Black Belt Productivity

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When it comes to success in business, one of the most underappreciated and underrated skills is that of taking notes. Being able to quickly go to any piece of information communicated in a meeting, or collected from a customer can be a vital asset at weekly review time.

There are many ways to take notes. Most of us simply take a note pad to a meeting and jot down things that we think are important. This is effective to an extent. However, if we do not have a solid dependable method in which we store notes we have jotted down, when we need that note the most, it can be difficult to find. A few key points about taking notes that have been important for me…

1. Develop a system that is most effective for you.

It is so important to develop a way to take notes that works best for you. People process information differently than others. So what works for me, in terms of taking notes, may not work for you.

Personally, when I take notes with pen and paper, I use the Cornell Method. Originally, the Cornell Method was developed for use by college students in the classroom. However, over time it has shown great effectiveness for many people in the work environment. Here is a great visual of the Cornell Method. The basics allow us to take notes, draw out key points, and then summarize the meeting with any next actions or projects that come out of that meeting.

This allows us to be able to quickly reference key points without having to read the whole page of notes. It also allows us to look in a specific place for actions without reviewing the complete page.

A good template to use for Cornell Notes is available as a part of the D*I*Y Planner System avalable here.

2. Develop a method to store notes in a way that can be quickly referenced.

How many times have you needed to find a note, and pulled out a notebook digging and flipping through to find your note in a massive notebook? Frustrating isn’t it? Notes do you no good if you cannot quickly find them. If possible, make meeting notes a part of your reference filing system. When you are done, remove that page and drop it into a folder related to that subject.

How do I take notes?

I take notes for three purposes.

• To be able to quickly find needed info (my brain is not a good storage device)
• For my weekly activity report @ work (So I do not sit and think…”hmmm…what did I do this week?”)
• C.Y.A. (this needs no description)

These purposes drive my method of storing notes.

On pen and paper, I use the Cornell Notes Template from D*I*Y referenced above. Then I drop into a folder for that topic.

My favorite method of taking notes, however, is electronic. I use two mediums. Pocket Word on my Pocket PC is wonderful for use in meetings. The letter recognizer function allows me to take notes by writing as I would on the pad at he bottom of an old Palm using grafitti. Then when I sync with my PC later, I copy the notes into Evernote (cut and paste). The slick thing about Evernote is, you can then tag the notes for future reference. So if I am looking for that note from the meeting about that writeoff for XYZ project, I filter on XYZ Project, and BOOM, my note is right there. No flipping through notebooks for 15 minutes…no making sure I am looking in the right book. I use Evernote escpecially for the activity report inputs. That way I filter on the tag for weekly report and cut and paste into my report. That tedious and non-value added (for me) task is done in ten minutes…tops.

Just a closing thought…I have intentions of improving my system for taking notes by purchasing a Leveger Circa Junior soon. There are some real advantages to having a system like this to use for paper notes. Emory Lundberg published an excellent review of the Circa Junior here.

-Jason