the best kind of exercise is the one you’re actually going to do, and the best way to explore the vast array of information in the world is whatever is going to mean you actually do it.

The final reason to be wary of these attempts to store knowledge and information for future use is that the point of reading, at least most of the time, isn’t to vacuum up information but rather to shape your sensibility. As the art consultant Carina Janova has written, each work that you encounter changes you at least a little and changes the way you see the world. And that change is going to occur (or not) regardless of how much of any given book’s contents you happen to intentionally retain in your memory. And after all, it’s the way you see the world—your unique angle applied to the people and events and things around you—that’s going to result in the best ideas and the most original work.

This doesn’t mean I think you should throw away your notebooks or delete your note-taking apps and just give up on the idea of retaining knowledge and information that you encounter. Plus, of course, there may be a few contexts—say, if you’re studying law or studying medicine—where you really do have to memorize a lot of facts. But what I want to argue is that most of us could benefit from chilling out significantly when it comes to how we think about reading and learning and recording our thoughts.

First, embrace low-overhead ways of reading and note-making. It’s often drummed into us at high school or at university that merely highlighting a passage from a book or underlining it in pencil isn’t a very good way to internalize what you’re reading. Okay, maybe that’s true, but you know what’s an even worse way of internalizing what you read? Never even reading it to begin with because you couldn’t face taking detailed notes on it. So the method that you actually put into practice—be it highlighting or underlining—that makes it a good method.

Secondly, I think you should feel free to copy down quotes verbatim whenever you feel like it. There’s another dogma in the world of education that if you don’t transform things into your own words, then it doesn’t really count. You haven’t really engaged with the text. But at the risk of repeating myself, that means you don’t read the text at all in the midst of an otherwise busy and tiring and distracting day. Well, that’s a bad rule. Copying things down verbatim is what all sorts of celebrated writers and scholars have done for centuries in their so-called commonplace books. If that’s good enough for them, I think it can often be good enough for us.

And then thirdly, I would recommend keeping your notes messy. Keep them in a not-too-organized system, as opposed to some complex hierarchical scheme of folders and tags that needs 20 minutes a day just to keep it all in order. So that, once again, you’re more likely to actually do it. But beyond this, and for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I’ve found that keeping my notes messy also keeps them more alive for me, somehow makes them more fertile, more likely to be a source of interesting ideas than if I were to lock them down into a more rigid structure.

In the end, I think I’m getting at something a bit deeper than merely choosing lower-effort approaches to reading so that you actually get around to reading. It’s also a question of what the point of reading is, what the point of encountering new ideas and perspectives really is. Because it’s easy to operate, I think, on the assumption that the main point of picking up a book—certainly a non-fiction book or a work-related book—is to add to your storehouse of data. So you’re hoarding information and insights like a squirrel hoarding nuts, ready for some moment in the future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all. And in fact, to approach reading in that way is a recipe for living permanently in the future, mentally speaking, never reaping the value of life here in the present moment.

So instead, it’s better to think of reading not primarily as preparation for living later on, but as one way of engaging with the world, one way of living right here in the present moment. By all means, of course, let your reading shape your thinking over the long haul. Let it generate or improve your ideas for future projects. Let it enhance your skills and your knowledge base. But consider also the possibility that spending half an hour reading or watching or listening to something interesting or moving or inspiring or even just entertaining—that might be something worth doing not only for some other future reason, but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.