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. Read more

Say Thank You and Make Someone Smile

In januari we launched the Thank You Project. It comprises small businesscard-size booklets containing removable cards with a short sentence followed by ‘Thank You’. You can give those cards away to someone you like, or just a stranger. Put them in someone’s bag, mailbox, leave them at a restaurant or put them in a book for someone else to find.

This month we launched a new website! Here you can read what the project is about, order freshly printed booklets, postcards and a Thank You stamp. For the really thankful people there is also a complete Thank Pack available, with two booklets, to sets of postcards and a stamp. There are two other new things on the new website: You can choose a postcard, fill in a message and the address of the person you want to send it to and we will write the message by hand on a real postcard and send it off. You can also write your own Thank You sentence, which will appear on the website, and maybe even in a future version of the booklet! Read more

Taking Notes: Choosing the Right Tools

It’s a known fact: the longer the lecture or presentation, the smaller the amount of information that will be remembered. If a lecture is 30 minutes long, students don’t remember the first 15 minutes as well as in a lecture with a duration of only those first 15 minutes. So how can we keep track of the information given to us in a two-hour lecture?

Not Just Reading a Book

When we read a fiction book we probably read a line only once. That’s no problem. We don’t really have to remember that specific line, but we want to understand the story. When we have to learn something, say for our final exams, we really have to study the material and make sure we will not forget what we read. So we have to read it over and over again, or use a smart highlighting system to keep track of the most important fact and information.

However, when we listen to a lecturer or a presenter, we can’t highlight words or read things over several times until we really understand what’s being said Read more

Speed Up Your Writing: Typing Utilities Compared

Sometimes you stumble upon a piece of software that’s just wonderful, and you wish you knew it before. Software that really enhances the computer interface. The most important piece of software in that category is Quicksilver (also read my recent post about Quicksilver).
Another thing I discovered about a year ago was a tool that finishes your sentences. It’s like a fully customizable version of predictive text input for your computer.

What do those little tools do? They help you type. By setting up a list of sentences you use a lot and connecting those sentences to an abbreviation that is easy to remember, you create ’shortcuts’ for your text. This is great when you get a lot of email and a lot of people are asking you the same thing over and over again. You can also use it for URL’s email addresses, and signatures.
While writing code or inserting html tags this can also save you a lot of time, as you can imagine. Read more