Tiago Forte describes his approach to summarize books with AI:
- Read the ebook and export the highlights to your digital notes app. As he reads a book on his iPad Kindle app, Tiago highlights the best passages, which are automatically saved to his notes app Readwise.
- Go through the highlights and bold the most important, interesting, resonant points. The full set of highlights is usually too long for ChatGPT, so he does a first pass to select the absolute best parts to include.
- Turn those best points into an outline format. He creates a structured outline with major ideas and supporting points, telling ChatGPT which ideas are most important.
- Paste the outline into ChatGPT with a specific prompt: “Please write a detailed summary of the key ideas and insights from this book based on the outline I have provided below. Feel free to elaborate on the main points and provide additional examples, data, or supporting evidence not mentioned in the outline.”
- ChatGPT produces a high quality summary extremely quickly. In just 30 seconds, it outputs a summary that is far longer, more detailed, and better than what it could produce without the custom outline.
By feeding his personalized highlights/outline to ChatGPT, Tiago can create book summaries with minimal effort in a fraction of the time it used to take him. This process saves him 70-80% of the time while producing better, more practical summaries.