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Ask HN: What tips or tricks do you use for fast and efficient note taking?

11 points by mtrpcic ↗ HN
I often find myself wanting to document various pieces of information during meetings or my commute, but often the information is coming at me faster than I can put it all on paper. I end up getting flustered and the quality of my printing degrades as I try to scrawl everything down. What shorthands, tips, tricks, or other note-taking quirks do you use to make your life easier?

8 comments

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atian
Caffeine. You can continue summarizing as you are but afterwards you'll be able to recall better.
sukonik
I personally like AudioNote for class notes, for times when content comes at me fast. This way you can silently record them while you type for better recall later.

Another option is just to use an app like Notes+ or Apple's notes app.

aethertap
I tend to use notes as a self-test rather than for logging what's been said. For example, as I hear something important, I'll write a small question to the effect of "what is X?" or even just "X?"

Then (this is the important part) soon after the note-taking session is done, I go back and answer all my questions from memory, in writing. That lets me get tons of stuff down on paper later at a slower pace, and it also helps to cement the stuff in my mind because I'm not distracted by trying to write it all down while it's happening. Forcing myself to recall it also does a lot to make it stick.

Usually I can use my questions as cues to go look up the stuff I forget, and if there's something that I know I'll forget and won't be able to look up, I'll try to write that down (that's pretty rare though).

maraglee
Yes! The most valuable information is usually not the pure content but rather things that deviate from that. So contextual information, relationships between things, knowing what's important (the gist) and what's unclear. Especially the last part tends to be what at the end of the day gives new insights
KhalPanda
> ...coming at me faster than I can put it all on paper

So don't. :-)

I don't know if 'paper' was a figure-of-speech to mean 'some recorded format', but if it was, get yourself a cheap Chromebook. I (and I expect most) can type a lot faster than they can write, so that's step one.

Step two is to just work on making your notes as brief and concise whilst still being intelligible to you. Unless whatever somebody is saying is extremely densely packed with critical information, there is a lot of filler you easily can cut out.

For example, if someone read your post to me, all I would write is:

- Tips for efficient/effective notes?

misframer
I do what databases do with WALs :). I write stuff down as I get it, and then organize later.