Ask HN: How to take notes?

18 points by stephenheron 9 years ago | 7 comments

I seemed to have avoided taking any sort of notes for most of my professional career mostly relying on my memory. However as I get a touch older I can sense that I am forgetting certain points from meetings etc.

I am looking for advice on how others take notes or perhaps some good resources on note taking. It seems like such a simple skill but it is one I am definitely missing out on!

Thanks!

alexmorenodev 9 years ago |

My daily notes:

- Exercises I made today, with a few details (how it was going, why maybe I failed, why maybe that exercise was so easy).

- What I ate today and what made it good / how can I improve.

- Money spent, what made it good / how can I improve.

- How did I spent my free time (developed something, worked on a side project, what did I do, what could I've made).

- Random thoughts and ideas.

Instead of just put info there without detail, I try to "explain to myself" a little bit, helping myself when I check them later.

Funny how it helped me a lot when I got bored. Well, if I have nothing to do, maybe I might just check my own notes to see what I wanted to do days ago.

zhte415 9 years ago |

Print the agenda of the meeting with decent whitespace between points.

Fill in agenda with points covered.

Have decent minutes, which can be as simple as a snap of the filled-in agenda through to a list of follow-up emails. Whatever fits whatever hole. Camera phone shot of pen marks on agenda works well; important dates highlighted and calendar updates done to back up.

It seems incredible you take meetings without taking a record. Record meetings are hugely useful for others around you - attended or not - to stay in the loop in a formalised not 'do you a favour and tell you what we discussed' way.

flukus 9 years ago | |

Also fantastic when you need to CYA, you can email clients the minutes/discussion points and ask them to agree.

bartcobain 9 years ago |

Hello, In my opinion, when taking notes, the old way works better than the digital way Step 1. Get a small notebook or notepad that you can carry around with you. In my experience, is better if it fits in your pocket. Step 2. Start taking any note that comes to your mind, doing drawings helps a lot. Step 3. Bookmark your notes. Theres many ways to do this. Fold the corner of the page or add a sticker in the top of the page. Also highlight the notes you think are more important.

Thats all i got.

xoxo!

poletopole 9 years ago |

Buy a voice recorder for meetings. I used to do a lot of handwritten notes on my iPad as well.

nekopa 9 years ago | |

I don't know if its still available for iPad (I have the 1st iPad) but I used to use an app called AudioNote (I think).

With this app you could record audio, and any notes you took are synchronised to this audio. It was super useful...

thirdsun 9 years ago | | |

Apps like Notability [0] do this very well these days. You can combine text, pen and audio input, though I'm not sure if the audio is synchronized.

[0] http://gingerlabs.com/