A New Year of Learning: How to Take Notes?

You might think it’s ridiculous to spend your holiday thinking about how you’re going to take notes the coming year. When the year is over though, you will be glad you did, when you have all the notes you took together so it will be easy to find the information on that specific topic you wrote about in january.

During the year a great amount of information will be fired at you, and it will be way too much for you to remember. It will probably also be way too much for you to write down, so it’s important to capture the essentials.

Don’t let those precious words escape

As a student I had a ring binder with tabs for each class. I used this binder for a year and the next year I bought a new one, fresh paper and tabs to start over. Looking back at the things I wrote down at that time it’s amazing to see how much information got lost. Some lessons are almost gone, just a few words remain but I don’t remember a thing of what’s been said.

I would love to have a book of references from that time, but the things I scribbled down barely represent something like that. This is a good moment for me to think about how I would have done this in a better way!

Different note-taking techniques can be found in my post Taking Notes: Choosing the Right Tools I wrote in may of this year. As you can read it that post I prefer using a notebook and a nice pen. Especially in a classroom or a meeting situation where you have to deal with other people, hiding behind your laptop screen is not really opening up the space between you and the other person.

The interpersonal wall of technology

Even though people know you are not checking your email or your web site’s stats while they’re talking to you, they can’t tell for sure, they’re not sitting next to you looking at the screen. I have the same problem sometimes while using my new iPhone. The thing is so multifunctional, you can set appointments, check your to-do lists, control your iTunes and play games, to name a few.

The person you’re talking to never knows which of those things you’re doing. And because it’s a phone, people are tempted to think you’re reading or writing an sms message while you’re actually just taking some notes about what they say. You can’t play games or send sms messages with pen and paper though. They don’t create this wall between you and me. They can represent sincere attention. There are no other possibilities in the space between us.

So paper it is?

Well, there is no totally perfect solution. Copy-pasting is not that easy on a piece of paper, and when you gathered a lot information and you want to organize it using categories and tags, you’ll probably want to use a tool like Evernote, DEVONnote or VoodooPad.

And if you are using pen and paper for your notes you might want to have a look at different note taking techniques and see what works best for you. Of course it is very important that those words you wrote down still make sense to you after a month or a year!

How do you prefer to take notes? Please leave a comment and let me know!

Photo by Jacob Bøtter