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It's not taking notes, it's paying attention. It's listening. It's letting the speaker know that you are interested and value what they are saying. If you've e
by pj 17y ago
It's not taking notes, it's paying attention. It's listening. It's letting the speaker know that you are interested and value what they are saying.
If you've ever tried teaching someone something, this happens to geeks all the time, someone asks you a question right? How do I calculate the average of all the values in this excel spreadsheet? So you tell them. Then the next day, same question. Then the next day, next week... same question.
People just don't pay attention. They don't want to work. They don't want to work to rearrange their neurons so they can remember things. They'd rather remember what they have programmed to record on TiVo when they get home.
If you don't really value what the person is saying, don't waste their time by making them think you care because you are taking notes.
Take notes if you care. The irony is, if you care, you'd be taking notes without reading this lifehacker stuff. You'd be taking notes so that you don't have to waste that person's time with the same question over and over. You'd actually take the time and put the energy into learning and committing to memory inside your brain what you are hearing.
- diN0bot 17y agotrue, but being able to write things down goes one step further than mere listening: remembering.
- lionheart 17y agoWhile I used to agree with this kind of black and white perspective on caring I've lately begun to think differently. As with everything about the human brain, its all in shades of gray. The logical part of you might care a lot, but your subconscious is distracting it with memories of that cute girl from last night, and so on. I've learned that its very useful to give your higher brain functions some external help. Sometimes this means throwing out all of the snacks when you go on a diet. And sometimes this means taking a notepad with you and taking notes even when you don't really think you need to. "Pretending" to care by taking notes quickly turns into really caring and paying much more attention to what you are doing than you would otherwise.