(My) Definition#
What is note making and what’s the difference to “note taking”? I don’t know how deep you are into the topic of note taking/making, but if you are in this never-ending rabbit hole, you might have heard of the term note making. And if so, yuo might have noticed that some people use the terms note taking and note making interchangeably and some people don’t. Further not everyone draws a the line between the two terms at the same point. So please note that the following is my personal definition and understanding of the terms.
Note Taking#
When I think of note taking, I think of the process of writing down information that you want to remember. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as writing down notes in a notebook, typing them into a digital document, or even recording them in an audio file. The key point here is that the focus is on capturing information that you want to remember for later.
Especially in the context of lectures or meetings, note taking is a valuable skill to have. It helps you to stay focused and engaged with the material, and it provides you with a reference point to look back on later. In these situations, the goal is often to capture the main points as quickly and accurately as possible to avoid getting lost in the details and missing important information. So note taking is often a more passive process, where you are simply recording information as it is presented to you.
Example Lecture Notes#
My workflow here is (regarding lecture notes) to write down the main points as a bullet lists with multiple levels of indentation to structure the information. If I had time before the lecture, I would create a simple outline of the topics provided in the lecture slides. But because sometimes the lecturer goes off script, I would have to adjust my outline on the fly. Additionally, some information is not provided in the slides (due to questions from the students or some stories the lecturer tells) so I jot down these information as well.
I can’t say that I’m a good note taker, but I’m trying to improve my skills in this area. What I’ve noticed is that if I am able to go through the slides before the lecture, my notes are more structured and a lot better than if I listen to the lecture for the first time. But yeah, the time is often limited so it doesn’t always work out.
Note Making#
So, let’s say that the note was filled with “unprocessed” information from the note taking phase. It is only plain text, bullet points and probably a lot of typo’s. The next step is to make something out of these notes. This is where note making comes into play.
The next step is to make something out of these notes. This is where note making comes into play. The goal is to take the information that you have captured and turn it into something that is more meaningful and useful to you. This can involve organizing the information in a way that makes sense to you, connecting it to other information that you have, and adding your own thoughts and reflections to it. What does this mean in practice? Well, it can mean different things to different people, but here are a few examples:
- Summarizing the information in your own words
- shorten some information, remove duplicates, etc.
- Making connections between different pieces of information
- linking related information together
- old lectures from the same course
- different courses
- code snippets in my vault
- so called “evergreen notes” (I call them “wiki notes”, but more on that later)
- etc.
- linking related information together
- creating a visual representation of the information
- mind maps
- diagrams
- etc.
Honestly I always underestimate the power of visualizations, because I’m a very text-based person. But I’m trying to incorporate more visualizations into my notes, because I’ve noticed that it helps me to understand the information better and to remember it more easily. So in this step of the whole process, I’m creating more out of the information I’ve captured. Sometimes it helps to compare my notes with other people’s notes, because they might have captured information that I’ve missed or they might have a different perspective on the information that I haven’t considered yet. Probably you have noticed that note making is a more active (creative) process than note taking, and you can spend a lot more time on it.
To be honest, I don’t spend the same amount of time or energy on every note. It depends on my personal interest in the topic, the importance of the information, the time I have available, etc. Sometimes I just read through my notes and fix some typos.
Conclusion#
So in conclusion, the definitions and the workflow is very different from person to person and that’s totally fine. I think it’s important to find a workflow that works for you and that you feel comfortable with. I’m still in the process of finding my perfect workflow, but I’m getting closer every day. I spend a lot of time tweaking it and trying out new things, but I think that’s part of the fun. But I get if people do not over-engineer their workflow and just stick to a simple one.
I am planing to write more about my personal workflow in the future, so stay tuned for that. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me your preferred way.
Resources and Further Readings#
Here are some resources that I found helpful in my journey of note taking/making: