3 Note-Taking Methodologies To Help With Productivity
By Sam Hickmann
Date Published: Jul 8, 2021
As a business leader, you might find yourself asking, “What is a good note-taking system?” As Jeff Su put it, “The less friction you experience, the more effective the note-taking system.” He explained how friction can be judged on three different aspects:
1. Before: How easily can you start taking notes?
2. During: How quickly can you write everything down?
3. After: How easily can you resurface relevant notes?
There are hundreds of note-taking methodologies leaders can choose from, but I’ve found the following three to be especially helpful. Consider using the above framework to help you compare, rank them and find the method that works for you and helps with your productivity.
1. Note-Taking During A Company Meeting
Goal: to capture the essence and share it with the participants
Let’s dig into the basic method that I call the "common-sense methodology." If you’re in charge of documenting a meeting with your team, keeping track of these five sections can help achieve the goal:
1. Topic
2. Meeting details (date and time, participants, location)
3. Takeaways
4. Action items
5. Notes
Your takeaways and action items will usually be written at the end of the meeting, but I suggest placing them at the top of your notes, as they can be good summaries when you read the document a few days or weeks later.
2. Note-Taking For Private Use
Goal: to capture quick private notes about personal life and business life, with to-dos and reminders
A lot of people still use physical notebooks and a trivial system of notation: Each page is a note, with the date at the top and voilà! I can’t blame them; it’s quick and fun (and you can sketch and doodle). It’s perfect to brainstorm.
However, it can require a lot of effort to retrieve and understand these notes because they’re written chronologically. What if you need a note that’s in a previous notebook tucked away somewhere? These notes can also have virtually no organization — one note might be about a hobby, the next one about a professional meeting.
Considering that most smartphones and computers come with a pre-installed note-taking app, many people tend to replace their notebooks with the digital version. Here are my recommendations for your digital notes:
Create stacks: Stacks are the virtual equivalents of your drawers where you put your old physical notebooks. The two obvious stacks are personal and professional.
Create notebooks within the stacks: In each stack, create notebooks named after the different categories. These act like folders. For instance, in the personal stack, you can have several notebooks like finances, hobbies, to-dos, etc. In the professional stack, you can include HR, business development, marketing, etc.
Use hashtags in your notes: Even though search features are getting better, I recommend using hashtags in your notes because more and more apps offer powerful filtering systems or even graph views based on hashtags, making it easier to find notes grouped by sub-topics.
For your to-dos/reminders, use the Eisenhower Matrix: Many phones have separate apps for to-dos, reminders and notes, which can make things confusing. I suggest managing everything in your notes. A note can contain action items, and certain action items must be done by a certain date. I recommend using the Eisenhower Matrix methodology. Use one of the following tags to append your to-dos:
• #Urgent #Important: things to do ASAP
• #Urgent #NotImportant: things to delegate to someone else
• #NotUrgent #Important: things to do by you in the future (set a date!)
• #NotUrgent #NotImportant: things that you can usually archive
3. Note-Taking As A Second Brain
Goal: to document your life
If you’re a researcher working on a grant proposal, an author writing a new book or s