Paper Doll

Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking for Learning and Creative Projects (Part 3)

Posted on: February 17th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

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.

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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.  

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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:

  • Highlighting and underlining — Mark key phrases or sentences, and color-code highlighting to match themes and concepts. However, if you overuse it, the highlighting or ink will bleed through to the reverse side. Use sparingly.
  • Symbols, abbreviations, shorthand — Develop your own system to speed up the annotation process; use the same characters to mean the same things across all of your note-taking.
Visual Annotation Methods

As with the mind mapping and sketchnoting methods we discussed last week, there’s a related method for note-taking when you’re trying to gather and synthesize written knowledge. 

The Blank Sheet Method is described in detail on Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street Blog, so I encourage you to read his post, From Passive Reading to Active Learning: The Blank Sheet Method. I can’t reproduce Parish’s proprietary illustration, but the basics are:

  • 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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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.

  1. Write down the concept you’re trying to learn about. 
  2. 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?
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Posted in Notes and Notebooks, Paper Organizing, Podcasts, Productivity, Students, Task Management, Time Management | 8 Comments »

Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking in Lectures & Presentations (Part 2)

Posted on: February 10th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

In last week’s post, Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking (Part 1), we looked at the variety of situations in which we might take notes. Of course, it’s instinctual to think of classroom notes or notes in meetings first, but as we reviewed, we take notes all the time in other ways.

To review, we take notes on other inbound information:

  • non-academic learning and skill acquisition
  • at conferences, in webinars, and at professional lectures
  • in collaborative meetings
  • situationally, such as when we’re learning about a diagnosis or a new project, or we’re fielding information captured on a phone call
  • in legal and financial situations, such as when conversing with professionals providing guidance
  • when we’re gathering quickly-changing information when dealing with a crisis situation

In the comments for that post, my colleague Linda Samuels described the process as “Listen, capture, and engage” and that’s exactly the case when someone (a lecturer, a presenter, a group of people in a meeting) are speaking.

However, we’re not always listening and porting someone else’s spoken thoughts into our notes.

Quite often, the categories of note-taking involve figuring out for ourselves what is important and worth capturing, such as when we do research or plan travel. And sometimes, the notes we take are completely of our own devising, such as when we are writing fiction or music, designing, inventing, or otherwise capturing our own thoughts.

So, Linda is right, note-taking can be about listening (to others or ourselves) or reading, capturing, and engaging with the material. Ultimately, it’s about what they said, what they wrote. and what we thought (and continue to think).

Our notes are extensions of our brains, and the more organized they can be, the better able we will be to use that information, whether it’s to get better grades, further our careers, choose the best course of action, or create something masterful.

Today, we’re going to explore some of the best methods for organizing our note-taking.

NOTE-TAKING METHODS WHEN SOMEONE IS SPEAKING

We’re going to start with the category we think of most often when conceptualizing taking notes — when someone else is imparting information verbally.

In these situations, you generally have little-to-no sense of what information is coming next (unless the speaker has provided an outline or detailed agenda) and — unless you’re watching a recorded presentation — you have no control over the speed at which the information is coming at you. Common situations include:

  • In a class lecture (whether in-person or virtually)
  • When taking a webinar (whether live or recorded)
  • At a conference (whether in crowded plenary sessions, like keynotes, or smaller breakout sessions)
  • In a brainstorming session or meeting at work

As we look at methods of note-taking in these situations, we’ll begin with text-based notes, and then look beyond at notes that employ graphics and symbols.

TEXT-BASED NOTE-TAKING METHODS

Sentence Method

Have you ever been in a course or at a conference where you’ve been given no sense of the outline of material to come? It’s hard to take notes without context.

If the information is coming out firehouse-style, with a rapid-fire, fast-and-furious assault of information (and often abbreviations or unfamiliar buzzwords), the best thing you can do is to accept that you will not get the necessary context, and treat each thing you hear as existing on its own little island.

Literally, each new thought or fact that you hear gets its own sentence/line in your notes. If you can transcribe it into your own words, do so; if you haven’t a clue, start the line with some quotation marks, write as much as you can of what you hear in a sentence, close the quotation marks, and put an asterisk (or whatever symbol you prefer) in the left margin, to remind you to come back for it later.

If you write each sentence sequentially, with a break between lines (skipping a line on paper, or double- or even triple-spacing on your screen), you’ll at least capture the essentials and give yourself space to revise and make it make sense once you do get context. That context may come either from continued lecturing, from reading a textbook or associated PDFs, going to office hours with your professor or a one-on-one meeting with your supervisor, or speaking with your fellow students or colleagues

The disadvantage of the sentence method, which is not very different from most people’s default “try to get everything down” method is that until you go back to review and flesh out your notes (and perhaps add context from your readings or later discussions), the notes themselves don’t really indicate which points are major vs. trivial.

The Sentence Method is equally applicable to analog or digital note-taking. Just remember, as we discussed last week, that digital note-taking temps you to transcribe rather than to cognitively process, making it less likely that you’ll learn as you take notes.

Outlining Method

Outlining is one step up from the sentence method in terms of organization. You know what a formal outline looks like:

I. Overarching categories start at the left.

A. Sub-categories of the overarching category are indented further right, and are indicated with a capital letter.

      1. Examples or subcategories are numbered and indented even more.
      2. More examples are further numbered.

a. Further sub-breakdowns get lowercase letters

b. And if you need to indent further, you can start using bullet points.

B. And here’s your fabulous second sub-category under the first point

II. Your second major overarching category goes here, and the process continues.

Formal outlining tends to work well if the speaker is organized, if you already have some familiarity with the topic, and especially if you’re provided guidance in advance. In a history course, for example, you’re likely to know that you’ll need to track political, economic, and social factors. In a science course, the material is usually presented from top-level down to the specifics.

A more informal outlining system will focus on putting the super-mostest-importantest stuff toward the left, indenting somewhat for sub-categories, and indenting more for examples or less important things. When you’re informally outlining, it takes some effort to get a sense of the speaker’s intent to create your sense own of hierarchy.

An outlining method works best when you have enough time to consider and make decisions about organizing the information as it is spoken. Of course, if you’re not entirely sure about the information coming at you (or the person lecturing isn’t particularly organized), neither method of outlining is likely to be much superior to the sentence method. 

Cornell Note-Taking System

When I arrived at Cornell University in August 1985, I had never heard of the Cornell Note-Taking Method. About a week into my freshman year, I sat in a biology lab where a teaching assistant taught us the basics, and (as I inhaled the scent of what I assumed was formaldehyde and anticipated having to be cruel to a poor, departed cousin of Kermit) I assumed that this note-taking method was specific to my school.

I had no idea that it had been devised 30+ years earlier by Cornell professor of developmental education, Walter Pauk, who made the method famous in How to Study in College. 

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The Cornell Note-Taking Method requires dividing each page into three sections. (N.B. — remember that abbreviation from last week? — some people refer to a fourth section, which is the top of the page, where you reference what the notes are about. You could call it the topic line or the subject line. However, it seems a bit too obvious to discuss in depth.)

First, the majority of the page is divided into two vertical columns or sections, with the left (Cue) column taking up about a third of the page and the right (Notes) column taking up about two-thirds.

Sticklers would say to divide it as 30% for Cue and 70% for Notes. In this regard, Paper Doll is not a stickler. If this were an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of notebook paper, the Cue column might be 2 1/2″ and the Notes column 6″.

The bottom of the page is not divided vertically, but spans the entire page horizontally. It’s used as a summary section. I’ve seen some articles require that the section should be 2 inches high, but again, I’m not a stickler. (I attended college before there were many pre-created styles of Cornell Notes notebooks. I just eyeballed everything. Nobody will put you in note-taking jail if your lines aren’t straight.)

How does it all work? 

  • The Notes Column — In this section, take notes by whatever method you can — sentence method, outlining method, your default note-taking style, etc. The key is to record the lecture or presentation as faithfully and meaningfully as possible here. Quoting the words Linda Samuels used at the start of this post, this is where you listen and capture.
  • The Cue Column — As you take notes, the cue column will largely remain empty, but as soon as possible after the lecture or the presentation, re-read your notes and declutter them. Reduce the material in the Notes column to their essence. What is it you absolutely need to know? This is where you engage!

In an academic setting, you might use the cues to “recite, review, and reflect” (in Pauk’s words) as you study. You can use the Cue section to write prompting questions to help you quiz yourself later. 

At a professional conference, these might be ideas you intend to put into practice, such as marketing methods or software platforms you intend to try. 

  • The Summary Section — This area gives you the chance to sum up the key information from that page in just a few sentences.
 

Cornell Note-Taking is best for academic notes, conference notes, or any time you’re focused on learning or key aspects of something presented by someone else, as it encourages intentional notet active recall. (You can also use it for taking notes on study material you read.)

Understand that it will be rare for the end of the page to sync up with the end a concept. That’s OK; use the Summary Section to summarize the concepts on that page. 

You might also wish to try the Cornell Note-Taking Method in collaborative meeting notes, and use the cue column for action items that are your responsibility.

To learn more about the Cornell Note-Taking Method, Cornell University offers a free public-facing course called Note-Taking Strategies.

Products to Help the Cornell Note-Taking Method

You can absolutely try the Cornell Note-Taking Method with a sheet of notebook or bank paper and a writing implement and just free-draw the dividing lines; a ruler or any available straight-edge will perfect your lines. But if you (or your favorite student) are more likely to commit to a method when  there are fun school or office supplies to use, you can add a variety of goodies to your note-taking arsenal. For example:

Cornell Notes Notebook — rustic cover, 8 1/2″ x 11″, lined, 120 sheets, $6.99

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Oxford Tops FocusNotes —8 1/2″ x 11″, 50 sheets, three-hole punched, $6.06

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Oxford FocusNotes — 6 ” 9″, 80 pages, top spiral bound steno version (good for lefties), $6.14

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Mochi Things Pieces of Moment Cornell Notebooks — 7 1/2″ x 10″ pages, unlined notes section, grid summary section, only 26 pages (!) but 8 gorgeous designer colors, $6.95

Horizontal-style iQ Organizer Tablet — 8 1/2″ x 6″, landscape, 80 sheets, $5.99

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Of course, if you prefer the digital approach, a number of digital platforms have Cornell templates built in:

VISUAL AND HYBRID NOTE-TAKING METHODS

Some people (like Paper Doll) think in words; in fact, I think in outlines, with Roman numerals, capital letters, Latin numbers, and lowercase letters, and in my head, I see how new, inbound information should fit in that mental model. (Y’know how they taught outlines in fourth grade? That’s what’s going on in my head.)

However, to my shock and utter confusion, not everyone in the world is exactly like Paper Doll. Not everyone thinks and understands best solely in terms of text-based notes. For the visually inclined, there are a note-taking methods that incorporate graphics that represent concepts and the connections between them.

Mind Mapping

Mind maps are literally maps that allow you to see how to get from one concept to another. The basis of mind-mapping is that, depending on the complexity of your understanding of the connections between concepts, you can use branching diagrams to draw the way ideas are connected.

And the better you understand a concept, the better you will remember it!

Mind mapping helps you to visually connect ideas regardless of how they are presented. The key is that you have to pay attention to the nuances of the way your lecturer or presenter delivers information so that you know whether whether something is a whale (a big, new idea) or a small fish swimming in the specifics with other little fishies. 

For academic purposes, reviewing your mind maps requires that you restructure each of your thought processes, ensuring you truly understand. You can even break down the sections of your mind map onto index cards to text yourself on small sub-sections, then piece them altogether like a jigsaw puzzle to see the big picture.

Nicoguaro, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mind mapping for knowledge acquisition is often best done free-hand, as classrooms, webinars, and conference settings don’t offer the time necessary to quickly click and format a device screen; however, you can take traditional text-based notes and then study by creating visual links as you understand the relationship between concepts.

In a group/work meeting, you might capture brainstormed notes on a white board. For whatever purpose you’re using mind-mapping, if you employ an analog method as you acquire the information, you can always adapt and augment your notes afterward in a digital format.

Popular mind-mapping software platforms are MindMeister, Coggle, Scapple, MindNode, and The Brain.

Even if you’re a visual thinker, mind mapping may be hard to use in an academic setting, when you need to capture a lot of complex details. However, it’s an exemplary tool for visual thinkers taking notes on their own research and personal creative projects.

Sketchnoting

Mind mapping requires words, maybe a few circles about the big concepts, and lines connecting the ideas.

But what if you are so creative and/or non-linear that you need actual pictures for your notes to have meaning? Sketchnoting may offer a better solution; it blends text with doodles and drawings, as well as customized symbols, to help make sense of material presented in a class or at a conference.

Designer and author Mike Rohde coined the term sketchnoting in 2006. His process uses words, pictures, and symbols, including:

  • standard text
  • emphasized text (though colors, all-caps, “bubbling” of letters, and anything that makes the text stand out)
  • shapes, either on their own or combined with bullet points
  • “containers” or larger shapes, like boxes, quote bubbles, thought bubbles, for showing larger concepts
  • “connectors” like solid or dotted lines, arrows, or squiggles to show connections between concepts
  • symbols and icons
  • drawings, usually done in quick comic-esque style to capture metaphors

Most of the videos on sketchnoting are long; however this little intro (designed as a teaser for a course) is just five minutes and provides a good overview.

 

Personally, the most creative I get is drawing a delta (a Greek letter that looks like a triangle) as the shortcut for the word “change,” and arrows up/down/right/left to mean increase, decrease, backward, forward.

Additionally, my drawing skills are so poor that when playing Pictionary with my family, it’s been noted that my cows, cars, and maps of the United States all look pretty similar. (Conversely, getting the word “motorcade,” my sister once drew the entire JFK assassination, complete with the grassy knoll and the book depository. I suspect only one person in a family gets artistic talent.)

For a visually creative person, sketchnoting can enliven the material and make it grippier to understand and remember. 

If you’d like to delve more deeply into using sketchnoting, Rodhe has his own YouTube channel, and there are there are numerous books on sketchnoting, starting Rohde’s own The Sketchbook Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Notetaking.

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Next time, we’ll continue this series and look at the importance of annotation for learning, as well as note-taking methods for situations that do not involve lectures or presentations, such as research and creation. This will include Zettelkasten, Ahrens Smart Notes, and the Feynman Technique, and we’ll match up the various note-taking situations with the best methods, both analog and digital.

We’ll wrap up this series with thoughts on how AI can help us take notes (or improve our notes), provided we take certain cautions.

Tell me, did you use any special note-taking methods when you were in school? And how do you take notes when you’re in a class, webinar, conference session, or meeting? Please share in the comments.

Posted in Notes and Notebooks, Paper Organizing, Productivity, Psychological, Reading, Students | 12 Comments »

Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking (Part 1)

Posted on: February 3rd, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

Have you ever seen a sign with the letters “N.B.” on it or a set of instructions where the highlighted part says N.B.?

N.B. is short for nota bene, the Latin for “note well,” or in our own vernacular, “Hey, take note!” and until about thirty years ago, it was common to see N.B. on documents, notices, and signs, warning that something was important.

The Maryland Gazette (March 19, 1801). “Wanted, A Wife (Advertisement, Extra)” Public Domain Link

We may not use the Latin abbreviation much anymore, but we sure do have a lot of things to which we need to pay attention, or pay heed, or take note! Today, we’re going to look at different areas of our lives in which we need to capture and organize information by taking notes. 

The inspiration for today’s post was friend-of-the-blog Dr. Frank Buck. Recently, I sat down again with Frank for his fabulous podcast Get Organized!, to talk about note-taking in all of its myriad forms. 

In the episode entitled, Your Note-taking Just Got Better (with Julie Bestry), Frank and I chatted about the evolution of note-taking from the structured forms we learn in school to the various ad hoc and formal notes we use in adulthood, and we explored the importance of adapting our note-taking strategies to our individual needs and contexts.

I espoused my personal preference for analog note-taking (on my beloved purple Roaring Springs Enviroshads legal pads) in client sessions, both for the tactile engagement as well as how it helps me ensure my clients feel that I am focusing on them.

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But because Frank and I both love tech solutions (and are both Evernote Certified Experts), we also looked at the ways we are able to integrate our notes digitally into searchable, accessible formats.

Our discussion delved into how to establish a consistent system, and we came to some agreement on the practical tips that ensure that notes are useful. But note just take my word for it. Frank included an amazing outline and list of resources in his show notes. (N.B.: scroll down).

You can listen to the episode on the episode page linked above, or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your yummy podcast goodness. And, if I managed to link this properly, you might even be able to listen from this embedded version.

Of course, if you prefer to see our smiling faces, can watch the episode on Frank’s YouTube page or even here, but be sure to click through to YouTube to leave Frank some nice comments and a thumbs-up/like.

 
 

TYPES OF NOTE-TAKING SITUATIONS

When you think of taking notes, what first comes to your mind? Is it sitting in a lecture hall scribbling notes to later study for a test? Perhaps you envision gathering information for a project? The truth is, the concept of “notes” cuts a wide swath through our lives, and our ability to take notes and keep that information organized may determine our success in a wide variety of endeavors. For example:

Academic Settings

We start taking notes in elementary school, with the teacher telling us what will be important to write down. (“This will be on the test!”) As we get older, in high school and college, we’re expected to suss out for ourselves which material is important enough to capture and how to separate the wheat from the chaff. (“Will this be on the test?”) Why? Because we can’t get it all down before the instructor moves on to something else!

Sidebar: analog vs. digital notetaking in academic settings

We aren’t robots or androids. (Though it might be cool if we were.) We lack the motor dexterity to hand-write everything as fast as the educator can speak, so it’s important to try to figure out what is essential.

While we can type faster than we can write, research have often found that for academic success, it’s not ideal. For children and adults, writing notes in long-hand can improve memory word recall; for kids, that means creating the foundational aspects of learning and literacy. For adults, handwriting notes has been proven to improve conceptual understanding of educational material.

Computer and Notebook photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

The research spells out the academic advantages of taking notes by hand as:

  • Improved memory retention — The act of physically writing notes engages more brain regions associated with memory formation, so students recall more vs. when they just type their notes. 
  • Forced summarization — When students write by hand, they must condense spoken words, narratives, asides, jokes, responses to students’ inquiries, etc. into key points. This process promotes “active learning” so the note-taker will better understand the material.
  • Reduced distractions — Paper is boring. It just sits there, and unless you doodle, there’s nothing but your notes to look at, so distractions are minimized. On a computer or tablet, audio and text notifications pop up, tempting the note-taker to divide attention between mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell and the a notification of the latest celebrity breakup.
  • Visual organization — “Aha!” you’re thinking! Here’s where Paper Doll must be wrong. Surely you can do more to organize notes visually on a computer, because you can format important things in bold, italicize unusual terms, use different color text, or even highlight entire sections in different colors.

And yeah, you can, but not until later, after class, when you’re studying, and might no longer remember which things needed accenting. Plus, the cognitive component of studying is different from the one at play when you’re taking notes.

But when you’re taking notes contemporaneous with the lecture, you can:

    • change from cursive to printing
    • add block letters
    • underline or circle key information
    • draw diagrams
    • put symbols in the margins (like an asterisk to say, “Hey, this will be on the test!” or a question mark to tell yourself, “I totally don’t get this. Go to office hours to ask the prof what this meant.”)
    • use different pens (or sparkly ones!) to color-code as you go
    • or use the geographic landscape of the page for different methods of learning the material. (That last part is key to the Cornell Note-Taking Method, which Frank and I discussed in the podcast, and which I’ll explain in greater detail in next week’s post.) 

All of these advantages convince me, but one element of this “feels” the most believable to me. In a classroom setting, when we hand-write, we process first, then translate what we hear into those few, condensed phrases; when we type, we’re more likely to try to transcribe (almost) everything we hear, bypassing our brains and letting our fingers do the walking. We become like court stenographer, gathering the details without relating to them. When we transcribe, we may as well be an AI platform. 

Of course, there are advantages for students to take academic notes on devices vs. writing in longhand.

      • Typing is faster; when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the influx of information, typing may give you some breathing room to absorb what you’ve taken down in those few extra seconds vs. the pen-on-paper peeps. 
      • You can organize digital notes with pertinent headings, color-coding, and after-the-fact added graphics, plus you can copy & paste notes you’ve taken from the readings. If a professor makes an aside or expands on an earlier topic because a fellow student has asked for clarification, you can cut & paste the later blurb into the earlier, related section.
      • Digital notes can be edited after the fact to make them make more sense. You can’t really edit notes in longhand; you can only re-write them.
      • Digital notes are searchable, allowing you to key in on particular concepts. 

If you’d like to geek out on this, avail yourself of these research papers and articles, arranged starting with the most recent:

Not everyone agrees on this, particularly in an academic setting. The politics of teaching (or not teaching) cursive writing, the neurobiology of how our brains process information when writing vs. typing, and the arguments of the relative merits of speed vs. comprehension make this a fighty topic in the world of education. Maybe I believe the research because I’m already inclined toward a slower, more analog approach to note-taking, or maybe it’s just (in Stephen Colbert’s words) the seeming truthiness of these researchers explanations. Students must find their own way.

As Frank and I discussed, however, it doesn’t have to be either/or.

In academic note-taking, as well as in all of the other note-taking situations described below, you have options.

A hybrid approach, one in which first-level notes can be taken in longhand, then digitized to be edited, organized, refined, and searched, is increasingly applicable, both for students and for most of these other situations. 

OK, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Academic settings don’t just include taking notes in the classroom. Diligent students also take notes on what they’re reading, whether by writing on notepads or typing in a document,  annotating books and documents by scribbling in the margins (or on transparent sticky notes, as I wrote about in See Your Way Clear: Organize With Transparent Sticky Notes), making flashcards, etc. We’ll look more at this aspect in the next post.

Non-Academic Learning and Skill-Building

When you’re not learning something for a grade, there’s less pressure on your note-taking skills; you may not have to learn as quickly, so you can focus on hitting the things that seem essential, as you can always go back to get help with the finer points. This category encompasses things like learning a new language, learning how to code, even gaining cooking skills.

(Il vegetariano compra l’insalata. In case you were wondering.)

As with academic settings, you may take notes on what you hear from a lecturer (whether in person, on a webinar, or even watching a YouTube video), but you also may make experiential notes: telling your future self that you should only whip the sugar and eggs for two and a half minutes, not the three called for in the recipe, or that you should inhale after the fourth measure of the song you’re learning for choir so you’ll have the lung capacity to make it to the bridge or the chorus.

Conferences and Large-Scale Professional Settings

I’ve attended many NAPO conferences, and the educational offerings are tremendous. But I have to admit, sometimes I psych myself out when trying to take notes.

There’s a voice in the back of my head shouting, “You paid SO MUCH for this conference, air fare, hotel, and cute outfits so your colleagues don’t think you only own that one cardigan you always seem to be wearing on Zoom, so be sure to get EVERYTHING down in these notes.” Even though there’s no exam, there can be self-imposed pressure to capture every nugget of information.

I’ve written in the past about my attempts to take conference notes on my iPad vs. my traditional notepad method. The first year, I’d only had an iPad for a few weeks, didn’t yet own a smart phone, and was so delighted (and distracted) by the availability of email and texting (both of which I’d only had through my iMac at home) that I struggled to focus.

The next year, I wrote about my more concerted digital efforts in NAPO2014: Taking Notes–The Paperless Experiment. I provided the results of my experiment, but ruled that the jury was still out. At that time, I felt the jury was still out, and up until 2020, when the conference was canceled due to the pandemic, I was still not happy with a fully digital note-taking approach. Tech has come a long way in the last five years, making a hybrid method much more appealing. 

Work Meetings

You know the expression about how, “This meeting could have been an email.” If it had been an email, you wouldn’t have had to take notes!

Because communication in meetings, even with agendas, can be ad hoc, there are fewer indicators of what is important to capture. Certainly, you want to write down any “next actions” assigned to you, but unless it’s your responsibility to take minutes in meetings, the best reason to take notes is to make sure you don’t get caught being distracted by things on your phone.

When I worked in TV, my otherwise stellar general manager would ask a department head to take notes during meetings when the executive assistant was on vacation. But he only ever asked women. (This was the 1990s.) It made me cranky, not only because it felt sexist that only half of us were ever asked to do it, but also because my handwriting was bad and I couldn’t engage meaningfully if I was playing stenographer.

The first time, I was only 25 and not yet confident enough to either say no or be maliciously compliant, so asked everyone to give me their speaking points and I’d type up a summary. The next time, I said, “No thank you. I’m sure it’s Larry’s turn.” Happily, Larry was much better at it, and after that, we passed a micro-cassette recorder around the table to record what each of us said, so nobody took notes.

Situational

These are “life” notes. They can range from serious, like the notes you might take if you or a loved one has just received a medical diagnosis and you want to write down the treatment options and next steps, to casual, like the notes you take when you make (or receive) a phone call and want to capture quick details like names, appointment times, or directions.

Research

Research notes encompass everything we take notes on where the information is not spoon-fed to us. Unlike in a lecture hall, webinar, or conference, this kind of information involves gathering data from multiple sources — books, periodicals, journals, interviews, and even scientific (or social science) experiments. 

Notes by Hand and Computer, Photo by Kaboompics.com

Such notes may be taken by journalists, authors of non-fiction, students writing academic papers, graduate students writing a doctoral or other thesis, etc.

Creative

Unlike taking notes on research, which tends to be outwardly focused on what is found elsewhere, whether created by others or observed by the note-taking individual, creative note-taking is more personal.

Guitarist making musical by Artem Podrez

When you take creative notes — for example, if you’re a novelist, an artist, a musician, a designer, etc. — you are capturing your own thoughts and innovations in the form inspirations, lyrics, sketches, etc. Creative notes may involve words, drawings, musical notes, or other note-capturing formats.

Travel

If you’re planning travel, you might take notes on the research you’ve done regarding options for hotels, flights (or trains or ships), and sights, in advance of your trip. However, you might also make contemporaneous notes about changes in your itinerary, jot thoughts down for later journaling of experiences, or capture must-remember details, like what platform to switch to when you changing subway trains.

Legal and Financial

These are life notes with added importance, similar to the more serious situational notes. These might be require taking notes in a meeting or conversation with your attorney or investment advisor, or could involve making notes on what you’ve read (similar to the different academic note concepts).

For example, I have clients who’ve taken precise notes in divorce mediation meetings, combined with notes on each iteration of the divorce agreement until everything was finalized; for some, this was about having a sense of control during an emotionally roiling time. 

If you’re negotiating a contract, figuring out how to invest for retirement or your child’s education,  trying to structure a business, or deal with the best possible tax implications, you may want to take notes to help you better understand the options or to make sure that later on, you can reflect on why you chose to make the decisions you did.

Emergency or Crisis Situations

When you’re calm and nothing is distracting you, taking notes can be a perfectly ordinary (or boring) task. But in a crisis situation, when your mind is spinning, keeping track of information and urgent next steps can be overwhelming.

Calming your mind to make sense of things can be difficult if you’re the victim of a crime (as I wrote about in Organize to Prevent (or Recover From) a Car Theft) or there’s a family crisis (such as during the floods in western North Carolina this fall, when my client was trying to capture snippets of phone information while his elderly mother was being airlifted to safety).

During a crisis, taking notes gives you the opportunity to focus on something a little more tangible and removes some element of emotion from the process.

During a crisis, taking notes gives you the opportunity to focus on something a little more tangible and removes some element of emotion from the process. Share on X

Back in 2017, Paper Mommy‘s heart surgery ran much longer than we were told it would, and when the doctor finally came to speak with me, he began explaining what had happened. I immediately started writing down what he said, but he discouraged me, saying I wouldn’t be able to get it. I stared him down, and our family friend encouraged him to keep talking.

When he was done, I said, “This is what I think I understand…” and proceeded in my own words to recap what had happened, what they were going to do next, and what the timeline was. This wasn’t just so that I could explain things later to my sister and my mom’s friends (or to prove the doctor wrong). Taking these notes was an essential part of making sense of what was going on in order to calm me down. 

I’m not a doctor; I didn’t “need” to know the science of it. But as a daughter (and as a person who struggles when things are vague or confusing), I nonetheless needed to take these notes. 

NOTE-TAKING: WHAT’S THE BEST METHOD FOR YOU?

When I initially told Frank I’d be delighted to be on his podcast again, I vaguely thought, “Oh, and then I can write a follow-up post with a few extra ideas. It’ll be a short post.” Well, long-time Paper Doll readers know how that usually turns out!

After recalling the handful of note-taking situations Frank and chatted about, I kept thinking of other, more narrow categories. Then, I’d figured I’d write a few paragraphs about the Cornell Note-Taking Method and a few other analog methods, and then give a nod to digital note-taking platforms.

But then I realized I’d completely skipped the idea of audio notes and AI!

The more I read of my own notes on note-taking (how meta of me!) from recent years, it became obvious that one post wasn’t going to be enough. So, if you’re trying to learn how to take better notes in webinars, or you have a high school or college student who is looking to improve how they capture and organize their notes, be sure to make a note (heh) to come back next week for the follow up. 

Going forward, we’ll examine:

  • analog note-taking methods you may not be familiar with (like the Cornell Note-Taking Method, Zettlekasten, the Ahrens’ Smart Notes Method, the Feynman Technique, mind-mapping, and more)
  • digital note-taking platforms including, but beyond the big names like Evernote, OneNote, and Notion, and including apps for organizing learning, remembering, and being productive
  • identifying which of these analog and digital methods might be initially better for the categories outlined earlier in this post
  • how to create a hybrid system, combining the advantages of analog and digital note-taking
  • the different capturing methods applicable for taking notes on things people are saying vs. concepts you’re reading/researching vs. ideas you’ve created on your own 

I can’t guarantee you’ll have fewer meetings that should have been emails, that your novel will sell better, or that your kid will remember what happened in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. But you will have a broader idea of the varieties of note-taking options you have, and a better sense of which might work best for you in different circumstances.

 

Posted in Paper Organizing, Podcasts, Productivity, Students, Task Management | 10 Comments »

Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time

Posted on: January 27th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

Pardon me, handsome stranger, would you happen to know the time?
I can’t find a trace of 1988 or ’89.
If you see the daredevil ghost of my youth go racing by (woah-yeah)
Will you flag him down and let him know I’ll be running a good ways behind?

A Tall Stand of Pines, ©1998 Jeff Holmes/The Floating Men (From the album The Song of the Wind in the Pines)

If you’ll indulge me, let’s start with the inspiration for this post. Last weekend, after five years of avoiding all large groups out of an abundance of COVID caution, I did something essential for my mental health. I saw my favorite band in concert two nights in a row.

I started seeing The Floating Men perform in 1993, and went to just about every gig near me until the last time they performed in Chattanooga, in 2010. I’d also seen them in Johnson City and Nashville, TN, and most memorably, for 30th birthday (with family and friends) in Atlanta. 

Their songs range from keening heartbreakers to joy-filled romps, all with complex lyrics and reflecting a louche, delightfully misspent life. I am an old, overly cautious soul, so I’ve lived a misspent youth vicariously through those songs. Seeing The Floating Men’s live made me unceasingly happy.

The Floating Men, Barrelhouse Ballroom, January 19, 2025

The bandmates’ “real” careers took them all over the country, so it had been a long time since they played together. But the fandom, The Floatilla, remains loyal. When the band scheduled one Nashville show in 2024, it sold out in moments; they added another night, and the same thing happened; and a third night. No tickets for me. But for this year, they scheduled one (and then two) shows in Chattanooga, and five years of caution gently stepped aside. Echoing Robert Frost, I can only say, “And that has made all the difference.”

In Act V, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the erstwhile king bemoans that:

I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me.

King Richard II was indecisive, squandered opportunities, and was forced to relinquish his crown. Time was once a resource he could have directed, but once imprisoned, time became a force that eroded his life and meaning. 

Last week, in How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity, I wrote about time tracking as a tool for mindfully ensuring that your actions align with your goals and values. That post focused on the minutes and the hours, the nitty-gritty of our lives.

However, I keep coming back to the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We “manage” our time (our days), seeking out new ways to be efficient and get specific tasks done. But fewer of us are adept at working on the bigger picture, making sure that the larger aspects of our lives intentionally arc toward meaning. 

Today, we’ll look at how we perceive time and ways to elevate our appreciation of the passage of it in order to organize a life that better reflects what we want. We’ll also review tools to help us achieve a more ongoing sense of mindfulness about the passing of the days (and years) of our lives. 

 

APPRECIATE THE SPEED OF TIME

When Daylight Saving returns, and you Google (for the seventh time) how to change the clock in your car, do you grumble that it feels like we just fell back, and now we were springing ahead? But you’ve also sat in interminably long meetings, shocked that each glance at the clock shows only a minute has passed.

What time “is” and what it feels like can be very different.

Time is a precise, but in some ways, arbitrary set of measurements for something we have never fully understood. St. Augustine believed that time actually just “sits between our ears.”  There’s no actual external, objective, universal time; our measurement of time has (mostly) become culturally accepted, but it’s just by collective agreement that we measure time in 60 increments of seconds, 60 minutes, etc.

(Admittedly, the 24-hour day is fairly fixed by the Earth’s rotations, but the number of days in a year is a convention. The Jewish calendar, for example, has lunar months, 28 days each; to make up for the “extra” time, there’s an additional month in a leap year.)

For more on the history, philosophy, psychology, physics, and neuroscience of time, I recommend In Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick.

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In a BBC article from September, Why Children Perceive Time Slower Than Adults, Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Belfast, notes that children’s comprehension of time is understudied. We know that tiny humans’ concepts of linear time are limited, and their understanding of time as a dimension (with a sense of duration) is slow to develop.

Adults, however, have both the vocabulary to mark spans of time and understanding of how time works:

  • time is unidirectional and linear (outside of time travel movies)
  • time is unified such that there is only one timeline (again, outside of fiction), and
  • time is event-independent (meaning it’s objective, continuing while we sleep, and existing independent of human perception). Trippy!

But aside from vocabulary and complex neurology, why do kids experience time as moving quickly but it seems to pass more quickly as we age?

One simple answer, explained well on the Inverted Passions blog, is that we have a biological imperative for survival which prompts us to take note of anything that helps us make predictions regarding the future.

Investment legalese says “past performance does not guarantee future results,” but we know that things that worked for us before (or conversely, that caused awkwardness or danger) might happen again; our brains hold onto whatever helps us make predictions. But, when something novel happens, our brains stop and pay attention!

When you’re little, everything is novel. Every experience, whether the cause-and-effect of flipping a light switch or what a sneeze feels like, is new. That’s why we have granular memories of our youths through our college days, but why, other than our first days on a job or meeting our significant others, the rest of adulthood starts to blend fuzzily together.

Our adult lives are routinized; patterns repeat; life whizzes by. Yesterday is like tomorrow is like January 87th; it’s all the same. But we remember each day of our big vacations, doing new things in new places, perhaps with new people.

Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived.

Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived. Share on X

MEMENTO MORI AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

Are you familiar with the term memento mori? It’s Latin, meaning “Remember you must die.”

A reminder of the fleeting nature of life and our impending mortality may sound depressing, but it’s been used in literature, art, and architecture, and as a meditative practice, throughout history. None of us gets out alive, so we need to make our lives more about meaningful moments and less about to-do lists rivaling the length of CVS receipts.

Memento mori helps us realign our priorities — or at least take note when we are not living according to our stated values. 

It’s worth revisiting Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, where I wrote the following:

REVISITING FINITUDE: THE MACRO AND MICRO APPROACH

Our time on this rock is limited. A central tenet of Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is the ability to see the shortness of life, examine your goals and values, and maximize spending your time on what matters most. This isn’t some hippy-dippy philosophy that says that if we all stop worrying about work or making money, we’ll find ourselves in a vast utopia.

Rather, it notes that life is hard, life is short, and feeling like you only have a right to be here if you’re accomplishing things that make money — whether for your company or yourself (even, or especially, if you are your company) — leads to frittering away the most valuable commodity: life.

Tim Urban’s stellar Wait But Why blog broke ground in this arena. Allowing for a little more time on the planet than Burkeman, Urban posited that we might have 90 years of life, so 4680 weeks rather than 4000.

One of his most famous posts, back in 2014, urged readers: visualize your life in years, your life in months, your life in weeks, your life in number of remaining SuperBowls…to appreciate what you do with your time.

For example, I’ve got got 2860 of my weeks behind me. It’s tempting to use these kinds of visualizations for dismay; certainly they can lead to existential angst and even more productivity dysmorphia. “See?” one might yelp! “I have even less time to make the widgets! To earn the money!” And yet, as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, that attitude just leads to focusing more on the quantifiable value you create for others; we want to look at quality, not quantity.

But, we can still turn to Urban for guidance. As a follow-up to his macro look at the finitude of life, he developed a way to organize and examine our lives at the micro level in 100 Blocks a Day.

Inspired by Urban, nomadic programmer Jama of Notion Backups, has identified a way to pause and reflect, giving perspective on where you are, chronologically speaking, in your day (rather than in your life). Rectangles.app gives you a quick glance at how much of today has gone by, in ten minute increments, as of the point in your day when you click the link. Click later in the day, more boxes turn green. 

For example, when I visited and took this screenshot, I’d made it through 93 1/3 ten-minute blocks in my day.

When faced with how much of your day has passed and how much is left, you might have the following reactions:

  • Yikes, I’d better get cracking! (A good motivation if you’ve been staring at social media or playing a video game for hours on end, for sure.)
  • Yikes, I’ve been working and working, and I’ve only written 17 TPS reports and attended 5 hour-long meetings! (A likely sign of productivity dysmorphia creeping in around the edges.)
  • Yikes, all I’ve done all day is work. I haven’t talked to anyone I love, I haven’t exercised or gotten any fresh air. I haven’t laughed. (And here’s where the magic might begin!)

If you’ve been experiencing signs of burnout due to toxic productivity, give this approach a try. Click on Rectangles and think about the day you’re having. Maybe even text the link to a friend, describe your day thus far, and get a reality check from someone who sees you more clearly.

Expanding from how much time is in a day (1440 minutes) to how much time is left in our lives, memento mori yields perspective. There are digital and analog options for helping you do just that. 

ANALOG APPROACHES TO MEMENTO MORI

The Meditative Marble Method

Purchase a bag of colorful marbles and display them in an attractive glass jar. Create a ritual such that each day (or perhaps weekly, on Saturday or Sunday), you remove a marble from the jar and think about what you accomplished and gave your life meaning the last day (or week). This isn’t how many blog posts you wrote or how many new clients you signed on, but the intentional awareness of meaningful time spent with your partner, child, or friends, or special things you did to make your life a little more worthy of reflection.

Now, move the marble out of the jar to somewhere else (like an identical jar). If you planned to use this ritual weekly, you’d need to buy at least 52 marbles; daily, you’d want at least 366 (to cover leap year).

Perhaps carry that day’s marble around with you in your pocket to give you a visceral reminder all day that your time has precious value. 

Perpetual Calendars

In my prior television career, I sent a lot of faxes, and that meant a lot of cover pages, and you always had a field to write the date. Unless you’re time traveling, it’s not 1997, so we’re not sending faxes much anymore. Instead, most of us check our phones or give a shout to Siri to see what the date is.

Just as digital time feels vague and unmoored from the rest of the hour, seeing just today’s date doesn’t give a sense of how today relates to the rest of the week or year.

Something more three-dimensional may help you be contemplative about the days as they pass.

See the MoMA Sliding Perpetual Calendar, designed by Giancarlo Cipri.

The Sliding Perpetual Calendar is made of plastic (so, not particularly environmentally sustainable) and measures 12 high x 9.2 wide x 0.3″ deep. You can mount it to the wall or prop it up on its included pegs. Each day, slide the red dots down the chutes-and-ladders (OK, just chutes) to select the day, month, and date. It’s currently available from MOMA for $48 ($43.20 for members).

Make the changing of the date into a device-free daily ritual and an opportunity to be mindful and intentional about the activities with which you fill your life.

Any perpetual calendar with moving pieces will work for this purpose. Other options:

Vosarea Perpetual Desk Calendar is wood, so it’s a bit better for the environment, and measures 12.8″ wide x 5.9″ high. (There’s no information on depth.) While it takes up horizontal real estate, the footprint is minimal. Amazon has it for $18.19 with a digital coupon.

ComiHome Perpetual Calendar Date Desk Calendar measures 10″ wide x 10″ high and has a sleek, modern look. This magnetometer calendar has a circular ring for the month and day of the week, a horizontal plane for displaying the date, and three magnets for selecting each, manually. It comes in red and black, or black and white and runs $22.99 at Amazon. 

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Deerine Wooden Block Perpetual Calendar is an upgrade the old-school block/cube calendar. It comes in pink, green, blue, black, and wood-grain, and runs $13.99 at Amazon. It measures 5.9” wide x 1.92” deep x 4” tall and is made of wood.

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Journaling

It’s easy for days and then months to zip by without giving any thought to intentions beyond getting through the day. It’s like how the calendar pages flip and fly off in old black-and-white movies to let you know that significant time has passed. In old photo albums, you can gauge the passage of time by the change of hairstyles and clothing. But to percieve the changes (or lack thereof) in ourselves, a snapshot isn’t enough.

I’ll admit, I’m not skilled at journaling or adept at looking at my life as a big picture. I’m more of a to-do list person. I often write the blog posts I need to read, so I suspect that’s why I’ve been thinking about memento mori. 

There are numerous apps for journaling, but I believe we’re more likely to put in emotional effort and pour out heartfelt thoughts on paper. I encourage you to try an analog journaling method if you are able. Something as simple as a One Line a Day journal for capturing the most vivid or uplifting aspects of life might be a good start.

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Use Visual Time Trackers

Print or buy a copy of the grid squares from the Wait But Why post referenced above and track your life in weeks by shading the squares. 

CONSIDER YOUR MORTALITY DIGITALLY

These apps are designed specifically to encourage memento mori.

Death Clock

The Death Clock app, available for iOS and Android, uses your answers to a questionnaire about your age, sex, lifestyle habits, and nation of residency to predict a death date. It’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Death Clock is AI-powered to help increase your longevity by helping users understand the impact of current habits on life expectancy and encourage making changes to live a longer, fuller life. 

Their makers describe it: “It’s like having a personal grim reaper, but with health tips.” The app is free, but some features require a paid subscription.

Life: Just One

Life: Just One, created by Julien Lacroix for iOS, was inspired by the Wait But Why post. It’s designed to help users recognize that their time is precious and make the right decisions by allowing them visualize the approximate number of years, months, and days they have left on this earth.

Atypical for apps these days, it pushes no notifications, has no ads, and there’s no sign-up. It collects no life data. The basic app is free, though the Pro level unlocks widgets, a “life in weeks” section, and full customization. 

WeCroak

WeCroak was inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying:

To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.

Each day, the WeCroak app sends five notifications to invite users to stop and contemplate death (and, by extension, the value of life).

Rather than coming at predictable times, the “invitations” arrive randomly and can arrive at any moment (“just like death,” their web site states). Upon receipt, users open the app to reveal a quote from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker on the topic of death and may choose to pair contemplation with conscious breathing or meditation. 

The WeCroak app is free to use on a variety of platforms including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Vision and Android.

Additionally, WeCroak has subscription-based Leap programs, providing challenges to help “face impermanence in all its aspects and live better lives today.” 

Life Clock

Life Clock is a simple, platform-agnostic website. Enter your birthdate and time, and the result is a swiftly moving digital readout of your age to 12 post-decimal point places. Click the right arrow to get your age in months to ten decimal places; click again to get your age in months; click again for your age in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.

You can even see your age in lunations (lunar cycles), dog years, fortnights, galactic years, kilometer light traveled, Poincaré recurrence times (a theorem which theorizes that everything that’s happening now will happen again in exactly the same way!), heartbeats, your age in Friends or Game of Thrones marathons, and more! The data isn’t deep, but offers perspective.

Related apps include 0280, Mori Master, Life Left, and Memento Mori Stoic Reminder. 

Ask AI Bots to Play Jeeves

Super-techie? Let AI remind you that life is short and precious:

ORGANIZE AND ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR VALUES

You know the story of the professor, the jar, the rocks and the sand, right?

 
Once you see your life racing by, you may be inclined to focus on the big rocks. In addition to applying all of the organizing and productivity lessons this blog shares weekly, try a strategic approach.

Audit Your Life

Identify what really matters to you. Sit quietly and write down your top 5 values: being more present in your children’s lives, leaving a professional, personal, or financial legacy, improving your health to live better longer, having more adventures, being creative, etc. 

Look at your calendar and your bank account. Examine how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention. 

Does your spending reflect your values? Are you giving time to your priorities or just whatever is loudest?

Look at how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention. Look at your calendar and bank account. Do they reflect your values? Share on X

Write a Personal Mission Statement

Channel your inner marketing director and figure out what you want your life legacies to be. Post your mission statement where you can see it.

Organize Your Life to Invest in Meaningful Experiences

What are your big rocks? If it’s time with loved ones, personal growth, and joy, do you have inviolable time for vacations, family dinners, or learning opportunities scheduled? 

I’ve often referenced Laura Vanderkam’s book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Her Rule 6 encouragesus to have identify one “big adventure” (lasting perhaps half a weekend day) and one “little adventure” (lasting an hour) each week to introduce novelty.

As Vanderkam has explained, “We don’t ask where did the time go when we remember where the time went.”

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What’s keeping you from scheduling adventures?

For five years, I had so few “adventures,” I can count them on one hand, twice meeting up with Nashville colleague Sara Skillen for day trips and last summer’s 1900-mile round trip road trip to see Paper Mommy and go to my college reunion. My two-night adventure of going to see The Floating Men was transformative, reminding me what I want in my life.

Revisit Your Audit Periodically

Memento mori isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Build time into your day, your week, your month, and your annual review to put more life in your life.

Memento Vivere

Author Annie Dillard said, “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.”

Actress Kelly Bishop (A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls) wrote in The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir, “Don’t cry because you think your best days are gone. Smile because you had them in the first place.” So make sure you have them!

Memento mori (“Remember you must die”) has a sibling concept: Memento Vivere — Remember to live. Make every moment count: through mindfulness, gratitude, engagement, a sense of purpose, and celebration. 

The lyrics to the song at the start of this post are a little salty for a “family” organizing blog, but I want to share my love of The Floating Men with Paper Doll readers. You can find their catalog on Spotify and Apple Music, and lots of (mostly ancient) concert video on their YouTube channel. And for the first time since 2009, they’ve got a digital EP, #Reoverimagined, with new (joyous) songs and fun bonuses, including:

 
Thank you, readers, for this extra-long indulgence, and thanks to Jeff, Scot, and The Floating Men for more than three decades of reminding me to (really) live!

Jeff Holmes and Paper Doll (Julie Bestry) Scot Evans & Paper Doll (Julie Bestry)

Jeff Holmes & Paper Doll (left); Scot Evans & Paper Doll (right) — Barrelhouse Ballroom, 1/18/25

Posted in Paper Organizing, Productivity, Psychological, Time Management | 14 Comments »

How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity

Posted on: January 20th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 16 Comments

 
Have you ever reached the end of a day, collapsed onto your couch, and thought, “Where did the day go?”

Time is slippery like that—it vanishes into the ether when we’re stuck in meetings, running errands, or just hanging out and taking a truly shocking number of trips to the fridge.

Back in May 2020, I wrote Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation. That post looked at how stress and the lack of novelty in our days (such as during lockdown, when every day is much like any other, or that mystery week between Christmas and New Year’s, where nothing feels “real”) can make us lose touch with our experience of time.

Conversely, how do you feel when your schedule is jam-packed with back-to-back client meetings, or there’s no breathing room between getting the kids to school and yourself to work and then reversing course at the end of the day and taking care of everyone else’s needs and you don’t have a minute to exhale? (Did you feel out of breath getting to the end of that run-on sentence?)

When we don’t have variety — it’s the spice of life, or haven’t you heard? — or we’re overtaxed without the chance to pause and reflect, time can cease to have any meaning. 

That’s where time tracking comes in: it’s like a GPS for your hours, showing you exactly where your minutes travel without you noticing. Unfortunately, the idea of logging every little thing you do can feel about as appealing as untangling a drawer full of mismatched USB charging cables. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

This past week, I’ve been participating in Laura Vanderkam’s Time Tracking challenge. (She has a free Time Makeover Guide and time-tracking spreadsheets in 15-minute and 30-minute increments, each in PDF, Excel, and Google formats.)

I’ve done Laura’s challenges each January for several years, and am always intrigued by how it impacts my productivity during the week even before I start analyzing the data. (More on that next week!)

Before we move on, I have to put in a plug for two of my favorite books Laura’s, her classic 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and the oft-mentioned Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.

Today, we’re going to look at the perks and pitfalls of time tracking and see how to make it work for you (without driving yourself loopy). 

The Benefits of Time Tracking

If you’ve ever worked a job where your supervisor required you to report what you did with every moment of your day, you may be (understandably) disgusted with the concept of time tracking. When forced to track the minutia of your day for someone else to analyze it, you can feel judged, micromanaged, maybe even infantilized.

However, when you track your own time, it can be empowering. In fact, time tracking may reveal some surprising insights about your daily habits.

Yes, you may have scrolled your social media feed for far too many sessions for your comfort, but tracking your time might help you see that right before most of those digital mental escapes, you were dealing with cranky customers or a stress-inducing in-law, or you were sluggish post-meal.

No one moment stands on its own, so tracking your time doesn’t merely show you what you’ve done, when, and for how long, but shows the pattern of your time usage. Whether your behavior is consistent or inconsistent over time can help you dig a little deeper than knowing you worked on a blog post for 47 minutes or that you spent an hour and a half at Target. 

Let’s look at some of the ways time tracking helps.

Mindfulness and Focus

By virtue of measuring something, we bring our attention to it. Without attention to how you’ve been spending your time, there’s little chance of intentionally spending in more effective and efficient ways.

If I asked you what you did last Friday afternoon, you might recall a major event you’d been working toward, unexpected occurrences (whether positive or, more likely, negative), and annoyances (whether large or small), but remember little of the granularity of your day. Time tracking helps you identify, in as granular and detailed a way as you like, how you really spend your time vs. your perceived activity and time usage.

Once you mindfully pay attention to what you’re doing (or have just done, over the last half hour) and log it, it will be easier to highlight when you’ve been inefficient (e.g., fighting with a piece of software vs. having someone help you figure out what’s wrong) or areas for improving what you do, how you do it, or when you do it, and figure out what you might want to delegate, or stop doing altogether. 

But you can’t go by your gut, because your gut makes small annoyances seem larger (especially if they are repeated over time) and as though they lasted longer than they actually did. 

Tracking our time allows us to measure how we deal with all manner of experiences, and that focused attention helps us better predict our future time needs.

Prioritization

It’s not only a matter of catching yourself “wasting” time, or even spending too much time on the wrong thing. Time tracking clarifies which tasks consume the most time and effort; it’s your role to analyze whether the things taking the most time represent what’s the most valuable.

Are the unimportant things taking a lot of time, leaving you few high-focus and high-energy sections of your day to focus on what’s meaningful?

Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values?

Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values? Share on X

Of course, not everything that takes the most time is the most important for you to accomplish, and vice versa. Time tracking, and seeing how much time you currently put into accomplishing certain tasks, can help you distinguish between what’s “urgent” and/or “important,” as we’ve frequently discussed when reviewing the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. 

Only then can you “wasted” energy toward what really matters.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Having actual numbers to back up your interpretation of what’s working (and what’s not) in your schedule is a game-changer. It will grant you actionable insights — prompts for what to do differently — to optimize your current routines and workflows.

When you time track, you’ll have a real-time account of where your time goes — towards what is:

  • important and urgent
  • important but requiring scheduling during your “deep work” hours
  • urgent but unimportant and can be delegated, and
  • what’s really so lacking in urgency and importance that it can be drop-kicked into Never-never Land.

In this way, time tracking supports goal-setting and monitoring progress over time. 

Time tracking identifies how long tasks take, enabling better planning based on more realistic estimates of how long certain tasks will take to complete in the future. 

Stress Busting

Oh, and those realistic estimates time tracking produces? They can reduce overwhelm* by showing you what you can reasonably do (and what you can’t) in the course of a day so that you’ll stop trying to ten pounds of sugar tasks into a five-pound sack of schedule.

If you can clearly see that you can’t get a blog post done in an hour when your kids are at home (or that trying to get it done in one long sitting will keep you from getting seven other things done), you’ll stop forcing yourself to live by unreasonable, unrealistic expectations.

In turn, this can empower you to set better boundaries (for yourself, and for others who demand or encroach on your time) and ensure you schedule breaks more effectively so that you’re doing high-focus deep work when you have high mental energy.

Accountability

A well-known saying is that what we measure gets done. If you’ve ever been in Weight Watchers, you know that they make you log everything you eat. When you know someone’s going to look at your seventeen logged mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Thursday night, you’re more likely to put the bag back after your third nibble, and maybe lose some weight.

Similarly, while the purpose of tracking time is to get a realistic take on what you’re doing with your time, knowing that you’ll be judging your time use later may help you avoid self-soothing “time wasters” when you’re on deadline and need to stay on task.

Time tracking encourages greater tasks focus in real time. You’ll anticipate, note, and deter distractions when you’re aware of how every minute counts toward your goals. (And while you may not like the experience of judging yourself, it’s better than when your boss does it, right?)

The Challenges and Obstacles of Time Tracking

The concept of time tracking is a great one, but even great things can be problematic. We need to be realistic about how it can trip us up so we can avoid falling over Dick Van Dyke’s ottoman.

 

Time tracking can be a time sink. Remember that asterisk above about how time tracking can reduce overwhelm? It can, but when tracking your time feels like it’s eating into your day because you have to stop too often to note what you’re doing, you may get frustrated.

Time tracking can interrupt your flow. Some people try to track their time so contemporaneously with their actions that they can’t focus on their deep-focus or creative work. 

Time tracking can be boring. There’s tedium in tracking everything. Time tracking can feel counterproductive if you’re taking time away from productive activities to note what you’re doing too many times in the course of an hour.

Time tracking may be used to procrastinate. If you don’t like what you’re doing, either at work or with your life, it’s easy to spend a lot of time fussing over color-coding or pretty fonts (or all the bells and whistles of a digital tracker) to the point where you’re not really leaving much time for the real work.

Perfectionism paralysis can be a type of procrastination. If you obsess over every detail of how you track your minutes, to the point that tracking your time causes you to stress about starting any task, very little of your actual work will get done. 

Additionally, resistance to change can short-circuit your efforts in two ways.

First, for people who have mental roadblocks to starting a new habit, it can be difficult to train themselves to track their time. If you’re resistant to making the effort to track time, none of the benefits of time tracking can be reaped.

A second, more insidious problem is that the data you get — and the realization of what you’re really doing with your time (whether wasting it or giving too much time to others as a people pleaser, or just being stuck in crummy jobs or relationships) — may force an issue you’re not ready to deal with.

For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn?

For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn? Share on X

Finally, the prospect of time tracking can trigger privacy concerns. If you’ll dillydally over selecting a digital time-tracking tool because of concerns over privacy, you have two alternatives: choose tools that respect your data boundaries or opt for analog tracking.

Make Time Tracking Work for You

So, how do you avoid those pitfalls?

Start Small

If you anticipate feeling overwhelmed by the practice of time tracking, know that you aren’t bound by any overly ambitious practice. Take baby steps.

For example, aim for a single-day experiment on a random Wednesday when you’re not anticipating major kerfuffles in your schedule.

Similarly, don’t feel like you have to start out with too granular a measurement. I generally track in 15-minute increments, but you might feel more comfortable in 30-minute slots. You’re not writing down the call you made at 1:02 p.m., 1:16 p.m., and 1:22 p.m., but rather “Made client confirmation calls” from 1-1:30 p.m. If that thirty minute slot of one category of activity yields enough information, so be it.

Once you’ve tried a one-day tracking effort, you could opt to expand, gently. For example:

  • Try one tracking day per month, changing the day of the week each time. You get two chances at a “normal” Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and can either take two monthly breaks, maybe during summer vacation and December, or use some months to track weekend days to analyze how your personal time is flowing.
  • Consider one time-tracking week each year. As noted, I do this as part of Laura Vanderkam’s annual January challenge, but you could do it each spring as a time management refresher, or to coincide with the fresh start of back-to-school each fall.
  • Track just the time that you suspect is harboring your time gremlins and vampires. If you (and your team) are satisfied with all you accomplish during the workday, but you feel like you’re doggy paddling at home, then tracking your office tasks may not be necessary.

Pick the Right Tools for You

When I track my time, I do a week at a time on an Excel spreadsheet with columns for each day of the week and rows for each quarter hour, which I keep open but minimized on my screen.

You could use a pre-made tracker or create one for yourself. Or go really low-tech and draw or write out your daily blocks of time from waking to bedtime on a sheet of notebook paper or graph paper — or just track your work hours. (But remember, if you do decide to color-code or make it fancy, do that during your planned recreation time time and not during the period you should be doing the logged, tracked work!)

Alternatively, there are numerous digital time tracking software programs and apps, including:

  • Rescue Time — This is the grand-daddy of time tracking software; I wrote about it seventeen years ago, when I first started blogging. Rescue Time will automatically track all of your computer-based work and then provide reports on your time trends. Rescue Time has solo and team plans, all paid (after a 14-day free trial).

 

  • Toggl Track — This veteran platform offers free (for up to five users) automated time tracking, making it ideal for solopreneurs and freelancers, with paid versions for teams. It’s accessible from anywhere via computers or mobile devices.
 
  • Timeular — If you want completely seamless time tracking that’s operating system-agnostic (it works on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, Linux) and an offline tracking option, Timeular may be for you. However, note that it’s paid-only (after a 30-day free trial). Timeular also has an AI tracker and a cool physical tracker (an eight-sided doohickey where you can assign and link facets of the doohickey to categories of work you do).

  • Clockify — This time tracking software has plans ranging from free, basic, and standard, to pro and enterprise levels, with increasing variety of features. It’s more basic than Toggl Track, but also feels a bit easier to learn. Even the free level has unlimited tracking, reports, projects, and users.
 
  • Harvest — This offers free, pro, and premium plans and is designed for freelancers. It’s available for all major operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, as well as browser extensions). While it’s simple to learn and has myriad integrations with other software programs, the free plan is fairly limited. (If you’re just starting to explore time tracking, though, simple is better!)

 

  • Memtime — This has a pretty minimalist interface, so the simplified, automatic time tracking makes it super-easy to use. However, it’s only available for desktop use (so, no mobile tracking) and it’s a paid-only platform (after a 14-day free trial), so it wouldn’t be your best option for first-effort time tracking. Above the basic level, it offers a wide variety of software integrations. Note that Memtime claims, “We’re the only automatic time tracker that guarantees privacy by keeping your activity data offline.” 

 

If you want something less corporate and more minimalist and mindful in a time tracker, you might want to look at Hourlytics (iOS-only) or Balance (MacOS-only). If everything you need to track is computer based, Monitup has an AI-based tracker, but if you’re cool logging everything on the phone, HoursTracker® Time Tracker works on iOS and Android.

Only you know what kind of tracking system — analog, basic spreadsheet, or digital app — will keep you committed to the experience.

Think Patterns, Not Perfection

It’s easy to note one-off times where you went down a rabbit hole on a particular research project or social media thread, but don’t beat yourself up over less-than-ideal time use.

Punishment isn’t the point! Instead, remember that one purpose of time tracking is investigating what doesn’t work so you can find what does.

Because of this, focus on trends. Are you always in a slump after lunch, distracting you from high-focus mental tasks? Maybe you need to schedule more physical tasks until you work off that post-lunch sluggishness, or try tasks that take less brain power. 

Set Goals, Then Support Them

Your time tracking efforts will yield a wealth of information about what you’re doing that barely registers in your mind as a “task” (like picking up after your kids or straightening the company supply closet because everyone else leaves it a mess). You’ll see what’s taking too much time, what should be scheduled at different times (or delegated or given up on altogether), and where you have opportunities to do more things or do the same things differently.

Use what you learn from time tracking to help you set your goals; think: what gives you joy or feeds your values? Then schedule supporting efforts in a way to improve your productivity on the things that matter the most to you, whether it’s for money-generating work or happiness-generating life.

The Big Picture

I get why time tracking has a bad rap. If you ever had a bad boss like Gary Cole’s passive-aggressive Bill Lumberg from Office Space, you probably only remember the nasty edge of being asked to track your time.

 

We should reframe time tracking as a positive, empowering practice, just like practicing mindfulness, gratitude, yoga, or anything that benefits personal development. If we choose to see time tracking’s value as a learning tool about ourselves, rather than a rigid system leading to pejorative judgment, we can reap some pretty impressive benefits.

Time tracking doesn’t need to be done 24/7/365. And tracking your time without reflecting on what your data tells you is going to have fairly limited results. But periodic time tracking, with reflection and review of that data, will help you refine your routines so your schedule of what you do and when you do it can guarantee more wins. Just remember to:

  • Find balance — Be just comprehensive enough in your tracking to yield good, meaningful data, but not so much that it becomes a source of stress or uses too much of your time. Make your system flexible.
  • Embrace the unexpected — Be openminded about what you find. Even the act of tracking less-productive moments (hello, social media!) can teach you something about yourself and your needs — variety in your workflow, downtime, or maybe even for a different job or relationship that builds you up instead of draining your energy and causing you to self-soothe to inefficient levels.

Time tracking is your personal productivity GPS. Use it to help you read the map of your life, identify where you are, and travel the best possible path to your preferred destination.

Today’s post was about the literal passage of time — being mindful what we are doing with it — so that we can be more productive and self-aware.

But as I noted at the start, time is slippery. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We spend a lot of time rushing to accomplish tasks, mostly for others but sometimes for ourselves, but our awareness of time (and the passage of it), both on a daily basis and as the infrastructure of our lives, can be murky.

Next week, we’re going to look at how we can do more to appreciate the speed of the passage of time to organize a life that better reflects what we want. I’ll also share tools to help us stay mindfully aware of the passing of our moments, our days, and our years.

Do you track your time? Share in the comments!

Posted in Paper Organizing, Productivity, Task Management, Tech, Time Management | 16 Comments »

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