Note-taking is essentially recording information for future reference. Whether you’re a student or a knowledge worker, you’ve probably got a system that you’re comfortable with, be it scribbling notes on the back of a napkin, copy and pasting text into a digital notebook, or sketching elaborate graphics inside a leather-bound Moleskine notebook.

Whatever your system is, here are a few tips compiled from our own notes that could improve the way you record information.

Note-Taking How To #1: Choose a Method That Fits You Best

Lifehacker covered popular methods of note-taking, including the Cornell Method, which segments your notes with columns; visual methods like mind mapping; and developing a short hand system. Other helpful tools include digital notebooks that run off of a word processor on your computer or exist in the cloud like Evernote or Zoho Notebook. You can combine both digital and non-digital methods with a Livescribe pen, which records your pen’s strokes and digitises it. The pen can also take audio notes.

Note-Taking How To #2: Make it Easy to Find

In the quest to remember everything, it would be tragic if something important slipped away. For digital notes, built-in search functions and tagging systems often help you find your notes in a matter of seconds, but things can get trickier for a paper-based system, where searches are done at the speed of paper-flips.

This is where a good indexing system of colours and well-placed text markers such as Tim Ferriss’ can be useful for paper notebooks.

Note-Taking How To #3: Writing to Remember

Dustin Wax at Stepcase Lifehack explored what exactly happens in our brains during note-taking. He found that students who took notes during lectures recalled a higher proportion of key points than those who didn’t. Here’s a surprise find: It wasn’t the notes in and of themselves that caused this, but the process of digesting, ordering and evaluating the information to find the most pertinent material prior to writing it down that allowed for more effective recall.

If that’s the case, then a note-taking system like Sketch Notes can help crystallise your thoughts while etching useful pictures to convey ideas graphically.

Not Just an External Memory Bank

A good note-taking system can work like an external brain – but there are other uses for it apart from a recall tool. Well organised notes can help trigger new ideas and also help with problem solving. To paraphrase David Allen, when you lay out your thoughts externally, you are able to dedicate more effort to processing and organising them.

When faced with a daily barrage of information, the note-taker’s burden is to make sure that nothing of importance is forgotten. We advise running a quick check on our Note-Taking How To Guide to give your note-taking system a boost.

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