Omar Kholeifgoodbye World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age Sternberg Press

Editor, content marketer, production director and writer with 12+ years of experience in the startup, design and tech digital media industries. Read full profile

⌄ Curlicue downwards to keep ⌄

Note taking is as ancient an art every bit any. At that place are hefty tomes on the subject of how to best capture and organize data in a swift and legible manner and courses devoted to the subject in colleges.

And yet, the most popular suggestion in our Skribit widget , which you can use to suggest articles for Lifehack authors to write, is on the question of whether to employ digital or traditional methods of note taking. It seems that the mountains of existent information haven't yet caught up with the modern age, addressing traditional note-taking methods, but altogether bypassing digital annotation-taking technologies and techniques and assistance in deciding which method of notation-taking is best for the individual.

What do we want to have notes for?

There are all sorts of reasons to take notes, and it'southward important to first look to these reasons in deciding which particular method of notation-taking is all-time for united states in the modern age. Unlike note taking needs demand different notation taking methods and the importance of each of these needs to each of united states differs drastically. University students and freelance writers both tend to take notes for unlike reasons.

⌄ Whorl down to keep reading article ⌄

⌄ Gyre down to continue reading commodity ⌄

What might you lot need to accept notes for? Here's a few I thought of (experience gratuitous to add your ain in the comments):

• Ubiquitous capture—a note taking organization to help you capture ideas, thoughts and of import information any time, any where. Note taking to ensure you never forget.
• Retaining information from lectures and seminars—you tin can't take a lecture home like yous can a book, but taking notes helps to first the temporary nature of verbally delivered information.
• Problem solving—note taking as a method of sorting out the flighty thoughts in your head with a more than tactile medium.
• Visualization—visualizing complex systems and concepts with the help of diagrams and sketches.

While I'm sure I haven't covered every believable reason to take notes, these are the things that come up to listen as the most of import, popular and common reasons for note taking.

Digital methods of note taking

Digital methods of note taking accept grown in popularity over the concluding few years in particular. Applications like Evernote and OneNote have risen in popularity, with the former receiving enthusiastic reviews from many sites including this one and supporting many devices, including the iPhone. This makes it an excellent option when information technology comes to ubiquitous capture.

The ubiquity of cloud-supported, multi-platform applications is not the only reward to digital note taking. Your notes become indexable and searchable, which is infinitely useful in itself. And I don't know about you, but I can type way faster than I can write with a pen—that's either a product of the age nosotros alive in or the product of working equally a writer who pumps out thousands of words on my keyboard each solar day, I don't know. But I'm guessing that most of you reading tin type faster than you tin write, too.

⌄ Scroll down to continue reading article ⌄

⌄ Whorl down to continue reading article ⌄

Besides, as users of Evernote on the iPhone will know best, dropping photos of whiteboards, business concern cards, presenter'southward slides and the like into your notes is superbly easy—with traditional methods, yous take to write out as of info y'all want to go along.

But digital note taking methods fall downward in a few important areas; drawing diagrams, sketches and mind maps is usually incommunicable and where it is possible, by no means a pleasant experience. Feel gratis to drop me a link to an app that makes this sort of matter enjoyable, but I don't believe such a thing exists. The obvious exception: tablet PCs. But nobody really wants to purchase a computer that can take notes better than a laptop and exercise little else quite as well.

Whatsoever sort of visualization is limited when information technology comes to digital annotation taking, and non just when it comes to diagrams, but the power to fashion text in any format not based on the paragraph.

Permit'southward get dorsum to the list of reasons for note taking and see how digital note taking does:

⌄ Ringlet downwards to go on reading article ⌄

⌄ Scroll downward to go along reading commodity ⌄

• Ubiquitous capture—digital is a winner when it comes to ubiquity, though you'll demand a few fancy—and ofttimes expensive—devices to make that ubiquity truthful.
• Retaining information from lectures—digital wins hither. Well-nigh people can continue up with the presenter far more quickly with a laptop than with pen and paper.
• Trouble solving—sort of. Problem solving often requires non-linear idea, and thus non-linear expression, but yous tin withal mankind an thought out in paragraph or bullet form.
• Visualization—non really; y'all need specialist, expensive equipment such as a tablet PC or even a graphic creative person's tablet to make visualization as a function of note taking work.

Traditional methods of notation taking

The skillful one-time pen and paper has served humanity well for… well, a damn long time. Become back a bit further and y'all've got papyrus, wax, chiseled stone and all sorts of things. The reason nearly note taking literature panders to such methods is simply that such methods have existed for a long time. Nobody brought a laptop to take notes in a lecture ten years ago.

And while it can be slow, unless yous learn skills such every bit shorthand usually only learned by journalists and professional notation takers, and can't be searched or snap an epitome in between blocks of text (without going home and press one out and taping information technology in, which sort of defeats the purpose), it is flexible. Y'all've got a blank canvass of newspaper before y'all, and you tin can mark information technology nevertheless you wish.

You can format text in strange and unusual ways, including the famous Cornell method of note taking, diagram, sketch and visualize in any way you wish without obstructing. Many fans of newspaper-based note taking call it liberating, and not without reason. This is why the Moleskine has become an icon of frappucino-sipping hipster civilization; those guys detest to be restricted.

There's one other reason many people honey taking their notes on paper. Information technology's never mentioned in a practical context, but I think information technology's an important bespeak to brand. It's tactile. Some people feel they tin connect with their words more easily than they can with text on a screen when they create those words with a pen. And if that helps you procedure data, that'due south bully.

⌄ Curl down to continue reading article ⌄

⌄ Scroll down to keep reading article ⌄

How do traditional methods of note taking line up with our listing of reasons to take notes?

• Ubiquitous capture—there's no reason you lot can't take a notebook with you lot everywhere, but at that place's no denying that ubiquitous capture is far more easily achieved with digital methods (unless the idea to exist captured is visual in nature). Packing a phone in your pocket is like shooting fish in a barrel, taking a laptop everywhere is 2d nature for many, but lugging around a pen and pad isn't ever desirable.
• Retaining data from lectures—if you tin can write quickly, write autograph, or y'all're good at really truncating information on the wing and so you lot tin get information technology down before the lecturer moves on, note taking in lectures is totally doable with pen and paper. But I wouldn't do it; my hand would cramp up long before I caught up with what the speaker was going on about.
• Problem solving—you've got free command of the page which is always helpful when it comes to non-linear thinking; map information technology out nonetheless y'all similar. Writing with a pen besides forces you to slow downward a scrap more, which is much better for processing data and coming up with ideas than the fast-paced world of typing. Paper wins when it comes to problem solving.
• Visualization—digital note taking just can't match pen and newspaper for visualizing concepts, whether information technology'due south a diagram or sketch, or a skilful sometime mind map. Maybe ane day things volition change in this department, but information technology'due south a clear win for newspaper.

The verdict?

The verdict is up to you.

Notation taking is one of those things where the best course of activeness is totally dependent on what you lot need to do. Practice yous need to sketch ideas for your graphic design job? Go paper. Do you need to keep track of shopping lists, things you've got to do tomorrow and ideas for articles? Go digital. Need the benefits of both? Then become with both.

The pros and cons are lined up in a row for you here—the determination, I hope, is much easier than it was before!

⌄ Scroll down to keep reading article ⌄

⌄ Curl downwardly to keep reading article ⌄

mylerentils.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/the-art-of-note-taking-in-the-digital-age.html

Share this post