How to: Take better notes

You might associate note-taking with school, but it’s a useful activity that many people continue doing for most of their adult lives. It’s particularly helpful in business, whether you’re meeting with a customer or strolling around a trade show. Taking notes is a good way to capture and digest the content of a meeting. It also increases focus on the subject matter at hand, as the notes preserve the most important points.
 

Abbreviations help you organize

Paul Burton is the author of four books and numerous articles on productivity and time management, and the developer of QuietSpacing (www.quietspac ing.com), a customizable productivity system that helps busy people increase focus and results on the job.

A lot of what Burton does is find ways to cut through the clutter of what we do on a day-to-day basis, and do those tasks in a more efficient and effective manner. One of his ideas improves the act of taking notes.

Burton champions the art of action-oriented note taking, and created a list of abbreviations for use when taking notes to make them even more productive:

1. A is an Action item.
2. C is a Call that needs to be made.
3. R is a Reference item for further use.
4. F is a Follow-up that needs to occur.
5. S is something that needs to be Scheduled.
    

After the meeting, Burton suggests working through the notes to prioritize or delegate the associated action items.
 

Throw out your highlighter

Another way to improve your note taking is to stop wasting time going back over your notes with a highlighter. A report from the Association of Psychological Science (http://bit.ly/1qSjCXp) shows that highlighting or underlining sections of your notes does not help you retain the information. Although they are common practices, studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning; because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences.
 

Try a new system

There are many note-taking systems out there, and none are perfect for everyone. Depending on the type of person you are, and the note-taking situation, one method may work better than others. The Cornell system, devised in the 1950s by an education professor at Cornell University, is one of the most popular methods. In this format, the note-taker divides the notepad into two columns, one for the note-taking and one for the main ideas or topics that are covered in the notes. The note-taking column (usually on the right) is twice the size of the key word/main ideas column (on the left). About two inches at the bottom of the page are left for a summary of the information on that page.

You can print out your own pre-divided paper for Cornell note-taking at www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/cornellgraph/.