I’m a note taker. It’s a thing that I’ve been doing for years. Not strictly in meetings or the classroom, but I’ve always found I need to write down the thoughts that pass through my mind at any given moment. My concern is that if I don’t get it down, whatever the thought was will pass through my ears and then get lost in the ether forever. The thing that I have had to figure out is how to get everything down where I can find it again. Now, obviously for me, getting everything possible into my reMarkable will be my first step. That being said, once the thought is down somewhere, you need to be able to find it again later.

Templates are key

Reinventing the wheel every single time you want to write something down is exhausting. I have done it. I have changed the format I used to make notes, I have changed where I would keep my notes, and I have changed what notes need to be saved where. That feels like a lot to unpack, so maybe another post later.

That being said, no matter how you take notes, you should be consistent in how you do it. Funnily enough, it doesn’t matter if you keep your notes digitally or in hard copy—it’s important that you stay consistent. If you have a template (or a standard method for taking your notes down), then you don’t have to spend the brain space figuring out how your notes are going to be done every time. One of the things that I do on a regular basis is set up a notebook in my reMarkable for every month. These monthly notebooks hold all the meeting notes, key achievements, and whatever randomness rattles around my brain through any given month. When a new month comes around, I make a new notebook. I can do this because I do this digitally, so it doesn’t take a lot of space. What you need to consider is how you want to keep your notes so that you can come back to them later.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

When I first started this idea about the monthly note, I had to REALLY dig into the idea. It was important to me to be able to have everything in one spot. Part of the issue is that I was transitioning from hard copy (yes there was a time where I carried around paper notebooks) to a digital system. The other part for me was figuring out a centralized way where I would be able to keep my notes so that I could reference them later on. I felt this was important because my main pain point was not being able to find previous notes and worrying way too much that I was repeating myself all the time. Now however, you can set yourself up so that you can figure out how you want your notes to be, and then repeat that process over and over and over again. If you set yourself up with a system and a template, you won’t spend intellectual time and effort setting your notes up.

Always start with an idea

I like starting with an idea of what I’m going to write in my notes. That being said, I have looked over my previous notes and had no idea what I was scribbling down, but I’m fairly sure it was important at the time. For some, taking notes can be completely random, and for others there is a great deal of care in deciding which information goes into their notes. The thing about automation in this regard is that if you already have an idea of what is going to be in your notes, then you don’t need to think about what goes there. For those of us who grew up in the 1990’s and before, think about when you went to school and had a different binder for each course. You wouldn’t put your math notes in your English binder, would you? Same applies here.

As someone who is a battle-hardened note taker, I like to put some level of effort into what I do with my notes. I will admit that there are some people who like to go into way more detail than I do. I have a level of respect for people who use the bullet journaling system, but that is too complex for even me. I think that it’s important to be able to take notes in a way that both makes sense and makes it so that you don’t have to think too hard about either where you’re taking notes or what the notes are supposed to be for. I like writing my ideas down in a way that I know where to go when I want to come back to them. If you want to start making sure you have all your notes, I would start by figuring out a way to get everything down in one spot and take it from there. After a while, you will find more and more things to take notes about, and being able to put each of your notes in what you consider to be the right place will make everything easier in the long run.

How do you keep notes?

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