Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking for Learning and Creative Projects (Part 3)
Two weeks ago, in Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking (Part 1), we looked at the wide variety of situations in which you might take notes, and took a side journey into the relative merits of handwritten vs. digital notes.
Last week, in Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking in Lectures & Presentations (Part 2), we explored solutions for taking notes when someone is imparting information to you verbally: in class, watching a webinar, attending a conference, and in collaborative meetings. Some variation on these methods work for casual note-taking situations, like when you’re learning about a diagnosis or treatment, you’re hearing about a new program at a PTA meeting, or even when you’re fielding information on a phone call.)
Whether you want to capture information for a later test, to improve your professional (or passion project) success, or help your team hit its action items, taking notes ensures that information can be captured, processed, learned, and acted upon.
Using my colleague Linda Samuels’ rubric, we looked at how to “listen, capture, and engage” with information using text-based note-taking (e.g., the sentence method, outlining, and the Cornell Note-Taking Method) and visual note-taking (e.g., mind mapping and sketchnoting).
We also harkened back to the idea that not all note-taking depends on information coming to you verbally. When you’re studying printed material as part of coursework, doing academic research (like a term paper on Alexander Hamilton) or writing a non-fiction book (like the history of sandwiches), you will need to take notes on what other people have written to achieve your goals.
You may also create notes from scratch, not based on someone else’s concepts (presented verbally or in writing), but invent something totally new with the help of the elves in your brain. You might write the score for a Broadway musical, engineer the schematics for a cool invention you aim to patent, or draft a novel about vampires from Jupiter or grandmother protesting injustice, or vampire grandmothers…
With modifications, you can take notes using the methods we discussed last week, but there are also note-taking methods that help you create and organize notes on non-verbal content.
ANNOTATION
Picture yourself studying for an exam or preparing to give a speech to your colleagues. However much material you already know, there’s going to be a larger chunk of the unknown printed in books, journal articles, and online.
The advantage of taking notes on what you’re reading is that you can take it at whatever speed you need to make sense of the information and organize it, combined with your own thoughts, without having all the inbound knowledge outpace you. The main disadvantage is that, unlike when a speaker accents what’s important (with voice, body language, or saying, “Hey, you numbskulls, this is going to be on the tests!”), text may not give you a clue as to what is vital.
Sure, textbooks may have concepts in bold or italics, but novels will not; if you’re reading the Federalist Papers, there’s no formatting to clue you in on what Alexander Hamilton (yes, him again!) thought was key. And if you’re researching to support your creative endeavors, only you know what will hit the spot.
Key Benefits of Annotating
Annotating enhances comprehension by allowing you to actively engage with the text, identify key points (either what the writer thinks is key or what is key for your purposes), ask yourself questions (so you can find answers in the text or in other resources), and record your own thoughts.
Annotation can lead to a deeper understanding of the printed word, making it easier to recall information later and prepare for discussions, writing assignments, or drafts. Annotating your notes reaps the following benefits:
- Improved comprehension — By highlighting important information and adding notes, you’re forced to actively process the text, leading to better understanding and retention.
- Critical thinking — Annotating pushes you to question the author’s arguments, identify biases, and form your own interpretations. In fact, as described in the New York Times article, How Students and Teachers Benefit From Students Annotating Their Own Writing, annotating improves metacognition, or thinking about how you think about something.
- Active engagement —The very act of writing notes as you read encourages focused attention and deeper engagement with the material. You’re less likely to let your eyes glaze over if you’re annotating the material.
- Organization of ideas — Annotations can help you identify the main points, structure of the text, and see how different concepts relate to one another. Sometimes it happens as you are annotating; other times, the act of annotating creates the magic that helps you see how things are connected later. If you’ve ever seen the TV show The Good Doctor, this is the way we see Dr. Shaun Murphy arriving at life-saving connections.
- Customization — You can add your own thoughts, reactions, and connections to the text, making the reading experience more meaningful. Whether you’re studying for a test or bringing concepts together to write a book, you can add your own metaphors or connections (and references to pop culture!) to make it resonate.
- Preparation for writing — Annotations are first drafts. They’re the key to making someone else’s first line of research into a foundation for your own work, whether you’re writing essays for Medium, research papers for a class, or a work project where you need to analyze and synthesize information from varied sources.
Analog Methods of Annotating
Marginalia
If you’ve ever scribbled notes, comments, or questions in the margins of a book, you’ve been annotating. You’ve done the active reading and critical thinking referenced above, and created a personal dialogue with the author of which only you are aware. (That’s OK, some authors are cranky and don’t welcome questions.)
Marginalia are great for when you want a quick reference for future review of the material. Last week, I was in a book club Zoom for the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals’ Authorship and Publishing Special Interest Group (no surprise, we call it the NAPO A&P SIG), discussing On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction by William Zinsser.
Our leader, my colleague Deborah Kawashima, had extensive marginalia, and used those notes to lead the discussion — and to find related material when members brought up points.
I can’t bring myself to write in books — my first job was working in a library, and books are so sacrosanct to me, I can’t bear to even make a pencil notation. I use sticky tape flags combined with handwritten notebook pages for the short term (like a book discussion) and either handwritten or digital notes when working on a blog post or book project.
Transparent Sticky Notes
I wrote extensively about the benefits of see-through sticky notes in my blog post See Your Way Clear: Organize With Transparent Sticky Notes.
To summarize, they give you flexibility when taking notes on written material. You can add non-permanent markings (especially good with library books or borrowed materials), take extensive notes without cluttering the page with marginalia, and reposition them, either on the original text, or as applicable, on your drafts or mind-maps.
Traditional Handwritten or Typed Notes
If you’re taking notes on printed resources to research an article, book, or presentation, you might need room for your mental gymnastics. Taking your notes in a bound notebook, on a sheaf of loose paper, or in a digital document will give you the ample space you need.
You’ll also be able to organize your notes — with clear headings, bullet points, numbering or outlining systems, and any kind of doodles (even marginalia on your notes) you like. The physical act of taking the notes will increase retention.
And yes, in case you’re about to remind me that I talked about how typing/digitizing lecture notes tends to reduce comprehension and memory because you tend to transcribe rather than process, I’m not flip-flopping. When you type what you hear, you don’t process it. But when you type what you read, you translate and process anything that’s not a pure quote.
Additional Analog Annotation Methods
You can also annotate without writing actual sentences, employing:
- Before beginning to read, write down what you know about the subject on a blank piece of paper.
- After you read, add new the information you’ve gained with a different color pen or marker.
- Before you read the next time, review the sheet. (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
Parish recommends storing finished sheets for periodic review and rewriting for clarity.
Digital Methods of Annotating
When taking notes on analog content, analog note-taking may be the best approach. When the material you’re studying, researching, or investigating is already in digital form, it’s often easier to annotate digitally. Some of the more popular digital annotating tools are:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader is best for annotating PDFs. It features highlighting, comments, on-screen sticky notes, drawing tools, and text markup.
- Notability is best for handwritten and mixed-media notes. It can handle handwriting, text, audio recordings, sketching, and PDF annotation. If you use an iPad and want to blend digital and handwritten annotation, Notability is ideal.
- Hypothesis works best for annotating web articles, blogs, and research. It’s a web-based tool for highlighting, adding comments, and collaborative notes on PDFs and online materials. It’s for students, researchers, writers, and teams.
Analog or digital, as with note-taking methods for verbally-presented material, annotating written material is just the beginning. Whether you “listen, capture, and engage” or “read, capture, and engage,” you still have to engage, and that means keeping your notes organized and connected to one another and the central purpose of your work. For more on annotation:
Annotating Texts (The Learning Center at the University of North Carolina)
The Art of Annotation: Teaching Readers To Process Texts (Cult of Pegagogy)
More Than Highlighting: Creative Annotations (Edutopia)
Why you should annotate your books (Johns Hopkins Newsletter)
Zettelkasten
Do you know Zettelkasten, also called the slip-box method? It was developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, to reduce researcher overwhelm and create a network of interconnected ideas, rather than one simple, static archive of information in separate silos.
David B. Clear, Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive, in: The Writing Cooperative, 31 December 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
How Zettelkasten Works
Zettlekasten was designed to be analog, using garden-variety index cards. (Obligatory link to The Humble Index Card: Organize Your Life, Then Organize Your Cards.) But with modern computing, you can link digital notes notes to one another easily, as with the internal links in Evernote. Here are the basic steps:
- Capture notes, each with practically microscopic bits of information — A note should have only one fact, concept, or idea. Brevity is the soul of Zettelkasten; so, no long, convoluted, Paper Doll-style paragraphs. Let’s say you’re writing a book: in the analog version, you’d have one quote to prove your point. At first, that quote is isolated.
- Link your notes together — Each subsequent note you take gets connected to related, already-existing notes, forming a network of ideas, a Charlotte’s Web of notions.
- Use unique identifiers — In an analog system, this means you’ll use a system of numbering or indexing the notes. In a digital system, your tools (like Evernote or Obsidian) will offer backlinks, the digital equivalents of the red yarn connecting the bad guys in a mystery movie’s murder board.
- Create “fleeting” (temporary), “literature,” and permanent notes —
- Fleeing notes let you quickly capture raw thoughts that come to you on your own, scratchpad-style. Think of them as shower thoughts.
- Literature notes are one step up; they serve to summarize key ideas from whatever resources you’ve used: articles, journals, books, lectures, etc., but in your own words. (So, don’t copy & paste, but also, don’t use AI.)
- Permanent notes are the refined, interconnected insights that build on the ideas you’ve collected and/or created.
- You may also create “meta” reference notes, which help you think about how your Zettelkasten comes together.
Develop a personal knowledge system (PKS) — Over time, your Zettlekasten becomes an idea-generating machine. It represent what you know, and what you might want to share. It could be everything your freshman needs to write a term paper for Social Studies or the amazing non-fiction self-help book that earns you a place at the top of the best-seller lists — or a series of brilliant stand-up routines George Carlin developed, as explained in this video.
How to understand Zettelkasten
Think of Zettlekasten like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Each note you take is an aspiring Hollywood star, just needing to be linked to someone bigger. Let’s say I’m writing a chapter on productivity.
- One lone note about time management is like an indie actor, good but totally isolated and unlikely to reach stardom.
- If I add a note about prioritization techniques, like a link to my well-established character actor Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity with the bit about the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, it’s in a movie with my time management note — one degree of separation.
- But let’s say I have a third note about Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands to fit the time available to complete it.”), link it to both the general time management note and the Eisenhower Decision Matrix note, and suddenly they’re all in a Marvel summer blockbuster about productivity!
(Hey, it could happen!)
The point is that a good Zettelkasten is not merely a random collection of notes, but an ever-growing network of interconnected concepts; developing it over time sharpens your thinking and makes your knowledge base not only more expansive, but more powerful.
Zettelkasten is perfect for researchers, authors, deep thinkers, and anyone developing a huge body of networked knowledge. If you’re writing your thesis, a series of books, or building lifelong learning, Zettlekasten is your man (well, system) for less overwhelm, more creativity and retention, better organization, and increased productivity (if handled deftly),
What are the drawbacks of Zettlekasten? It’s freaking complicated if you’re using an extensive numbering/indexing system connecting all the moving parts.
Some of the best tools to develop your own Zettlekasten include:
- Index cards of uniform size (so, go 3 1/2 x 5 or 4×6, but not both)
- Obsidian (for backlinking and networked thought)
- Roam Research (outline-style, with powerful linking capabilities)
- Logseq (a privacy-focused, open-source alternative to Roam)
For more on how Zettelkasten might fit into your note-taking (and organizing) style, read:
The Zettelkasten Method: A Beginner’s Guide (Goodnotes)
Try the Zettelkasten method to manage information overload (Atlassian)
Getting Started: The Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method (Zettelkasten)
Ahrens’ Smart Notes
Sometimes, you need to build an easier mousetrap. Sönke Ahrens, a German author, took Luhmann’s Zettelkasten ideas and modernized them for his now-classic, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking.
Ahrens looked at Zettelkasten and said “Jeez, Louise, that’s a lot of complexity with numbering and indexing!” (Well, he said it in German.)
So, the Ahrens’ Smart Notes Method is a simplified method designed for knowledge workers (particularly academics, researchers, and writers) who want to create a structured knowledge workflow without going hardcore into the Zettelkasten approach.
Ahrens’ system focuses less on numbering or indexing of notes and places a much heavier emphasis on summarizing concepts (wherever possible) in your own words. It encourages you to write as you go, rather than taking the fleeting notes and the literature notes and then going back to write your permanent notes.
Ahrens advises creating notes with your own interpretations at an earlier stage so your notes are really first drafts. Less structure, more trusting your gut earlier on.
The Feynman Technique
Physicist Richard Feynman’s system is a learning method, not about note-taking, per se, but baked into his process for helping people understand complex topics is a way to take notes that spur the learning process.
- Write down the concept you’re trying to learn about.
- Explain it in simple terms — On the internet, you’ll often see someone say ELI5 — text-speak for “Explain it to me like I’m five-years-old.” How would you explain what you’re trying to learn to a kindergartener, or at least someone who is an absolute non-expert?
- Identify areas of confusion or gaps in your knowledge — What are you struggling to simplify? If you can’t explain it, then you don’t really know it yet.
- Review and refine your notes — Keep rewriting your notes until your explanation is crystal clear. Picture yourself writing the answer as an exam question, or presenting it on a webinar.
Feynman’s approach is less about note-taking for capturing information than for processing it until you understand it. It’s ideal for students, journalists, speakers, authors, and anyone who needs or wants to both acquire knowledge and put it to use, ostensibly to eventually communicate it to others — even if that communication is solely to pass a test on the material — or use it in their own lives. It can be an academic study aid, or a system for pursuing knowledge on a more lofty level.
Using the Feynman system encourages more active engagement with the content instead of passively copying key phrases out of a book or re-reading lecture notes. It also prompts you to seek clarity, cutting away the excess so your notes are focused and uncluttered. As a professional organizer, Paper Doll approves!
Some good tools for taking Feynman-based notes would be:
- Traditional notebooks (though it may kill trees)
- GoodNotes — especially if you’ll be using an iPad or tablet)
- Evernote — use a combination of handwriting and sketching for clarifying explanations; if you spent your time in the Microsoft environment, OneNote is a similar option.
- Notion (for refining the explanations over time)
- Flashcard apps to help reinforce key ideas over time and find them again. Examples include Anki (free, open-source), Quizlet, and Kards.ai.
DIGITAL NOTE-TAKING PLATFORMS
Beyond options for general academic purposes (and those mentioned in these three posts), there are too many specialized digital note-taking platforms to mention even a representative number.
For casual, situational note-taking on your phone or organizing notes for travel, Apple Notes, Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep suffice.
Creative writers and journalists alike benefit from Scrivener to keep their research close to their writing; novelists might like Campfire for character notes, world-building, and plotting. Know someone composing musical notes? Try 7 Best Music Writing Software Programs for DIY Musicians or Resources for Creating Your Own Sheet Music.
HYBRID NOTE-TAKING: A MARRIAGE PERFORMED BY A ROBOT
AI’s role in note-taking will continue to expand in ways we can’t imagine. Right now, we can feed our notes (whether handwritten or typed) into an AI to yield notes on our notes.
You could record a lecture, interview, or meeting and ask your favorite AI for a transcript so you can focus on just key concepts and then go back to flesh things out. After reviewing the transcript, you could ask the AI to write an outline or summary.
Last week, I uploaded the link for the podcast I did with Frank Buck and asked ChatGPT to outline and summarize our conversation. It was revelatory. I stored links, the actual video, and the outline in Evernote to link to other podcast appearances. If I uploaded the audio file, with the click of a button, Evernote could transcribe the entire conversation!
Did you know that your (paid) Zoom account’s Smart Assistant can not only transcribe any Zoom call, but can summarize the chat messages and identify action items? Whatever audio or video recordings you create in any setting, you can turn around and use a variety of AI platforms to transcribe, summarize the discussions, identify next steps, and draft an email to your boss explaining why you deserve a raise!
You can have an AI interrogate your own notes to help you find specific research material without having to hand-search with Command-F. Imagine you’re writing a book and have 1000 research notes in PDF form. Upload them to a tool like Google’s Notebook LM, and instead of having the AI find content from all over the web (and risk AI “hallucinations,” false content), you can have it just provide you with snippets of research specific to what you want to write about that day. Scarily, you can even have “conversations” with the AI about the notes you’ve taken!
Nota bene: the future (of note-taking) is going to get weird.
Paper Doll Post:
Wow, Julie! This is a lot of information. I take notes during conferences and webinars – usually on the handouts to link my notes back to a point of reference.
I notice you didn’t say anything about Remarkable. One of my clients uses this in meetings to write on the agenda for the meeting – sort of like taking notes on a handout – digitally. Any thoughts on this?
Thanks for reading!
So, I’d say for (last week’s material on) taking notes on information that comes verbally, that you focus on annotating the written supporting material. That’s a great hybrid approach, though I’m curious what you do for lectures and webinars where there is no supporting documentation. Yay for giving a perfect example of annotation!
Remarkable is interesting, but I consider it less of a method than a tool; the methods we’ve looked at over the series (like Cornell Note-Taking, sketchnoting, Zettelkasten, etc.) have been about the “what and how” of taking (and organizing) notes.
To me, you can probably use whatever note-taking method (Sentence Method, Outlining, Cornell) on a Remarkable, just as you can take notes on paper or a computer. I’d categorize Remarkable as similar to your method, using annotation to take notes ABOUT the verbally-delivered material but ON the written documentation.
That said, the Remarkable is very cool, and I wrote about it when it way back in 2021 during my 7-part series on notebooks, in Part 6 on Smart Notebooks. https://juliebestry.com/2021/06/28/noteworthy-notebooks-part-6-get-smart-notebooks/
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
You keep giving us so much great content and fabulous resources! Did I miss it? Which of these systems do you use? I know you are an Evernote expert. Is that your go-to method for storing and organizing notes?
I like that you pointed out the different types of notes we take and the reasons for taking them. All of these factors can influence the system we choose.
I will admit to using different systems for various situations. And you might be horrified to learn that I DO write in my books. I have a reasonably simple system. I use a yellow highlighter to capture essential ideas as I read. After finishing the book, I reread what I’ve noted. If something is significant or possibly requires action, I highlight the text and add a star in the margin. It’s basic but it works for me.
Sometimes, I’ll make a copy of a particular page and add it to my blog ideas file. I do that less frequently.
My brain does that naturally when connecting the dots from a concept here to a concept there. I’m always on the lookout for those types of connections. They aren’t necessarily captured anywhere, but I can call them out when needed.
I appreciate all the tools and resources you shared. It’s amazing what’s possible. And with AI, it’s getting even more incredible.
Thanks for asking, Linda, as I can see I wasn’t clear. For verbally-presented material, I tend to use the Cornell Note-Taking Method. For taking notes on written material, I combine the sticky notes with traditional handwritten notes for short-term usage (like writing a blog) and with digitized notes for creative purposes (with additional symbols and markings), but a sort of Ahrens’ Smart Notes for learning material for testing.
And as long as you don’t write in MY books, I’m not horrified. 😉
Thank you for keeping pace with this three-part series and sharing your thoughts!
Julie, so much to process here – I need to take notes and go back later (tee-hee).
I too hate to write in books and love to use the post it flags.
I use the index card system when planning large projects with clients. As we brainstorm, each small task is put on a card. Then the cards can be grouped, prioritized, and put into a logical order.
Sometimes when I am writing a blog and I feel like I might be rambling, I use the outline format of word on my notes to see if I am staying on topic.
LOL, the entire time I was writing this series, I was realizing how many notes I had to take on all my different sources, and ALMOST considered mind-mapping to get it straight. It came to about 10,000 words altogether, and I barely touched on the AI aspects, but if people walk away remembering that “taking notes” is more than what we do in class and knowing about The Cornell Note-Taking Method, Zettelkasten, Smart Notes, and to keep watch for what technology can do, then I’ve earned my keep.
I love that you use the index card system to gather each idea on a card. You’ve been making a Zettelkasten all along!
I love the different ways you use notes to create. Whoohoo! Thanks for reading!
As always, a very thorough post. Wow. So many options.
I’ve always been a bit of an annotator. Back in my school days, everything was still analog, and I would underline, add numbers, works, circle key points, whatever would help the text be a bit more graphic, and therefore easier to remember and study from. My husband and daughter pretty much remember anything they read, but I do not.
I liked learning about the note taking tools for digital content. This is an area I know little about, since my serious note-taking days were pre-digital. I think it must be a challenge for kids who have only digital materials. My girls used to print a lot, because they preferred having their content on paper. (Yes, it was expensive and used a lot of ink.)
That Zettelkasten is a little intimidating to me. I do love index cards, but not sure I could pull that whole system off. I mean, if I were in school, I might give it a try.
I’m very interested in the idea of using AI. I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg on this one. I think the possibilities are exciting. Having a “study buddy” who can look at your notes and create questions, or rewrite notes in a way that makes it easier to study. AI does scare me, but it has so much potential. I think the entire way we live is going to change.
When I talk with young people about career choices, I suggest they study professions that won’t easily be replaced by AI. The trades seem to be the most bulletproof to me…
Thanks for sharing your experience vs. your husband and daughter’s. I think I could remember everything I read until I hit ninth grade. In New York State, that was Afro-Asian Cultures, and trying to learn the geography, history, and economies of all of those nations proved to me that just listening and reading were no longer enough. Note-taking became a real THING, all-caps.
I don’t think we’ll ever get away from paper; there’s something fundamental about holding the words in our hands and underlining something or making a small notation that digital annotation just can’t match. But yes, AI will change everything; hopefully, we will master it rather than vice versa. But I still stand staunchly with the idea that it’s OK to choose analog solutions, as long as you know what hybrid and all-digital solutions are available. We must know so that we can choose wisely.
As for the trades, yes, robots won’t be able to identify that our drains need to be snaked and then do it for us. But I also think the ineffable quality of humanity can’t be duplicated, so therapists, doctors, and yes, professional organizers, will still be needed!
Thank you for reading and giving such good feedback!