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Why & How I Take Notes
This coming week, I’m starting a new learning experience — Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking course. This makes it a good time to begin a possibly every six months review of how I take notes for work, for personal learning, and for content creation. I was a bit inspired to do this by a recent episode of the Focused Podcast featuring @Mike Schmitz and David Sparks . The episode was called “The Art of Note-Taking”.
What is the purpose of taking notes?
For many people, they either stopped taking notes when they left school OR, perhaps worse, they still take notes exactly as the took them in school — and never really learned how to use them effectively. I think there is a lot of value in taking notes — and learning to use your notes effectively — which means to improve yourself and/or to take actions that are aligned with your values.
For me, there are four purposes for taking notes today.
Purpose 1: Documenting what happened
This is probably the closest to what I think of when I think of school notes. In school notes, I actively replicated what the teacher wrote on the whiteboard or discussed. In my “adult” life this translated to going to meeting upon meeting upon meeting and making notes about the items we discussed.
