Best Practices for Collection

ArcCaster

Registered
Just listened to a webinar on this. Gist was that a bound notebook was the worst for taking notes, because you couldn't just rip out pages and throw them in the in basket. Big legal pads are also non-optimal because they can collect too many ideas on a single sheet -- ideally, want each sheet to have a single item to process. So David and Kelly and Robert use half-size legal pads to take notes, rip off each page, and throw it into the inbasket for processing later.

My question -- what happens to this paper AFTER it is processed for next actions? My job is to learn new software packages, then show others how to succeed with them. So my notes contain more than action items -- they contain a lot of reference material. I LIKE a bound notebook with a whole set of sequential notes, which can eventually lead to hundreds of pages of 'how to', whether in the form of slides, labs, books, or help systems. If my notes were on hundreds of discrete pieces of paper, seems like my job would be much harder. So -- my other question -- is my job 'different'? Or am I just missing a golden opportunity to make my notes more discrete, allowing me to spread them all over a giant room and 'organize' them a bit?
 

TesTeq

Registered
ArcCaster said:
My job is to learn new software packages, then show others how to succeed with them. So my notes contain more than action items -- they contain a lot of reference material.

Lucky you! I would never use my raw notes to teach somebody. Your notes must be very clear and tidy!
 

ArcCaster

Registered
Me neither. My notes accumulate over time, and my teaching sequence is very different from my learning sequence. And, my learning efforts often produce ambivalent results from which I can draw totally incorrect conclusions; over time, as I gather more data points, I refine these conclusions, removing the ambivalence. So there is a path that I retrace, and the most recent parts of that path are, in general, more accurate than earlier portions of that path. But not always -- because my learning leaps from general to specific to general and vice versa, and those jumps can sometimes end up in swamps with alligators.

But I digress.

A totally different perspective -- in recent weeks, I have switched to EverNote as my capture tool -- looks of unique notes (each perhaps half a legal sheet in size) each with its own title. Yesterday, in doing some collaborative planning, I was able to fly here and there through EverNote, retrieving exactly what I wanted. And yes, it contains a lot of reference material, just as my bound notebook did. I like it! And, perhaps, if I like the digital version of a half-size legal sheet, I might like the paper version. Of course, the digital version IS sequenced, and it is searchable.

Basically, I am describing research -- being able to retrace a sequential path can help in drawing conclusions and in abstracting the essence -- I would think this would be different from something like project management. Yes, there is project management and action items involved in what I do -- but there is also stuff that I keep until the project is finished -- so my question is, is the overlap between 'research' and best practices for collection total, partial, or not at all?
 
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