Note-Taking 101: Dealing with Fast Discussions

I could say that I was one of the best note tak­ers back in school (really! I was! hehehe). I made sure I had an unlined note­book (really the back part of pho­to­copied pages) which I used to take notes. The fact that it was un-lined was impor­tant: I wouldn’t have been able to make dia­grams and other draw­ings. And since I kept good notes (spe­cially when I loved the class and spe­cially when I was tak­ing up my MA), class­mates pho­to­copied my notes. So I know a thing or two about note taking.

Here’s some other tips we can use about tak­ing notes from LIFESPY. If you’re a stu­dent, this would be very help­ful. If you’re no longer a stu­dent, you can use these tips when you’re in a meet­ing and the dis­cus­sion is going really fast.

1. One thing you can do is bring a recorder to class and record the whole lec­ture so you can go back to it over and over when you study. All you’ll have to do it sit in class and lis­ten. Try to absorb every­thing you can.

If you don’t have the lux­ury of buy­ing a recorder, you can always do your best to lis­ten and get the most out of the lec­ture – and this means jot­ting down notes.

Remem­ber that fast lec­tures won’t let you do under­lin­ing, high­light­ing, eras­ing using a white­out, or elab­o­rate sketch­ing. Sim­ply lis­ten as closely as you can and write down the impor­tant stuff using short phrases and bul­let points. Do not even attempt writ­ing what the teacher says verbatim.

If you make a mis­take, sim­ply scratch them out. Yes, it could be messy and might be dif­fi­cult for those stu­dents who like to keep their note­books clean and neat. If you are one of these peo­ple, you can always take down notes on a pad and re-write them on your real class note­book later on.

If you have fur­ther ques­tions, you can sim­ply make an appoint­ment with your teacher for con­sul­ta­tion. They might seem not to care, but most would be happy to enter­tain your queries.

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What I do myself is use GTD con­cepts when I take notes. I open a .txt file every time we start a meet­ing and I’m asked to take notes. I then divide the .txt file into three sec­tions with these head­ings: INBOX, NOTES, and TO DO’s.

I put all new discussions/notes into the INBOX. I don’t num­ber these. I just make a car­riage return (that’s ENTER for the younger folk out there) for new stuff com­ing in so it’s in dif­fer­ent lines. This is the repos­i­tory of impor­tant points talked about dur­ing the meet­ing. I just put it here for the mean­time even if I do not under­stand it know­ing that I will process it later on.

The NOTES sec­tion carry all “processed” items. Pro­cess­ing can hap­pen DURING the meet­ing (dur­ing lulls in the dis­cus­sion for exam­ple), but I usu­ally do this AFTER the meet­ing when I review the INBOX. I put these in order (in num­bers or let­ters for exam­ple) as this is what I send out as Min­utes of the Meet­ing later on.

I then process the notes and turn these into ACTIONABLE items and fill out the TO DO sec­tion with it. I make sure I include the per­son assigned (if this has been assigned) as well as the tar­get due dates for these.

This is one way to take notes. Share your own tips at the com­ment sec­tion below.