Notetaking is still as relevant a skill as ever. Whether you’re digitally taking notes or heading towards a more old-school approach with a pen and notebook, it’s an essential asset for success. It’s not just for your academic achievements but also later in life with your personal and professional demands. Notetaking allows us to not only capture the information but retain said information from a variety of different sources.
Sources of information can be from your lectures or even study groups and readings. As you head towards a workplace environment, it will be critical during meetings to ensure that the agenda of the meeting is understood, as well as what the next actionable steps look like.
When we take the time to be effective with our notetaking, it will improve our overall efficiency, enable better productivity, and also help with our memory retention. With all these benefits, who doesn’t want to be an expert at notetaking? Yet often, notetaking is challenging for many of us. It can be difficult to know just what to write down and what information is important. Organization is another issue, such as how we should take notes and keep the information easy to retrieve later on.
Below, we’ll take a look at some strategies that can help you become not only a better note-taker but also understand mindful note-taking and why it’s important to you.
What is Mindful Notetaking?
By throwing the word mindful in front, it can give you images that make notetaking seem even more difficult. It won’t, and in fact, it will help you always remember to take notes and have them become much more effective. It helps bring the act of recording information into a more intentional and purposeful way.
The best part is that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to mindful notetaking, and you can tailor it to work in a way that makes sense to you. After all, if you find yourself a lot more aligned with the process, you’ll quickly notice how often you find yourself taking notes. This starts with knowing the key points to select for recording, as well as working on a way to organize them so you can quickly find them later on.
It will also help all the notes look as if they can make connections with the information you’ve put down and give you a moment to reflect on the topic, subject, study notes, meeting minutes, or whatever else you may have been taking notes for.
What are the benefits of Mindful Notetaking?
Besides the fact that you’re going to be able to know how to do notetaking the right way, you’ll be able to get additional benefits as well. The first benefit, which has been discussed briefly, is that you’ll learn a lot better. You’ll feel more connected with the material and be able to process it more deeply than was possible before. That means you’ll not only just learn but also start to understand the material and its connecting relationships.
Mindful Notetaking also leads to better memory. As you write down the notes, your brain is already re-recording the information you just learned and is now putting it down on paper (or digital format). Then, when you’re looking to recall it further, you have multiple imprints embedded in your memory about this information that will allow you to find just what you’re looking for.
You’ll also quickly see how much more productive you’ll become. Without always having to go back to the source material or find it again, everything that you need will be right in front of you in your notebook, meaning more time using it and less time looking for it.
With all these benefits, expect your stress to be reduced as well. You won’t feel overwhelmed because you trust your notetaking system to have the information you need to go forward and learn from. This can mean you can almost solely rely on those notes for the majority of the information you need.
How to get into the mindset of Mindful Notetaking
Even before pen hits paper, physically or digitally, take a moment or two to relax your body and bring your focus to attention. You want to get into the right way of thinking initially, which will help you stay more receptive throughout the notetaking time.
Only focus on what the main topics and information being presented are. It’s not about writing down every single thing that is being heard, but only on those concepts that are at the core of the discussion and the subject.
Write down your own words when recording the information. When you do so, you can understand it better by translating it back to your thinking and writing. You will grasp the concept and what everything means, and you gain from being able to understand it faster.
Organization is key from the start of notetaking as you need to develop a system that makes sense to you. You want to use headings and subheadings that you will consistently use throughout your notetaking days and even consider using bullets while developing your information in a hierarchical structure. Get visual and colorful and use colors and symbols to highlight those extra important elements.
Abbreviate when possible, and this means using acronyms. Also, make sure you have a glossary of what those acronyms stand for so you can quickly reference them later on. When you do this, you won’t tire yourself out while constantly writing down notes, which could cause you to burn out and possibly miss something in your notetaking.
You want to stay visual and draw diagrams and charts where possible
You can even consider using and drawing mind maps to make sense of all the information you’re recording. Combine this with your thoughts, which will help to give the information a fresh perspective that you understand.
A final thought
You want to make sure that you are constantly reviewing your notes to see what makes sense, where you can improve your system, and what makes sense for your system as well. You also want to do the complete opposite and take a break from taking notes occasionally to give your mind and body rest in between sessions.