Ask HN: How do you take notes?
Going off the discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1743513 about "Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?"; I wanted to ask, how do you take notes to maximize the amount of information you remember?
I spend a lot of time consuming information (HN, books, blogs, Mixergy interviews and Twitter) but have nothing to show for it. I think we really need to note three kinds of information: notes, questions and action items. But I have a hard time keeping track of all of it for all the different sources.
I've tried using a notebook, but then its harder to go back and look through it. Ideally, I would use an iPad application that has a system to handwrite notes and then easily categorize that information.
Anyone have any strategies to easily search through and maximize the amount of information they remember? Thanks!
EDIT: I use a mac.
69 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadI believe the mobile versions allow for hand writing but I've never used them.
edit: bad grammar :)
Todos/Questions/Action Items: Plain text, into OmniFocus, via Quicksilver. Syncs with iOS.
With books, I use sticky colored tabs to call attention to important pages (instead of dogearing the pages) and a highlighter to mark up important paragraphs, with notes in the side if need be.
I also wanted to do something in LINQ (LINQ to XML to be specific). Around that time I was looking at Notational Velocity and it's Windows "clones". So I went and create something really quickly and decided to make it a bigger project.
Meet Omnium. (This sounds cool.) As of now it's easy to sync with Dropbox (SugarSync, etc) but I plan to integrate synchronizing with Simplenote and also have some kind of export/import feature so you can use your NV notes/vice versa.
It's Windows only because Mono doesn't support WPF (yet) If you are interested: http://omnium.codeplex.com Please leave a comment on what you think (Codeplex' review system or here) </selfpromo>
https://www.dropbox.com/apps
I started on paper, but there are superb pieces of software for this as well.
iThoughts HD on iPad is excellent. Not sure if they have a desktop client. If desktop is a requirement then check out MindNode which is also very good.
You can also use it for brainstorming sessions and problem solving as a team (project on a screen and let everyone see it). http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institute/download/download.htm Available for Windows, Mac, Linux and free
Any time I hit something that seems both non-obvious and reasonably important, I write it down. When I make the notes clear and half-way organized, they end up being more useful than the original reference, since they're quicker to read and tailored for what I care about.
Early on in learning Objective-C, for example, I was getting caught on one wtf after another, not really grasping it. I decided to take it from the top with my notebook and jot everything interesting down in note form.
No kidding, after about ten minutes of this I looked from my notebook to my screen, where source code from an OSS OS X project was sitting, and it was like the climax from The Matrix – I, quite instantly, understood everything. Where once there were blocks of inscrutable code, now I was just reading, and comprehending, a story.
So that's great if your brain works like mine. Why is it your notes are so hard to look through?
Like danilocampos said, the solid state notes were the key. Having a physical copy of what was on the stack and watching it change made the assignment so much easier.
For organization, I just use Simplenote. Notational Velocity on the Mac + the iPhone app results in a great combination that's always in sync wherever I am.
I do the same when planning/thinking (code, todo, what to pack for a trip, etc).
I need the pen/paper because they "disappear" and don't take attention from my thoughts. It was like that all my life, until I read the rave reviews and learned Org mode in Emacs.
First, I thought "This was stupid. I've put lots of hours into learning Org mode; it would be minutes for a GUI app." Then I realized that I jotted down notes in Org mode as easily as when taking notes on paper! A big win, e.g. for backups and search.
Still, I must write notes on paper to remember facts. Org mode only works for organizing and exploring thoughts. (Too many years with a pen, probably.)
Edit: I might add: For me, the single most helpful thing to learn is to disconnect from the net.
There is a nice notepaper generator (including source code in Python) made by Simson L. Garfinkel:
http://simson.net/notepaper/index.cgi
This is very nifty when you have to take notes and want to have an already prepared format for your notes.
I'm sure there is lots of room for improvement over that. But, so far, for me, that's a huge improvement over my previous method.
Good luck with this.
for example, I would track a HN thread as follows: keyboard shortcut, type notes, tab, HN_topic other_tags actions_to_take_tags, tab tab, return. then I'd search for specific actions/tags when I need the info.
Thanks!
I use plaintext files edited with VIM for web-related notes, and organizing thoughts.
And finally I use a LiveScribe digital pen for lecture notes and jotting things down while reading printed papers & books.
I think what people often use notes for is as a surrogate memory. There's a desire to search through them for that one gem which will trigger you to remember all that you once knew. Or worse, it's a search for that part where you can just relive whatever experience you thought should have taught you it the first time, but didn't. To this end we have organizers and smart pens and the like. I might be jaded but they all seem like so many fancy gadgets that all seek to solve a very orthogonal problem.
I disagree with the "note taking habit" greatly because I think it's in your best interest to learn instead of memorize. By which I mean that if you're truly studying something, the goal must be to enact some sort of change in parts of your life far beyond just what you can regurgitate. It's starkly contradictory to a lot of what everyone seems to practice in education, and my adherence to it has cost me in graded performance, but it's also placed me far above a lot of my peers in both comprehension and success.
My goal when learning is building my own, real mind maps. Every thing I ingest has to be processed, extended, applied, and connected to other things. You have to act, not just listen and listen more than notate.
In classes that translates to a lot of questions that go beyond the scope of the material and great conversations with professors (in our own time). In information consumption, it translates to a much slower rate of consumption (helped by a lot of filtration) where action items are not just stored up but actively performed while things are still fresh and exciting.
In short, I try to maintain a distaste for what you might call "consumption mode flow". Learning is atomic and it takes effort to decompartmentalize the things you read into real effects in your life. That decompartmentalization is the best notation method possible, though. If you want to remember something important, make sure it rubs up against everything you do every day. If it's not so important, why write it down?
(Also, for voting purposes, pen and paper is best. I find this style of thought is aided by not being able to erase.)
> I think it's in your best interest to learn instead of memorize
This doesn't necessarily make sense. Memorization is a first step to learning, nothing more. I don't believe you can learn the higher level concepts of any subject without memorizing the details of its primitives at some stage of your study.
Also, I would add that in my experience note-taking is one of the worst possible ways to memorize anything.
> My goal when learning is building my own, real mind maps. Every thing I ingest has to be processed, extended, applied, and connected to other things. You have to act, not just listen and listen more than notate.
Agree 100%. I've found this to be true in pretty much anything I've applied myself to, specifically language study, martial arts and programming.
I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it.
I vehemently disagree, maybe because I understood the original statement differently.
In classes, I've watched students diligently write down everything on the blackboard and yet find themselves incapable of answering the simplest question on something just explained (but not written down). They spend all of their mental capacity putting ideas down on paper in front of them, rather than putting those ideas in their brain and playing with them, as they should. They can regurgitate what was just said, sure, but give them new data and ask them to apply a concept just explained with different data, and they're lost. That's the difference between memorization and learning. Memorization is something you can do at home with a textbook. In fact, textbooks have already "memorized" facts for you, why are you doing it at all? When you come to class, you shouldn't be worried about that.
Personally, I'd much rather be in a position to explain (for example) a formula I can't write down exactly, and say what it does and means, and why, than have a thousand formulas memorized which I don't understand.
> I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it.
Heh, I do the same thing. cat > /dev/null seems to be my brain's swap space.
When making myself outlines of things at work, I focus on stuff I need to know but for some reason am having difficulty with it. If I get certain types of requests to correct a particular type of error repeatedly, I focus on trying to figure out why I am doing it wrong and how I can stop doing it wrong. Then I note the stuff that I feel I personally won't feel is intuitive or obvious and expect to have trouble remembering to do. If I think the instructions we have suck, I rewrite it in a format that makes more sense to me and run it past my superior to see if my re-interpretation is still an accurate depiction of things.
Am I happy with all this? Nope. But they don't really give us a better method and I am making this stuff up as I go and it is getting to the point where team-members email me and say "do you have a copy of...?", so I have the general impression that my slap-dash, thrown together approach is more effective than whatever other people are generally doing. For at home -- working on my websites and such -- I am not really at a point of "production". I am still surfing HN and talking with my adult sons a lot and trying to nail down a more concrete idea of where to go next. My big focus for a long time was getting well. That still takes a lot of my time, so hopes of figuring out how to support myself as an entrepreneur are still almost a "hobby". That is changing and I may soon need to get a lot more organized and focused. So far, just collecting links to articles and information and emailing stuff to my sons is working okay.
I've actually tried many different software applications, but I've found that when I write something down, I'm forced to think about it a bit, and I remember/learn better. With software, its too easy to just copy, paste, and forget. I'm also a very visual learner. My notebooks are full of diagrams, pictures, arrows and other text annotations. I've yet to find a piece of software that easily lets me do that.