How To Finally Stop Taking Useless Notes At Work
Whether you’re a student, you’re taking down
notes during meetings, or you’re a regular at industry lectures and
conferences, effective note taking is a skill you could probably benefit from.
Although we tend to take notes for years when
we’re in school, most of us don’t ever learn how to take effective notes,
and we’re wasting time on approaches that don’t work.
And unfortunately, the most common approaches
to taking notes really don’t work well.
Do you ever highlight books or your own
notes? Do you underline important points? Do you sometimes reread your notes to
refresh your memory?
The most effective note-taking techniques are
active, whereas rereading, highlighting, and underlining are passive
techniques.
Here’s the bad news: Those techniques are
all pretty
much useless.
In fact, highlighting is such a bad study
technique it may even harm your recall ability, since it highlights particular
notes and takes them out of their original context, which makes it harder
to form connections in your mind—and thus, harder to
remember the material.
Studies have found the most
effective note-taking techniques are
active, whereas rereading, highlighting, and underlining are passive
techniques. We need to interact heavily with our notes and the material we’re
trying to learn if we’re to remember it.
So what active techniques can you use to make
your note-taking efforts worthwhile?
For starters, don’t use a laptop to take
notes, no matter where you are. A series
of studies pitted laptop note takers against
students taking longhand notes and found the laptop approach fared worst in
terms of information recall.
In the first study, students watched a video
of a lecture or TED talk, then completed 30 minutes of hard cognitive tasks
before taking a quiz on the material from the video.
Students who wrote longhand notes outperformed
laptop note takers in recalling information to pass the quiz. And when the
researchers examined the students’ notes, they found a clue as to why: The
laptop notes tended to include a lot of verbatim transcription of the video,
whereas handwritten notes couldn’t be written fast enough to do the same. If we
can type fast enough to transcribe information verbatim, we can get away with
writing notes without engaging our minds too much—we don’t have to think
critically or even pay too much attention to simply write down exactly what
someone’s saying.
Don’t use a laptop to take notes, no matter
where you are.
So for the second study, the researchers
specifically asked laptop note takers to not write notes verbatim.
In this experiment, not only did the longhand
note takers still perform best on the quiz, the laptop note takers still wrote
verbatim transcriptions of the videos. The explicit warning to not do so made
no difference at all.
For a third study, the researchers gave the
students a full week before the quiz, rather than 30 minutes, and gave some
students 10 minutes to review their notes before taking the quiz. Once again,
longhand note takers performed best, but those who took handwritten notes and
reviewed them for 10 minutes before the quiz came out on top.
So while handwriting your notes is a better
approach than using a computer, this approach works even better if paired with
time to review your notes before testing yourself.
And if handwriting your notes seems too slow,
you might look into learning
shorthand to speed things up. While older
shorthand techniques are based on hours upon hours of learning squiggles that
correspond to various sounds and words, more recent shorthand approaches are
more closely based on the existing English alphabet, but make it a lot faster
to write down.
To keep your handwritten notes organized, it
helps to index them by page number and topic, as well as using a key of symbols
to categorize ideas, notes, tasks, and other pieces of information quickly and
clearly.
Luckily there’s no need to figure this out by
yourself. The Bullet Journal
system is designed to work with any notebook,
and gives you a way to keep all your notes organized in one place.
The basic organizational sections work like
this:
1. Set aside a few pages in the front of your notebook for
your index and number every page after that (or buy a notebook with numbered
pages).
2. Turn to the next available page and put a heading to
match what you’re writing. It could be a meeting name and date, the name of the
person you’re meeting with, or the book you’re taking notes on.
3. Go back to your index and mark down the heading and page
number of your notes so you can find them again later.
The Bullet Journal system uses a set of
symbols to mark notes, events, and tasks. You can also add your own to cover
different categories if you need to. You might add an icon to denote an idea or
something you need to follow up with a colleague, for instance.
The system also includes some simple setup to
keep track of appointments or major events during the month and a daily to-do
list. If you like keeping everything in one notebook, the Bullet Journal system
and its handy indexing can help you keep track of your notes and find them
easily later, even if they’re in-between tasks and agenda planning.
Now this one might sound silly, but hear me
out. Research shows if you draw something you’re more likely to remember it
later.
A series
of studies tested drawing against writing and
other approaches for memorizing words, and found drawing came out on top.
In the first study, participants were given a
series of words that were easy to draw (for example, “apple”) and were either
asked to draw the word or write it down. To ensure participants spent the same
amount of time either writing or drawing, they were given 40 seconds for each
word and asked to fill the entire period. So they could write or draw the item
over and over, or do it just once and spend the rest of the time adding
flourishes and detail.
When participants were later tested on how
many words they remembered, drawing helped them to remember twice as
many as writing.
Follow-up studies compared drawing to other
approaches such as writing down attributes of the object (e.g. its color,
shape, size, varieties), focusing on a mental image of the object, and looking
at a picture of it.
Drawing came out on top every time when
participants’ memories were tested.
Researchers believe drawing works best
because it combines various skills.
The researchers believe drawing works best
because it combines various skills. When we draw an object we have to consider
its physical properties, visualize it in our minds, and use our motor skills to
render it on paper. Combining these skills, say the researchers, gives us a
richer memory of each of the items we draw than if we simply copy down the word
or look at a picture of the object.
Drawing your notes isn’t anything new. In
fact, it has a name: sketchnotes. Designer Mike Rohde popularized
“sketchnotes” with his books The Sketchnote
Handbook and The Sketchnote Workbook. Rohde uses the term
sketchnotes to describe the way he draws shapes and pictures among his notes to
help him better take in the main ideas from conference talks, rather than
trying to note down every little point.
Rohde advocates using signs and shapes such
as boxes and arrows, different sized writing, and doodles to illustrate notes.
You don’t need to be an amazing artist to use sketchnotes, he says. You only
need to practice using simple shapes and images to illustrate your points.
While many of us are lucky to have left our
lecture-listening days behind, opportunities for taking notes abound in almost
any job. Whether it’s a quick note to remember something later or detailed
notes on a book or research topic, there are plenty of opportunities for
improving your note-taking approach.
And you can even combine these
strategies. Graphic designer
Serena uses a Bullet Journal to organize her
handwritten notes and tasks, but also added drawings to her notebook:
. . . Flipping through my bullet journal, I
noticed that the daily logs with no drawings did give me all the information
about what I did, but those days with drawings were totally impressed in my
mind. For this reason, last month I decided to combine my daily logs with real
comic pages, in order to track what I do, what happens, and how I feel every
day.
Whether you combine drawing and handwriting
your notes with a Bullet Journal or similar symbol categorization system, or
simply choose one technique to try today, remember one thing: Throw out your
highlighters and stop wasting your time transcribing notes on your laptop.
This article originally appeared on RescueTime.
BY BELLE BETH COOPER
https://www.fastcompany.com/3069147/work-smart/how-to-finally-stop-taking-useless-notes-at-work?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-newsletter&position=6&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=03232017
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