HOW TO TAKE BETTER NOTES
Do You Suffer From Impulsive Note-Taking?
Experiencing the Need That EVERYTHING Is Important?
If you’re taking notes every day and experience the need of jotting a lot of things down, then this short story will help.
In fact, as a note-taking coach, I see many people writing down a lot of things… without never going back to them.
Most of the time, we can classify notes like so:
1- Things we simply need to “copy and paste” (like our Social Security Number)
2- Things we need to do (like calling back the accountant to follow up on our tax return)
3- Things we want to save for a project later down the road (like an amazing article about how to write your next book)
If you think about it, the purpose of a note is to re-use the information it contains in one form or another in the future.
We save it in a safe place (i.e: our note-taking app) to go back to it later.
And if you think about it again, re-using implies the neediness to recall the note later on in the future.
Now comes the tricky part:
We don’t know exactly what kind of information we’re really going to need in the future.
Some information implies a very strong degree of certainty for being re-used (like your social security number, or the fact that you need to pick up toilet paper at the grocery store.)
But for some information, the degree of certainty isn’t that clear.
As an example, you may read a great article about diabetes today. But who knows if you (or someone you cherish) will ever need this information in 5 or 25 years down the road?
Fact is, we can’t predict the future.
And here’s when impulsive note-taking comes into play.
We’re so afraid of missing out on information that we think that the cure is to write everything down.
While this may seem the safest bet at first sight…
While this may also seem not a big deal, given the fact that clipping and storing information is free (or dirt cheap)…
It still leaves us with a bigger problem: Congesting our note-taking apps!
By putting more and more notes into our apps, they start getting slow.
Finding relevant information becomes harder.
And we often finish making a Google search to retrieve the info we have been looking for, making the whole note-taking process useless.
To make it simple:
We have too many notes in our apps that we rarely re-engage with.
And now the good idea of “writing everything down” becomes a curse.
The notes pile up.
Organizing them becomes a headache.
The huge amount of notes starts causing anxiety and mental fogginess.
And if you’re like most people, opening your note-taking app starts becoming daunting because they’re nothing else than a huge… MESS.
So what’s the solution?
What I see most of the time is that impulsive note-taking is nothing else than a deeper hidden problem.
In other words, impulsive note-taking is often caused by something else.
While we’re all different, I can’t give specific advice for your specific situation in a broad article like that.
But what I can do is offer you a framework and a step-by-step process that you can work on to get rid of it.
The first step to getting out of this impulsiveness is to ask yourself a simple question.
The benefit of asking questions is that it’ll help ensure discovering your underlying cause.
The question that I’m about to ask you is nothing else than applying the “Socratic Questioning” to help you empower your-note taking.
If you’d like to know what this simple question (and the whole framework) is, here’s the deal:
I’ve created a FREE 7-Day Email Course called “How to Take Better Notes”. In the first email, (that you can get right now) I’m challenging you with a powerful question to get rid of this annoying “impulsive note-taking habit”.
You get the course for free by clicking here. (Safe link to my website)
