Transcription
Hey, book lovers. Listen up. How do you track the books that you're reading and the books that you want to read?
If you're still using email threads, random notes, and scattered screenshots, there's a better way. Stick around. I'll teach you the want to way to do it. I am Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and anyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with using technology to create simple systems for everyday tasks. And in today's video, I'm going to teach you my system for keeping track of the books you're reading and the books that you want to read. Make sure to stay tuned for my MacWhisperer Power tip because when you see what I'm going to do with Freeform and the journal app, it's going to blow your mind. Let's hop on in and get started. I'm really excited to teach you this system. It's going to be broken down into three separate sections. The first section is where we're going to gather all of the recommendations and books together into one place. The second section is where we're going to create a reminders list to keep track of all of the books, and then the third section is where we're going to kick it up a notch, adding tags, links, reminders, and smart lists to our reminders list to make it easy to keep track of what we want to read next and what we want to recommend.
Our first step is gathering all of our recommendations. If you're like me, book recommendations come to you in many different forms. Sometimes I'll get texted or emailed suggestions from some of my friends. Sometimes I'll hear about a book on a radio program and I'll drop it into notes. Sometimes I'll find something on social media or even stumble across one of those amazing 50 books everybody should read before they die lists. In this section, we're going to walk through each of those scenarios and gather everything together into a clean and simple note that we can use for step two.
So first off, let's take a look in our email program and see what recommendations we've got there. I'm going to open up email and come right into the search where I'm going to type in the word book, and immediately I'm going to find all sorts of book-related emails. In fact, this one right up at the top is exactly what I'm looking for: a recommendation from one of my friends. You may have to hunt around a little bit to find all of the recommendations, but once you do, copy those recommendations and paste them into a simple note. First off, let's grab the title of the book and the author right here, and hit command C for copy. Now let's open up our notes app and let's create a brand new note by clicking on the new note button right here. We're just going to call this note "Books to Read". And the first thing we're going to add to this note is that book that we copied from the email, just like this.
The next thing I'm going to do is take a quick look through my Notes app to see if I've got any scattered book recommendations here. I'll come right up to the search field and search for the word book, and right here, look, there's a note with book suggestions. I'm going to copy all of these book suggestions and come back to my "Books to Read" list right here and paste them down. I don't need any of the additional information; I just need the title and the author, so I'm going to delete everything else to keep this nice and clean and just give us a nice list of the books that I want to keep track of. That's not the only place that book recommendations can come from. So now let's hop right into Safari where I've got this Facebook post right here with some awesome book recommendations. I found this perfect book for me to read. Now, unfortunately, the person who posted this book didn't put the information inside of the post, but he did help us out by taking a picture. So I'm going to click on the image right here and open it up. And using the ability to grab text right from the Mac, I'm going to put my cursor over the title, highlight everything that we see here, copy it, and bring it right into my note here.
I buy a ton of things on Amazon, but I also save a lot of things for later. And what I didn't realize until today, Amazon keeps track of any books that you pinned, tagged, or added to lists. So if you want to see some of the books that you've left in Amazon but haven't purchased, it's easy to do by coming into your Amazon webpage and hovering over this section right here and coming to where it says "Your saved books". One simple click here, and you'll see the list of all of the books that you've ever tagged in Amazon. This can make it easy for you to grab that book title from right here, copy it, and paste it right down under a list, just like that. You can grab any of the books you want to add to your list, but if you know you want to buy it, you can just click on any of these books and add them to your cart right here, making it even easier for you to purchase it later.
But there's one more place that I get a ton of recommendations from, and that's from these lists that show up all over the internet. Things like the 76 books that everyone should read in their lifetime, or the best books of the 21st century, or the greatest books of all time. Now, when you come across these lists, sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll find them in a way that's easy for you to simply copy and paste them over to a note, but more often than not, they're in an article, which just makes it so hard to organize it. I can come in and I can copy and paste each separate title, but that's going to take me forever. And it's 2025, and we've got artificial intelligence to help us out. So we're going to use chat GPT to extract the books off of this list in a format that's easy for us to use.
The first thing we've gotta do is come up to our address bar and copy the website link. Next, come down to our chat GPT app and open up a brand new conversation. Within this conversation, we're going to need a prompt that helps to extract this information in the exact way we want. Here I've created a basic prompt that's asking for GPT to extract the information from this website. Now, all I have to do is paste in the website link that we copied and click send and let chat GPT go to work. And just like that, I've got a perfect list of all of the books from that article. All I have to do is come in and select all of them, copy them, move over to our notes list, and paste them in just like that. Now we've got a great list of all of the books we've been recommended from emails, from websites, from screenshots, and we're ready to take the next step.
For step two, come into reminders, and create a brand new list by clicking the add list button down at the bottom. Call it "Books", and give it a friendly emoji icon by coming in here, typing in the word book, and selecting the stack of books right here. Now let's go ahead and click okay. The next thing we need to do is turn this list into a list with columns. We can do that by clicking on the view menu here and choosing where it says "as columns". This is going to give us separate columns that allow us to track what's been recommended, what's been purchased, what we're reading, and what's been read. Before we do that, let's go back to our notes and format that in the right way for reminders. A lot of people don't realize that when you have a list like this inside of notes, if you copy it and paste it in, it tends to put all of the information inside of one reminder, which is super frustrating and isn't helping with what we're trying to do. There's a different way to format a list in notes so that it pulls over to reminders properly. And to do this, first, select our entire list, and then come up to the checklist function and give it checklists like this. Now, with all of those checklists, all we have to do is hit command C to copy. Come back into our reminders list, click into the right field, and paste, and now it puts all the books in separately, making it easy to take the next step.
Now, let's rename this column so that we can create some other columns. This is not really the "Others" column; this is the "Books to Read". Next, we need to create the additional columns. For this list to create additional columns, you're going to come up here and click on this button. The first column we need is "To Purchase". This is the column that we'll put in the books once we decide we want to read them so that we can buy them. Now let's create another column right here for "Currently Reading", and then one more column for "Completed". Now, what we've done here is we've given ourselves a very simple system. As you find the next book that you'd like to read, you can move it from the "Books to Read" section into your "To Purchase" column, and then once it's purchased, it can become the book that you're currently reading, and when you're completed with it, move it over into the "Completed" section and click the little completed checkbox right there. You'll notice that it disappears once you've completed it, but don't worry. Unlike notes and other programs, you can show all of your completed items by clicking the "Show" button right here, allowing you to keep track of all the books that you've read, and even which books you might recommend to friends, and that's how you set up your reading list to keep it simple and to keep track of the new books that come in.
Now, a lot of people might ask why I would do this in reminders rather than doing it in notes itself. I mean, after all, we already created the list in notes, but there's two very specific reasons why I prefer doing this in reminders. And the first one is as this list gets longer and longer and longer, it's all linear, meaning you've gotta go up and down and up and down this list all the time to find the next book that you want to read. Secondly, when you complete a book, if you click the little checkbox here, it'll drop all the way down to the bottom showing that you've read it. But it's always going to show up there, and it's going to be in your way on a regular basis, making this list longer and longer and longer and less and less effective. It's going to be hard to look back on; it's going to be hard to get additional information from. But the other reason that I prefer doing it inside of reminders is because of how well Siri works with reminders. If I want to use Siri to add a new book onto that note, good luck. Sometimes it'll work, and sometimes it just won't. If we don't have an easy way to add new books onto our list, we're going to go back to our old habits of emailing them to ourselves or leaving them in screenshots, which we don't want to do. But by having this list in reminders, you can take your phone and whenever you hear a new book recommendation, you can simply say, "Add Life's Golden Ticket to my Books list". And within just a moment or two, that new book is going to get added right onto our list where I can add it into our "Books to Read" column easily and simply. You just can't do that with notes. So that's step two.
In step three, we're going to take this system up a notch by adding some advanced tools like tags, links, and smart lists, and it looks a little something like this. First thing we want to do is add some tags. Tags are these little hashtags that you can use within reminders to help you find specific reminders from across all of your lists. The first thing we need to do is create a tag. So I'm going to come into this book here and click the letter I, and when it opens up, I'm going to go into the tag section here, and I'm going to type in "book". You'll notice it adds the hashtag for me, and as soon as I close that out, the book hashtag has been added to our list of tags on the lower left side of your reminders list. You have to create the tag manually the first time, but once you've got the tag created, you can take that tag and apply it to additional items by selecting the items, right-clicking, and coming into the tags list right here where we can tag these as books as well. Now, it's one thing to tag it as books, but there's a second tag we want to use here. I'm going to come back to this one and click on the I and add another tag: "to-read". This is going to be a tag that helps us know which books we have not yet gotten around to reading. Remember that you can make your tag say anything you want, but you can't have a space in them. So you'll notice I used a hyphen instead of a space. Now I'll click out of here, and we'll see down here the "to-read" tag is there as well. We're going to take all of the books in this entire column, select all of them, right-click, and I'm going to tag them all as "books". Select them again, right-click again, and tag them all as "to-read". So what we've got is a list of all of these books that we want to read, tagged properly and easily. By using these hashtags, it's going to allow us to create smart lists and to keep track of the books in an even better way. But there's another piece to this process, and we're going to do it with the book that we've already completed. So first I'm going to click on this book and click the letter I up here. Now I have read this book, so I can remove the "to-read" tag. Now add a new tag that lets us know whether we liked or didn't like this book so that we can recommend it to others. To do that, use an emoji as a tag. To get your emoji keyboard up, hold down the control and command buttons on your keyboard and tap the space bar. When you get into your emoji list, you can use the search section to search for any emoji you want. The thumbs up is right here, so I'm going to click on it. And now I've given us a thumbs-up hashtag letting me know which books I would recommend to other people. And the good news is that you can use that thumbs-up hashtag in all sorts of lists, like the recipes you'd make again, or the movies you'd recommend to your friends.
Now that we've created a nice, simple system with these tags, we can create a couple of simple, smart lists. Let's come up to the file menu here and create a new list. From here, we're going to change it from a standard list to a smart list just like this, give this one a title, like "My Next Read", and the tags for this title are "book" and "to-read". Once we've done that, any books that we have not yet read will automatically show up in this list, and if we come in and mark one of them as read and completed, it'll disappear from this list. As we do this, it'll keep great track of the books that we want to read. Here's another little power tip: You can also click on the I and give it a specific reminder for when you'd like to be prompted to read this book. Maybe you're going on vacation at the beginning of June, and you can set this for June 1st for it to remind you to pick up this book before you go. And there's one more smart list that we're going to make. File, I, new list. Make this into a smart list like this, and this smart list can be titled "Books to Recommend". The tags we want here are "thumbs up" and "book". And now whenever we come into this list, we'll get the list of all the books that we want to recommend. Remember, if you completed the books by clicking the checklist, they might show as all reminders completed. But all you have to do is click the "Show" button in the upper right-hand corner to see all of your recommendations. And now you've got a super simple way to keep track of the books that you're reading, the books you want to read, and the books that you've completed. And don't forget that at any time you can come into any one of these reminders and add additional information into the notes section: who referred it to you, why you liked it, or some of the information you gleaned from reading that book.
So that's my book tracking system, making it easy for you to capture the books you want to read, the books you are reading, and the books you'd recommend with a simple thumbs-up emoji. And while we're talking about thumbs up, if you got great value from this video, give it a thumbs up. Just like that great book you read last summer, it makes it easier for other people to find this video, and it goes a long way. If you have any questions or comments, or you'd like to know what I'm reading, or you'd like to tell me what you are reading, drop them down in the comment section. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, that's like going to Amazon and putting a bunch of books in your cart and never buying them. Stop it already. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button and that notify bell so that I can help you make your technology work better than ever before.
And now let's pop this book open and jump into the power tip. Now, I've already given you an amazing suggestion about how to keep track of all of the books that you're reading, but maybe you're more of a visual person, in which case I recommend using the app Freeform. Freeform is a relatively new app, and it exists on your phone, computer, and iPad, and it makes it easy for you to track things visually, like this. This is the book reading tracking system that I've been using within Freeform, making it easy for me to take the books and stack them up as I complete them. In fact, I just finished this book, so let's take it out of the current book stack, add it over here, and this is the next book that I'm getting into, just like that. It's really easy to create the system, and I'm going to show you how in just a couple of steps. The first thing that you want to do is come into Freeform and create a brand new board by clicking this button right here. Now the next thing you're going to do is open up Safari and do a simple image search for "empty bookshelf image". You're going to find a ton of them. I like this one, so I'm going to take this one; I'm going to drag it right onto my new Freeform board and make it as big as I want to make it easier for me to use. The next thing that I need is a book. So let's go back to Safari and do another Google search, this time for "book spine". You're going to find a ton of different books. I like this one, so I'm going to grab it and drag it right onto our Freeform board here. Now you'll notice that this book has a bunch of other stuff in its image. If I try and move it around, we're going to have this big white space, which looks terrible, but fortunately, Freeform can remove the background of images. Click on the image and click down here on this icon. Here you can click "remove background", which will take the background right off the page easily. I like to put the book flat rather than sideways 'cause it's a little easier to read. To do that, click on the book, press and hold the command button on your keyboard, and grab one of the blue balls here and just straighten that book right out. Now once you've done that, we're going to create a title by clicking on the shapes button here and grabbing a nice square. This needs to be quite a bit smaller and take it from being blue and make it white, and double-click right into it and title it. Now what you're going to do is take the title, drop it right onto the book like this, hold down your command key, and click on the book as well so that you have both the title and the book selected. Then click on this button here and group them together like this. That way, when you move one, they'll move together. And you might say, "But Dylan, that's going to take forever every time I need to add a new book." But there's a power tip that's going to...
Make it simple. Simply hold the option button down on your keyboard, and then click and drag on this book, and you can make as many books as you want. And then when you're ready, double-click on it. Take the words and put them in the new book. It makes it easy for you to keep track of the books you're reading, and if you do it right, it can look just like this system and make it super easy for you to visually keep track of things.
But there's one more quick power tip I want to give you about a completely unique way to keep track of the books that you read. You see, one of the problems I have is once I complete a book, I don't always remember what was in the book, and that's a really helpful piece. So for this tip, we're going to grab our iPhone and go right into the Apple Journal app here.
The journal app is a great app for all sorts of things, but I find it unbelievably helpful for tracking the books that I'm reading. The first thing I'm going to do is create a new entry by clicking the plus button down at the bottom here and clicking new entry. I'm going to take a picture of the book that I'm reading. Click on the camera right here, point it right at my book, snap that picture, and click use photo. In the title, give the name of the book and the author.
As I'm reading the book, if I come across a passage, a page, a chapter, or something that just catches my attention, I can quickly open up my camera. Take a picture of that page and then click on the little icon in the lower left-hand corner to pull that page up. From here, click the settings button at the bottom, and then the markup button at the top right here. Click on my highlighter, and then I'm going to highlight whatever part of the book really caught my attention. Click done. And then done.
Once I'm finished with the book, I'll come back to this entry, click the three dots, and edit. And from here, I'm going to click on the photos icon. I'll go through my entire camera roll and grab any of the highlight sections from this book, and then I'll come into the journal entry right here and I'll talk a little bit about what I learned in the book, what I liked, what I didn't like, and whether I would recommend it. At the end, I finish the post up by saying hashtag book, and that way whenever I want to, I can come into my journal app. Click on the search button, search for hashtag book, and I will find every book that I've recently read along with all of the captured pages and quotes that really connected to me from that book.
And just like that, you can keep track of your books in an even more powerful way, making sure you never forget why you liked that book, or some of the passages that really connected with you.
So that's what we've got for today's video, all about three different ways to track books so that you always know what you've read, what you're reading, what you would recommend, and what's up next. I hope you learned a lot, but remember, there's always more to learn. Check out this video over here for even more amazing tips and tricks on how to use your Apple products efficiently. I'm Dylan Stewart, the want to, and I'll see you in the bookstore.