My Constant Note Taking
No matter what you do with your career, learning is going to be with you till the day you die, Another thing that’s certain is the volume of notes you will make; I have gone from simple ring binders to A5 notebooks to many of the very specific note-taking Apps and has finally settled on a program called Obsidian, I have made posts on this program before , but in this post, I want to go back to the notes, I make before I add them to Obsidian.
Your notes and they are, just that, your notes, I once heard someway say, I jot down what I hear in a lecture, or meeting, same goes for what I see, The spelling is awful, paragraphs do not exist, just a series of sentences, style and spelling be damed.
Lots of notes, some highlighted with marker pens, some with ink, sketches some in pencil, often smudged, small notes with arrows the odd question mark ?
New students straight from 6th Form often make notes as though they will be marked, yes make them readable to you, but learn to capture the lecture, as best you can, and add to them later. You’re not looking for smart but content, the theme the heart of the lecture or meeting.
There are several studies that look at knowledge retention, between notes taken on the keyboard, and notes made by pencil on paper, there is no contest, paper and pencil wins every time.
For note taking, I use a method, called the Cornell method, three lines splitting a simple A5 page into four spaces, a header for date and title, a space at the page bottom for comments, and a space to the left of the page for small notes, leaving a large space centre page for the main notes, and sketches. see todays photo.
I use an A5 note pad with a dot matrix 10 mm grid, although I have had one book with a 1/4 “ grid, I tried a spiral bound notebook, and found it to be perfect, it lies flat on my desk, each page lying flat I can even fold to notebook back on its self for on the go notes, but this notebook is not cheap, I can spend less than half on a normal bound book style, with the same dot matrix, but with no spiral binding.
I prefer pencil, I use a 2H lead in a clutch pencil, I try to keep it light, using as little weight as I can, outlining details writing, and adding notes in the left hand vertical column. I am left handed and wondered if the vertical side bar should be on the right not left hand side of the page, but after a days trial, I wend back to the left, not problem.
I make mistakes, thats all part of my system, some I correct as I go, using a rubber, if I have used a light hand, then all will be removed !, some I live with but I never remove, I just make a note to address it, I find it easier.
One page is often to small, I let notes drift over to a new page or three, using the old PTO at the bottom of the page the first page I head with a date and subject, perhaps several subjects. unless I think its worth dedicating a whole page to that particular research.
But I still need to get my notes into Obsidian, so I make a point of not letting it build up, so the last task of the day is to translate and transfer, so often I need more than an evening, these days I can make an entire morning available.
So often I finish each section making a pdf of that page or group of pages, and add it to that specific Obsidian page, its a simple drag and drop, with a simple text header so I can search it, obsidian can’t search a PDF. My Apple phone can easily make pdf documents of many paged, I use Notes, it works well
Just recently I have been using Teams to record online lectures with the option to add a transcript. a speaker by speaker set of notes, it’s not bad at getting the speech right. Youtube is also adding transcript to is videos, that you can copy and paste into Obsidian, use the edit/Paste to match option to get the formatting right, if I just copy and paste it get a little muckey ! .
I still make my notes the transcript is just a backup.
So here is to notes, never stop, record and look back, I once threw out some old note books, I was tight for space, a mistake I shall never repeat.
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#Notes #A5notebook
