How to take notes fast? Many of you ask yourselves this question. This form of writing down information has been with us since our school days. At university, good notes were sometimes more valuable than lunch 😊 . In daily work, good notes can turn out to be a vessel for our success and growth.
Discover a few easy rules that will make your notes more orderly and much more practical. It will not only benefit their looks, but also their functionality.
Note with a purpose
Before you begin taking notes, think about the purpose behind them. What do you want to learn from them? What knowledge or skill do you want to master? This preparation will make you focus on catching only the most important bits from a text, a course or a lecture.
Note smart
When making notes, do you aim to write down everything you hear or read? This is a mistake. Such action leads to chaos and prolongs the note-taking process to an unnecessary degree. Begin by shortening the most important information to keywords or short sentences. Focus on the purpose and note down only the things that are related to it directly. You can safely skip the rest of the irrelevant information.
Develop your own style
Develop a uniform way of taking notes. This will let you retain their clarity and legibility. Figure out your own system of enumerations, abbreviations and contextual symbols (such as exclamation marks, shapes or colours). Leave a lot of empty space for later comments, thoughts or questions. Use sticky notes for additional note-taking.
Note by drawing
The brain can memorise pictures much better than text. This is why you should add pictures to your notes when you wish to better remember a text or a lecture. This will make them not just more attractive, but also more efficient. Creating simple drawings and diagrams will activate your right hemisphere and facilitate committing new information to memory. The drawings are just for you, so they don’t exactly need to be the prettiest 😉
Get to know and try out different note-taking systems
Have you ever heard of the Mind Map? It’s a method developed by Tony Buzan that is based on making a graphical representation of the links between individual bits of information. This method will find excellent application not just when taking notes, but also when working on new projects.
Try out and test different note-taking methods. Pick the most appropriate and effective way of making notes. You can read more about note-taking methods here: The flow method, The Cornell method, The hierarchy method