In this week’s ProductivityCast episode, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art voiced their thoughts on note-taking methodologies.
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In this Cast | Note-Taking Methodologies
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Note-Taking Methodologies
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
OneNote
Workflowy
Cornell Note-Taking Method
Mind Mapping
3 Best Note-Taking Methods
Common Note-taking Methods
7 Most Efficient Note Taking Methods
Evernote
FreeMind/Mind42
TheBrain
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and a goose open out with Francis Wade and art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23And I'm Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, what we're going to be doing is starting kind of an ongoing conversation we're going to have over the next few episodes on notetaking. And what I thought we would do today, what I thought we could have a conversation around is really the the note taking methodologies that we know of, and use and kind of go from there. So let's start off with some of the most popular note taking methods that are out there. And then we can kind of touch base on what we use, how we've used them in the past, and maybe some pointers in terms of how people can bridge the gap between the hybridization of notetaking, which is that people have to toggle between paper and digital so often today, even though they don't realize it because we get a lot of paper in our world. And we take digital notes many times, but yet we actually don't make them actionable. And I think there's this balance between making things, reference and action. And I'd like to have a conversation about that as well around these the baseline methods that I know of like outlining, the Cornell note taking method, there's mind mapping, there's just unstructured note taking. There are many other ways in which we can take note taking, where do you want to begin in terms of note taking methods that you know about, and you'd like to discuss?
Art Gelwicks 1:52Well, for me, it's a pretty straightforward one, I'm an outline guy. I love outlining, I use outlining that's, that is my fallback method, I find constantly doesn't matter what tool I'm using, I'll find myself creating outlines for organizing and moving through content. Mind Mapping is probably the counterpart in my mind to outlining, because it's that freeform structure, which outline limits a little bit, but I don't think, too, not to an extreme. But both, interestingly enough, translate just as well analog to digital, I can do them in both platforms. But also I found that they define the tools that I'm going to use. Because if I go into use a tool for note taking or try one out, if I don't have an easy ability to generate an outline in the tool, the tool is much less attractive to me, I have much less desire to use it. And even beyond that, to be able to get the content out of the outline to other tools, say from an outline into a word processing document, I have to be able to do that. So it still becomes that common denominator. It's the the one note taking method that I don't have to think about. It just naturally happens for me.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:15So can you explain for listeners what you mean by outlining? What does the hierarchy of the content look like? How do you structure your outlining method?
Art Gelwicks 3:23It's it's interesting, because there are very formalized structures and outlining you can you can look up specific approaches to how to create outlines, numbering structures and things like that, for me, it's really just a matter of relevance of relationship of content to each other. And then creating a progressive structure. One of the problems with outlining that people will run into is, especially if you do it on the analog side. As you start to capture the outline, it feels like it's being locked into place, you know, you've created a top level topic, you've captured sub items underneath that topic. And you may have captured additional details under those sub items, and so on and so forth. When you're dealing with that on an analog platform, you know, if you're taking it on a legal pad, it can be challenging, because if you need to go back and put something in the middle of that, functionally and physically, that platform doesn't allow you to do that easily. On a digital platform. It's much easier, you can backtrack and you can interject it in. But what I find outlining is at its best is a way of providing context relevance between topics that you're dealing with, whether you're taking notes from a book, you're going through and capturing information during a meeting. You're planning out a project. It's a great way to provide that structure. For two methods that I use. One is lots of levels I Ness things deep. I mean I will drop things in I'll have a question and then underneath that I will address additional answers. If I have, there's a statement that's made, and I have my own thoughts about it, well, I'll drop in sub items under that, that show mine. Because that in the digital space gets coupled with collapsing and expanding, most good tools will give you the ability to collapse and expand an outline to its various different levels. And that gives you an ability to refocus your thinking, but also reorganize the content easily. If you look at tools, I use OneNote all the time. But there's another great one called workflowy, where you can collapse down to a top level topic and then move that around in your outline structure to reorganize it and get get your thinking more structured. So formal outlining methods, I think that's one of the things that scares people off from outlining is they think back to school, and they go, Okay, this is what I had to do. And I had to have a Roman numeral here. And I had to have numbers underneath and lowercase letters under. And that if I didn't have that structure, right, it wasn't correct. Now, that's a bunch of baloney. You can do whatever you want. You can do colored dots, you can do emojis, you can do numbers, you can do letters, you can do bullets, I'm a big one for doing bullets. If I have no reason to have a sequence for the things under an item, if there is a logical sequence, I'll use numbers or I'll use letters. But if there isn't a sequence, I just need to indicate that these are slightly different than the ones above it and the ones below it. So structurally, it's relatively simple. I mean, it's exactly what we define. We just can't overcomplicate it. And I think that's one of the hang ups with outlining is people get that PTSD from elementary school, or middle school, in this case, of trying to figure out how to structure it just right, you don't have to worry about that just write this stuff down,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49I find that I, I spend most of my time using the outlining method, when I'm taking notes in meetings. If the content is highly structured, I find that outlining is best for me, because I can, you know, bullet, or 123 or Roman numeral one, number one, A, and I can follow the line of whatever that is that tends to be in an educational environment where I'm consistently taking an online course or I'm studying something online. And that gives me that conceptual framework for being able to follow and take notes along with those items, I tend to feel like this breaks down for me very quickly for being able to review and understand the notes when there isn't a structure or a flow to what is going on. So a meeting has an agenda, a seminar or workshop, the webinar or whatnot will have will have a syllabus, and I will be able to follow along with those things. If it doesn't have that, then that's where the outline method really breaks down for me. So just so that people have an idea that you know, you can, you can utilize or not utilize structure here, and that can be useful to you. Let's move on to mind mapping since art already brought it up. Mind Mapping is probably my favorite and preferred way of really capturing in general in a freeform fashion when it comes to brainstorming, or even sometimes collaboratively working with people so that they can structure their own thoughts. Many times people have difficulty structuring their thoughts. And so for those who don't know what a mind map is, a mind map is a freeform visual note taking method, whereby you create a parent thought, and that parent thought is usually in the center of a page.
