What should you write down when you stop reading?

Why is starting again the hard part?

Most reading advice is about staying focused once you have started. For many ADHD readers, the bigger cost is the restart: finding the place, remembering who everyone is, rebuilding why you cared. If that costs ten minutes, the book loses to anything that costs zero. The session card moves that work to the moment you stop, when you still know the answers.

What goes on the card?

• Stopped at: page number, chapter, or for audiobooks the time stamp and the last line you remember.
• What just happened: one line, in your own words. No quotes from the book.
• What I want to find out: one line. This is the hook that pulls you back.
• My settings: the font size, line spacing, speed or format that worked, so you stop testing the same things.

How do you use it?

1. Print, cut and fold. Keep it in the book, or for ebooks and audiobooks, in your phone case or next to your headphones.
2. When you stop, write one line. If you are in a hurry, write only "what I want to find out".
3. When you start, read the last line before you open the book. Then read one paragraph before your stopping point, not a chapter.
4. If the last line is weeks old and means nothing, use Coming back to a book you abandoned instead.

What if you read on a phone or e-reader?

Keep the card anyway, or copy its three lines into a note pinned to the top of your notes app. Highlights and bookmarks inside a reading app record where you were, but not what you were thinking, and the "what I want to find out" line is the part that makes you open the book again. If you listen, a card tucked into your headphone case works better than a note you have to remember to find.

Do not let the card become a second job. A line takes thirty seconds. If you notice you are writing paragraphs, you are summarizing, not hooking; cut it back to one line each.

Does writing it down really help memory?

Putting what you just read into your own words is retrieval practice, and coming back to it later adds spacing. Both are among the best-supported findings in memory research: recalling beats rereading, and spreading review out beats cramming it. (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Cepeda et al., 2006) That research was mostly done with students learning material, not novel readers with ADHD, so treat it as a reason to try the card rather than a promise.

For long novels, the card pairs with a cast list. For a gap longer than a few weeks, a recap that stops at your page does the heavy lifting: Kindle's Story So Far for supported Kindle ebooks (Amazon), or Magic Bookmark for print, ebook and audio copies of its supported titles on iPhone.