A Glance At My Note Taking Methods
I’m a writer for over twelve years, and I’ve written various kinds of texts and worked with many customers as an employee and a freelancer. I also love to write for myself, and need to write for Unitz.co. The reason I mentioned these is to show you that I’m really a person who have to take notes, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes meticulously.
Taking notes is easy. The hard part is to go back to them when needed. If you’re not working alone, then the other hard part is to share them with your team members. Here I will take a glance at some note taking methods and how they solve those “hard parts” on my part. I hope you’ll find it useful for you, too.
Good Old Notebook
I have to admit that I have never been a notebook person. Don’t get me wrong; I love notebooks. And I love paper, not as a note-taking medium but as a craft material. Pages end quickly; pens drain just as quickly. Notebooks can get lost or damaged easily. Moreover, you may have to scan lots of pages before you find what you need. Then you have to show that part to your team members, or write it on your computer, or take a photo of it.
Things I get tired, even while I’m writing…
Recently, I took a look at my stories, novels, diaries, etc. I wrote, when I was a teenager. I used notebooks, until I had my first computer. I have several volumes of “dream diaries” that extend over seven years (actually a period a little longer than Freud and Jung did in their times). They are personal treasures. And I have a large notebook including a fiction about my future self.
You may think that I eagerly turned page after page. Nope. I felt too lazy about it. They are sitting on the shelf, just as they did for 15–20 years.
Good Old Office Word
However, after I started to use my PC, I wrote everything on Office Word. I stored them on my computer, on disks (yes, the black vintage ones), on CD’s and on external disks. I will probably keep them on cloud one day. I still have my first stories and novels with me.
Regarding Word, computers, tablets, disks and other stuff, there is also a risk of losing everything without a trace. On the other hand, you have limitless pages, limitless rights to make spelling errors (and of course, to correct them), and a document to share with anyone and anywhere you like.
Yet again, the inefficient traffic. Attach it, send it, remember who you did send it and when; a revision; change the name of the document, send it again, remember… another revision… send it again. You get the idea.
Note Taking Apps
Time are changing, so are the note taking methods. For a couple of years, I fell that my habits are evolving and I had to find a new medium. When you search for “note taking apps”, you will find more than enough results. There are many apps that will serve you well, but choosing is hard.
1. Pricing Plans That Fit My Budget
I don’t want to say that I’m looking for “free apps”. If there is an effort behind something, that thing should have some price. However, I live in Turkey for this moment, and dollars and euros cost too much. You pay one unit to an app; I pay five or six units. So, I may skip some beautiful apps just because they are pricey for me.
Extra costs may be exhausting for small businesses and digital agencies that work with tight budgets. It is difficult to continuously follow the limits of your chosen plan and pay attention not to exceed them.
2. Simple But Functioning Design
I frequently witness that developers have an urge to add features to app, just in case. This attitude makes the app crowded over time. Customers may think those features are exactly what they need, but when the app becomes too complicated they will hurry to leave.
Sometimes we need plain apps that do one thing at a time. You want to take notes and share them with team members. That’s all. Let another app make the task management. You may mutter to yourself: “inefficient app traffic?”. No. If your apps are simple and effective enough, you’ll have a fully functioning highway.
3. Structure That Promotes Team Work
Big teams have big apps created by big companies. Smaller teams don’t have that many team members, but working together with any number of people can get complicated any time, when there is a constant work flow.
We, as Unitz.co, see there is a bleeding wound especially for digital agencies where employers continuously come and go. Every goer takes a bit of the company knowledge, which should be restored in order to resume work with a new team member.
We also love to focus on the invisible white-collar laborers: developers, designers and writers of all sorts. Customers and executives almost never see how much time and effort these people spend.
For example, as a digital writer, you are expected to write a post for a company’s blog (among many other tasks). It should be original, it should have a substantial length, it should contain useful information, etc. You have to put your mind into it, search the web, form a fiction in your head, use the right words and read it a couple of times. Then come comments and revisions, costing more time and more effort. Sometimes meetings. For all that, your work remains unseen. You publish the post, and the end.
Note-taking apps can help our work to be seen. You can record everything you do within the team and show the executives that there is more than the tip of the iceberg. Then, they can organize the work flow accordingly.
4. One Necessary Extra Feature
When it comes to digital agencies, working with teams includes not only your team members but also the customers. The thing with the customers is that they want to see the work done closely as, let’s say, temporary team members.
Regarding my field, customers are to make many comments and to make the last decision. Think about all the tiny bits of blog posts, social media posts, newsletter texts and so on, resulting in an inefficient e-mail or short message traffic.
The solution is simple: sharing the texts with customers within where you write and edit them. Of course, you don’t want to invite the customers to your team’s private space and share “everything” with them. If only you could allow their access to particular texts… We definitely wanted to add this feature to uWiking in the first place. It is literally a timesaver.
That’s all that comes to my mind, regarding note taking methods and apps. Feel free to comment and share your ideas with us.
