Best Results Organizing

Notetaking isn’t just about capturing information, but about beating the clock. People can speak at about three words per second, but can handwrite (without shorthand) only 0.3 of a word per second. There’s no way to get it all down with analog notetaking. However, that might be OK, because not everything that gets spoken is worth committing to paper, and as we discussed in the last post on my NAPO214 conference experiment in going paperless, the less you’re able to write down verbatim, the more likely you are to recall and understand what you’ve written.

WHY AND HOW DO YOU TAKE NOTES?

In an academic setting, notes let you record information so that you can learn, reiterate it for an exam, or use it in practical ways. In a work setting, or if you’re on a committee or a board, notetaking is less about learning and more about preserving — who said what, what obligations are to be met by whom, what ideas were brainstormed, etc. And sometimes, we need to take notes to keep ourselves focused so that we don’t lose something in translation — or to emotion — like when a physician is imparting important, or maybe even scary, information or instructions.

To some people, taking notes just means writing down everything you can. So, it might come as a surprise that notetaking is a science, one that has multiple sub-disciplines, and one that can dramatically improve both recall and comprehension.

Some famous and popular notetaking methods include:

• Sentence Method, where each new thought is a separate line, breaking concepts into simple statements
• Mapping, including concept mapping and mind mapping, where individual ideas are illustrated with lines, circles and pictures to indicate their hierarchical or other relationships to one another. It also includes sketching and drawing methods like Sketchnotes, developed by Mike Rhode and illustrated, below, by Los Angeles-based professional organizer Deron Bos.

#sketchnotes from @JoeContrera‘s opening keynote at #NAPO2014 pic.twitter.com/dRNN4wVFhz

— Deron Bos (@bosorganization) May 29, 2014

• Charting, which makes use of tables and graphs, is great for noting facts, like dates, processes and events
• Outlining (with Roman numerals at the highest level, then capital letters, numbers and lowercase letters, all nested and indented) which is more linear than the other methods, but requires having a sense of where the information is going from the very start
• Guided notes, where the presenter provides a written map of the speech or lecture, but with words, phrases or sentences left blank for the note-taker to fill in. This evokes memories of third grade, but is popular on conferences handouts, as well.

One of the most enduring and popular notetaking methods is the Cornell Note Taking System, developed at (my alma mater) Cornell University about sixty years ago by Professor Walter Pauk. He eventually made the method famous in his classic book How To Study in College, to the point that I (and probably many of you) learned the system in high school science classes.

CORNELL NOTES

Cornell Notes is a note-taking as well as a note-organizing method, with the goals of capturing, condensing and enabling review of material.

Each sheet of paper is divided into three sections:

• Notes: A large, lined section running about 3/4 of the width of the page, from the right margin towards the left, for the purpose of recording actual notes, contemporaneous with the lecture or meeting. (It’s a good idea to leave a few blank lines between main ideas for filling in missed details later.) The goal is to capture the main ideas and details presented, with longer/larger concepts paraphrased in the note-taker’s own words. Whenever possible, wordiness is replaced with symbols and abbreviations.
• Cue: A narrow, unlined column running on the left side of the page is used for listing key words or concepts and for developing questions for self-quizzing or further investigation. This should be done as soon as possible after the end of the class or meeting.
• Summary: A broad, lined or unlined section, spanning the width of the page, is for summarizing key concepts, and should be used within 24 hours of taking notes to heighten recall.

Once you’ve learned Cornell Notes, notetaking becomes more systematic and robust. The problem is that it has been fairly difficult to find notebooks that have the sections pre-divided for the user.

At Cornell University, and at other schools that promoted use of the system, notebooks with this layout used to be pretty easy to find (back when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth), but are far less available these days. Lifehacker had an extensive post on how to create a Cornell Notes notebook of your own, and there are a variety of sites with templates for Cornell Notes, but that’s a lot of effort. So, I was thrilled to see a new product at the NAPO Expo in Phoenix!

FOCUSNOTES by TOPS™

Pendaflex, newly owned by TOPS, has developed FocusNotes™, a format of notebooks they describe as “Comparable to the Cornell Note Taking System.” Without stepping on any intellectual property toes, they’ve preserved the essentials of the system. Each page is topped with a section for the date and the class or meeting’s purpose, followed by sections for notes, cueing and summarizing.

FocusNotes come in six formats:

• FocusNotes Notebook — This side spiral-bound notebook has 100 sheets of 11″ x 9″ 20 lb. paper.

• FocusNotes Steno Pad — Wirebound at the top, this 6″ x 9″ pad of 80 sheets of 16 lb. paper has a sturdy back cover and is suitable for taking work notes on-location or classroom notes in a lab or otherwise on-the-go.
• FocusNotes LegalPad — Bound at the top, each 50-sheet pad of 16 lb. 8 1/2″ x 11 3/4″ paper is perfect for left-handed note-takers. A sturdy back cover works well when you have to take notes on-the-go (or on your lap).

• FocusNotes Jr. Size Legal Pad — This 5″ x 8″ notebook has 50 sheets and a sturdy back cover, like the full-size version, and is also made of 16 lb. paper.
• FocusNotes Composition Book — This 80-page update on the classic gives you the feel of a traditional composition notebook with a Cornell Notes-ready format and 80 sheets of 9 3/4″ x 7 1/2″ paper.
• FocusNotes Filler Paper — For those who prefer to keep their notes in binders, this loose-leaf, 3-hole-punched, 8 1/2″ x 11″ stack comes 100 sheets to a pack of 20 lb. paper.

Prices range from about $3-$9 per notebook/filler set, and FocusNotes can be found at Amazon and office supply stores.

This (silent) video illustrates FocusNotes in action:

For more on the Cornell Notes method, consider reviewing:

• The Cornell Learning Strategies Center’s “cheat sheet” on Cornell Notes
• Video on the 5 Rs (Record, Reduce, Recite, Reflect, and Review) for academic use of the system
• Writer’s Bloc‘s post on How To Use the Cornell Note Taking System Effectively for Business or Client Meetings (Note: Writer’s Bloc formats the page atypically, flipping the left and right sections, which may be helpful for left-handed note-takers.

NOTETAKING SYMBOLS

To speedily take handwritten notes, it helps to have some shortcuts in mind. For Paper Doll, it’s a hodge-podge of triangles (the Greek letter Delta (Δ)  means “change”), asterisks (for “vital follow-up!”) and arrows (–> to me, means “leads to” or “causes”).

A blog called The Cramped “is a site dedicated to the pleasures of writing with analog tools.” Their recent piece on paper-based markup language might be a good place to start if you want to develop your own shorthand for using Cornell Notes or any other handwritten system.

So, how do you take notes?