4 ms·

The rash of "no way" responses makes me wonder: what note taking system(s) have you encountered that actually work for you? (And why, if known.) From someone w

by maphew 4y ago

The rash of "no way" responses makes me wonder: what note taking system(s) have you encountered that actually work for you? (And why, if known.) From someone who episodically takes notes in haphazard fashion and very rarely looks at them again, and thinks he's probably woefully working harder than he should as a result.

gmane 4y ago
I find for me personally, note taking is a way of forcing me to actively listen. Most of my notes are like yours: haphazard and rarely looked at again. The two things I do track are specific action items: those get a star in the margin so they can be found quickly and sometimes executives use specific wording they want you to emulate; that gets underlined and then offloaded to a reference document. I also make sure to be aggressive about giving my notes dates and titles for meetings so I know where/when notes are from.
twojacobtwo 4y ago
Though maybe not very useful directly for taking lecture notes, I like the Feynman technique for self driven learning. It's pretty sparse for layout and specific details, but the guiding principles are simple and keep you moving in the right direction: summarize your current understanding of a discrete topic in simple terms, iterate toward further simplicity as you learn more. ______ Step One: Choose the Concept You Want to Understand. Write it on the top of a sheet of paper. Step Two: Pretend You Are Teaching the Concept to a Child. Write an explanation of the concept on the paper as though you were teaching a child. Step Three: Stuck? Go Back to the Source Material. Re-read or re-learn the material until you can complete step two. Step Four: Simplify & Create Analogies. If your explanation is wordy or confusing, simplify the language. Create an analogy to help understand the concept. _____ https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman
- baq 4y ago
  he is on record saying you can't really explain magnetism to a child ;) https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8 https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8
- t235a 4y ago
  To be frank, this is still self-deception. Your subconscious won't be tricked by this kind of trickery. It's like being both the player and the referee in a game. You still need external feedback to improve yourself.
quartesixte 4y ago
I type moderately fast (can hit 150 wpm, average 110wpm on typing tests) so one of my favorite methods is transcription. I just verbatim type out what the speaker is saying. I can keep up if I leave out filler words, blow past typos and ignore punctuation. If I need to recall I just go back and read it again. Edit: Why not record? Because people get weird about it, I’m not allowed to, or literally illegal. Also, playback at 3x speeds still too slow vs reading. Scanning skipping and repeat also too much friction.
- karencarits 4y ago
  There are some open source projects now using Whisper from OpenAI to transcribe close to realtime, such as Buzz (https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz)
jimbob45 4y ago
The notes are ultimately for the person taking notes. As such, it's a bit aggressive to tell someone they will enjoy your system better than their own. Given that we know that everyone learns differently, it's silly to try to fit everyone in one box. You might as well force everyone to sleep on their stomach. The ideal note-taking instruction would present each note-taking strategy (Cornell notes, verbatim notes, strict memorization, etc) and then let the student choose for themselves. The way it is now, most students (myself included) won't ever use Cornell notes again out of principle even if we can admit that the system is better than our own. Even better, apply Auftragstaktik[0] and let the students use whatever they will to complete the task, judge their results afterwards for being able to recall a block of material, and make a competition out of it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics
quanticle 4y ago
This is what works for me: - When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting or the organization - Then, in a separate step, structure and transcribe the notes into org-mode (or OneNote or Roam or Evernote or …) For me, having that two-pass system really does a lot to improve retention. I can type a lot more quickly than I can write by hand, so the actual time commitment for the transcription step isn't very high. But I've found that forcing myself to go over my notes (at least once) in order to get them into an organized and searchable format does a lot to improve how well I remember what I've taken notes on. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to be as messy and disorganized as I need to be in order to get the information down in the first step, because I know that what I'm writing down isn't the "final version", and I'll be going back over it again to edit.

by maphew 4y ago

gmane 4y ago

I find for me personally, note taking is a way of forcing me to actively listen. Most of my notes are like yours: haphazard and rarely looked at again. The two things I do track are specific action items: those get a star in the margin so they can be found quickly and sometimes executives use specific wording they want you to emulate; that gets underlined and then offloaded to a reference document. I also make sure to be aggressive about giving my notes dates and titles for meetings so I know where/when notes are from.

twojacobtwo 4y ago

Though maybe not very useful directly for taking lecture notes, I like the Feynman technique for self driven learning. It's pretty sparse for layout and specific details, but the guiding principles are simple and keep you moving in the right direction: summarize your current understanding of a discrete topic in simple terms, iterate toward further simplicity as you learn more. ______ Step One: Choose the Concept You Want to Understand. Write it on the top of a sheet of paper. Step Two: Pretend You Are Teaching the Concept to a Child. Write an explanation of the concept on the paper as though you were teaching a child. Step Three: Stuck? Go Back to the Source Material. Re-read or re-learn the material until you can complete step two. Step Four: Simplify & Create Analogies. If your explanation is wordy or confusing, simplify the language. Create an analogy to help understand the concept. _____ https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman

baq 4y ago
he is on record saying you can't really explain magnetism to a child ;) https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8 https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8
t235a 4y ago
To be frank, this is still self-deception. Your subconscious won't be tricked by this kind of trickery. It's like being both the player and the referee in a game. You still need external feedback to improve yourself.

quartesixte 4y ago

I type moderately fast (can hit 150 wpm, average 110wpm on typing tests) so one of my favorite methods is transcription. I just verbatim type out what the speaker is saying. I can keep up if I leave out filler words, blow past typos and ignore punctuation. If I need to recall I just go back and read it again. Edit: Why not record? Because people get weird about it, I’m not allowed to, or literally illegal. Also, playback at 3x speeds still too slow vs reading. Scanning skipping and repeat also too much friction.

karencarits 4y ago
There are some open source projects now using Whisper from OpenAI to transcribe close to realtime, such as Buzz (https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz)

jimbob45 4y ago

The notes are ultimately for the person taking notes. As such, it's a bit aggressive to tell someone they will enjoy your system better than their own. Given that we know that everyone learns differently, it's silly to try to fit everyone in one box. You might as well force everyone to sleep on their stomach. The ideal note-taking instruction would present each note-taking strategy (Cornell notes, verbatim notes, strict memorization, etc) and then let the student choose for themselves. The way it is now, most students (myself included) won't ever use Cornell notes again out of principle even if we can admit that the system is better than our own. Even better, apply Auftragstaktik[0] and let the students use whatever they will to complete the task, judge their results afterwards for being able to recall a block of material, and make a competition out of it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

quanticle 4y ago

This is what works for me: - When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting or the organization - Then, in a separate step, structure and transcribe the notes into org-mode (or OneNote or Roam or Evernote or …) For me, having that two-pass system really does a lot to improve retention. I can type a lot more quickly than I can write by hand, so the actual time commitment for the transcription step isn't very high. But I've found that forcing myself to go over my notes (at least once) in order to get them into an organized and searchable format does a lot to improve how well I remember what I've taken notes on. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to be as messy and disorganized as I need to be in order to get the information down in the first step, because I know that what I'm writing down isn't the "final version", and I'll be going back over it again to edit.