The reading notes nobody reads
Your highlights are a graveyard. Everyone's are. You read a good book, you mark thirty passages, you export them somewhere with a satisfying import count, and you never open them again. The system worked perfectly and you got nothing.
The reason is not laziness or the wrong app. It is that a highlight is somebody else's sentence, and you cannot use somebody else's sentence until you have said the thing in your own words. Thirty quotes are thirty pieces of unfinished thinking, and unfinished thinking is exactly what you do not want to meet on a Tuesday.
One rule: the idea is the parent
Write the idea, in your words, as the bullet. Put the quote underneath it, as a child, with the page number.
That inversion is the whole method. It costs about fifteen seconds per idea and it changes what the note is for. The quote stops being the note and becomes the evidence for it. And because your sentence is at the top, the list is readable: five ideas you can scan, instead of thirty passages you have to re-derive.
The second child is the one that pays rent: where this applies to you. "The rollback line is the one skipped under load" is worth more than the quote it came from, because it is about your work rather than about surgery.
Six ideas per book, not thirty
If a book yields six ideas you can state yourself, that is an excellent book. Thirty highlights usually means you were marking recognition, not insight: the pleasant feeling of agreeing with a well-made sentence.
The test is simple and slightly brutal. Cover the quote and try to say the idea. If you cannot, you have not got it yet, and the note is a bookmark rather than a thought.
Why it belongs in the tree with everything else
Because a good idea from a book eventually becomes a project, a checklist item or a decision, and in one outline that is a drag rather than a transcription. The Gawande line about pause points became a release checklist in the tree it was already in. If reading notes live in a separate app, that motion needs somebody to notice the connection AND to retype it, and the second half is where it dies.
Mirrors help here too: an idea that belongs to two topics can stand under both without a copy, so the note does not have to be filed under the "right" subject.
The agent's half
An agent given a batch of exported highlights can do the mechanical part: group them by theme, and draft a candidate idea line for each group in plain language. You then rewrite those lines, because a summary you did not write is a summary you do not remember.
Take the shape
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and try it on the last book you read. Six ideas, your words on top. If you cannot get to six, that is worth knowing about the book.