A few words on taking notes

If you go back 20 years, reading a map was a fairly common skill. You’d plan a route, take some notes, then try to navigate it. And if you took the route enough times, you’d commit it to memory. You’d remember a fountain or the colour of a specific house along the way. You’d know when and where there would be traffic or construction, and the alternate routes to get around it. But these days, we just use our phones. We follow turn-by-turn directions from street-to-street without needing to commit too much to memory.

It’s helpful. It’s easy. That’s not really up for debate. But reading a physical map is still a very useful skill. There will inevitably be times that you don’t have cell service (or you lose your phone, or maybe you want to disconnect from technology), and knowing where you are and how to get where you’re going are important. And just like taking notes by hand, it allows you to remove some of the noise created by technology, and to focus on the important bits.

All the way up through ninth grade, I took detailed notes in school.

In tenth grade, I sat next to my best friend in world history, and I watched in awe as he took zero notes.

His reasoning wasn’t exactly clear, but the insinuation was that he saw it as a game to see what he could retain through sheer memory alone.

That really made an impact on me, and I effectively stopped taking notes up through college.

At work, however, it became abundantly clear that I needed to becoming better at note taking.

The two areas I found it useful were during client meetings and during podcast interviews.

For client meetings, I usually write down things that are said which I don’t understand (jargon, acronyms, etc.) and synthesized action items (“let’s use tech X as a data store”, etc.).

For podcast interviews, I would write down my question as a header, and then write down interesting quotes or topics that the guest brought up. Later, I’d use that list to pursue the topic in more detail or to write the description for the episode.

I am grateful to those I’ve worked with who take detailed meeting notes, but I find I only reference them when I need my butt covered. And frankly, getting a detailed summary from a transcript that’s run through an LLM seems perfect for that high level “action item” stuff.

The most important notes are the ones that help you make sense of information you learned while chatting with someone.