Note Taking Formats

Note Taking Formats

I read this thread with great interest. Rather than dividing a note page into quadrants, I use colors to denote action items or things to which I want to call more attention. I accomplish this using a Lamy 4-color pen, which is a fantastic tool (about $60-70, available at most fine pen shops). It has blue, black, red and green ink cartridges. It's great for linear note-taking, as well as for quickly creating colorful mind maps!
 
Re: Note Taking Formats

innovationtools said:
Lamy 4-color pen, which is a fantastic tool (about $60-70, available at most fine pen shops). It has blue, black, red and green ink cartridges.
Click to expand...

Dude, you've got way too much money on your hands. I can get the same thing for $1.69 at the local drug store.
 
Interesting...

This thread is very interesting to me... I've had some difficulty in this area recently-- allow me to explain.

All through high school and college, I had a photographic memory. I never bothered to take notes, as I remembered literally everything I read or heard. (Yes, really. I always aced tests. I always considered it a form of cheating.)

However, as I've gotten older, this ability has slipped away, and I don't have the memory I did in my youth. (Not even close.) The problem is that I never learned to take notes! Now I take copious notes, but because I never learned this skill in school I know that I'm not taking as good of notes as I should, and that I'm not getting the benefit out of them after the fact that I could.

Hearing how other people take notes is very useful to me. I now use OneNote and a Tablet PC (which I love-- they really have made my life easier.)
 
In reading David's books and listening to the CD's, two areas of weakness which jumped out at me were mind-mapping and note-taking. At 57, for some reason I had never encountered mind mapping. And my note-taking is woefully inadequate for many of the same reasons set forth in the prior note - in college I usually just listened to the lectures, skimmed the text, and passed the tests (can't claim to have aced them; just passed).
My business practices have been pretty much the same and over the years I stayed well-organized keping things in my head with Outlook as a buffer. However, over the past 3-5 years I've begun to notice things slipping. As I've tried to compensate by taking notes in meetings & at events, ironically I've found myself getting more disorganized with pages of notes floating all over the place.
I'm now implementing GTD, using my Palm (a gift which had been sitting in the box for a couple of years), and have decided to focus on increasing my note-taking skills. So far, the best approach I've found is dividing the page into a slim left colum, a wide center column, and a medium right column (similar to a web page layout). I take notes in the center with actions or key words in the left colum, and questions, follow-ups, or links in the right column. If the meeting or event requires a summary, I draw a fourth line from left to right across the bottom and write it there. Using different color pens also helps to visually orient me to these elements. Finally, I'm trying to discipline myself to review the notes immediately after the event and deciding on next actions, if I've inherited any. Everything else in the notes is either dump, delegate, defer, or file in reference.
Anyone willing to critique this method? I'm looking for opportunities to improve, have a thick skin, and am not resistant to change.
 
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