Why Take Notes?

Before understanding “How to Take Notes Effectively”, we have to understand “Why Even Take Notes in the First Place?”

The main objective of taking any notes depends upon your own intentions.

• Whether you want to publish them
• Whether you want to share them with your friends, colleagues, classmates or professors
• Whether you keep them private for yourself
• Whether you want to keep remembering specific details and topics
• Whether you want to make a summary or brief point downs

[ One Thing will be common ]

Which is your intention/objective. This small thing can even increase your notes' effectiveness from 2x to 4x times.

Your Objective Answers “Why Your Notes Exist”

How to Improve Your Notes? (Avoid common mistakes)

Let’s go straight forward towards improving your notes.

To improve your notes, the first step is

[1] Identify What to Note?

• Not every word, every line should be noted in the notes. It’s just like if you were highlighting almost every line on a page while reading a book.
• Solution: You should select specific line or words that gives the meaning or fulfils the purpose of the concept you are making notes on.

[2] How to Note?

• Many people don’t really fully understand the concept. They read or understand one line and write a note, and then another line and so on.
• Solution: You first have to learn the whole concept, and then should abstract it and make notes.

[3] Avoid Common Mistake

• Avoid Unstructured Notes: Always make notes in a structured way. (i.e. Index, Aim, Concept, Description, Summary). It depends on the objective of the note.
• Avoid Too Many Highlights in Notes: Not many words need to be highlighted or bold from each line. Highlighting many words makes it hard to grasp concepts.
• Avoid Copy/Paste: Many of you have at least “copy and paste” as it is in the notes. Instead, you should take notes in your own language as you were explaining it to someone. This will make your notes highly understandable and help you retain information in the long term.
• Avoid Taking Notes on Note-Taking Apps: If you were taking notes on simple applications (i.e. Google Notes, Notepad, Notepad++, Sticky Notes, etc). It’s time to move on to other applications.

Note-Taking Applications

The Note-Taking applications are specifically designed to make the note-taking process faster, easier and more effective.

Google Notes is quite good, but only for making short notes. If you are making very large notes, you should avoid Google Notes, as there are some better options available.

There are plenty of applications available in the market. And I have used many applications to test whether they’re user-friendly and convenient.

I won’t assume that you only use laptops and desktops for taking notes. Instead, I will assume that you can take and review your notes whenever you want, whether you only have your laptop, your computer, or your mobile.

So, once you make notes, you can also access them from different devices.

Some of the best tools I have used,

[1] Notion

The reason I put Notion on no. 1 is simple. Its features, UI, and Integrations.

• Notion’s beginner-friendly UI makes the note-taking process easy.
• Notion’s suite helps you map your activity and notes synchronizly. (i.e. Notion, Notion Calendar, Notion Mail)
• It integrates with many applications.
• It also supports integrated Notion AI.
• It is cross-platform.

[2] Obsidian

Obsidian is also very popular among note-taking apps. It is known for

• Its awesome UI and theme.
• cross-platform.
• Canvas, Graphs and Links.
• Publications.
• Integrated features and plugins.

[3] OneNote from Microsoft

OneNote is one of the most popular for

• Cross-platform
• Cloud storing notes
• Integrated Copilot
• Collaboration
• Advanced Features (i.e. Sketch, voice transcription)

You may use any of these tools as per your convenience.

Conclusion

Making good and effective notes helps you recall things, tracking your progress, day-to-day activity, planning and preparation.

Using good software helps you increase your efficiency & effectiveness of the notes. Not only softwares, but how you make notes decides how deeply you understan the concept and how effectively you can explain it to other (Skilling up: Grasping + Presentation).

Like and share this to your friends and colleagues. Help them improve because the better you make notes, the better you will understand the concept.

Also let me know in the comments,

• Have you used or currently using one of these applications before for taking notes?
• What features of them do you like the most?
• What other note-taking app do you use?

See you in the next blog.

Keep Learning — Keep Growing