How do I take notes I will actually use?

Notes have two purposes: helping you understand at the time, and being useful later. Verbatim transcription serves neither, because it bypasses comprehension and produces too much text to revisit.

What you'll need

• Notebook or notes app (optional)

Step by step

1. Write in your own words, not verbatim.Rephrasing forces you to understand, which is most of the benefit. Transcribing is a mechanical activity that bypasses comprehension entirely.
2. Capture structure, not every sentence.Main points, the reasoning, the conclusions. The detail is usually available elsewhere; the structure is what you need to reconstruct it.
3. Mark actions and questions distinctly.A box for actions, a question mark for things to follow up. It makes the notes scannable and stops actions being buried in prose.
4. Leave space.A wide margin or a gap between sections for later additions. Cramped notes cannot be annotated, which is where much of the value comes from.
5. Note the date, topic and source at the top.Every time. Notes without context are almost useless six months later, and it takes five seconds.
6. Review within a day.Ten minutes tidying, filling gaps and pulling out actions. This is the step that turns notes into something usable, and it is the one everyone skips.
7. Extract actions into your task system.Notes are not a to-do list. Anything requiring action should move to where you actually look for things to do.
8. Keep them somewhere searchable.One notebook or one app. Notes scattered across several places are effectively lost, however good they were.

Tips

• Handwriting is slower than typing, which forces summarising and generally improves retention. Typing suits situations where you need volume and searchability.
• For meetings, note decisions and actions rather than discussion. Nobody rereads an account of the conversation.
• A short summary written at the end — three sentences on what mattered — makes the notes far more useful than the notes alone.

Common mistakes

• Transcribing everything verbatim — It requires no thinking, so you retain little, and it produces so much text that you never reread it.
• Never reviewing notes afterwards — The review is where notes become useful. Unreviewed notes are a record of attendance rather than a resource.
• Keeping notes in several different places — They become unsearchable, and unsearchable notes are the same as no notes.

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