Capture The Information Completely And Accurately
Hello and welcome to a snapshot of what to expect within Video #4. This is going to be the note-taking method and strategy. We’ve gone from Videos #1, #2, and #3, which has helped set the stage for this particular video to capture the information completely and accurately.
This particular video is pretty simple, so do not take the simplicity as something that does not work because it actually works wonders. If you can apply this stuff, this is really going to help you out and then I’m going to show you other capture the information completely and accurately tools that you can use to kind of speed the process up. But before we talk about the tools, it’s going to be necessary and crucial to talk about the strategies themselves.
These are actually note-taking strategies that work really, really well. Basically, to start things out, for short reminders that you need to see visually to help you remember, post-it notes are effective. If you’re not aware what post-it notes are, they’re little sticky notes that you can paste to your wall, to your laptop, and things like that. There are even post-it notes via a lot of mobile phones. capture the information completely and accurately If you’d rather take notes via your mobile phone, that’s another route that you can go.
If you’re sitting down while listening, what you need to do, and take bullet points or a checklist is to use a pen and paper, because pen and paper is really, really effective. The reason why is because studies show that we tend to remember more if we actually write things down. The reason being is because we are actually applying and taking action and our mind and our hand is actually working together and therefore, it’s just easy to remember. That’s just something to keep in mind that if you want to retain the knowledge, make sure that you use a pen or a pencil and paper.
Keep in mind on the flip side, if your notes have online materials, mobile devices, it can actually be more helpful since what you can do is you can actually copy and paste information from your devices to your notes. Make sure that as you’re doing this, that you do not copy and paste every single thing. You want to make sure that you are being selective. And you want to make sure that you know your end goal so that you either need to use the notes to create infographics, to create presentations, or whatever. As long as you understand and you know that is your end goal, then taking notes and being selective about the notes that you take is going to be much more powerful.
Moving along, I want to talk about mobile applications that we actually recommend and are available to you for taking notes and keeping track of them. I’m not going to dive too much into these just yet because I want to cover the strategies first, but we’ll cover these in the videos after this particular video—Asana, which is a great note-taking application; then we have Evernote, which is a very popular one. I wanted to briefly touch base on those, but let’s jump right back into the note-taking strategies.
We’ve got key points, keywords, and references. Those are3 categories that you really need to focus on, and then, of course, we have reminders.
You’ve got to really think about this. Taking notes is not the same as transcribing. Transcribing was a thing that we all mostly did back in the day. We jot all the notes down, we jot everything that the teacher said down or the webinar speaker or whatever. That was the past. This is now. You’re no longer doing this. You’re no longer jotting every single word down because all that’s going to do is it’s going to overwhelm your brain and you do not want that. It’s important to really just jot down the essential parts. It’s really helpful to break it down into these categories, which I’m about to talk about.
We’ve got key points. These are focus points of the topics such as major headings or titles or main ideas. Rather than jotting down every single thing, because your brain retains 25% to 50% of knowledge, you can think—okay, this is what we talked about. The main heading was this—oh okay, I’ve got an idea of this. So, because your brain still retains a good amount of knowledge, as long as you can refer back to that without overwhelming your brain, your brain is going to be able to retain that knowledge. If you overwhelm it, however, that’s going to be a different story.
The second category is keywords. It’s important to record keywords relating to a specific key point—so starting with the key points that we talked about earlier. You want to find the keywords relating to specific key points to help you remember and identify the content or direction of the topic. Keywords are crucial because they help us remember specific areas, specific topics, the direction in which a speaker took—maybe they were talking, talking, and they decided to talk about something else, those keywords will help direct your brain back to its memory source.
And then we talked about references. References, you’re able to find a reference or where you can find more detailed information about key points or keywords. So, this allows you to kind of reach back, connect back to the key points, and back to the keywords. In practical application here, a reference could be a title and a page of a book, a site URL, or a quote by a person. Let’s say for example that you’re taking notes. You can add the key points, you can add the keywords, but if the speaker says, “Well, you need to refer back to page 55” or if they say, “Okay, let’s switch to chapter 3 and page 55” and then he spends all his time covering that. Rather than jotting everything down, you can write down ‘Page 55’ and refer back to it later on. It just makes your life a lot easier when you get to refer back to things rather than taking whole notes of that page and this and that.
Now, I want to talk about some effective methods that you can apply right now and immediately. Number 1 is to outline by adding indentations, bullet points, numbering, and letters. The reason why these things can be effective is it segregates the main ideas, keywords, references, and reminders. This is a lot easier when you have an electronic device, a mobile phone, or a laptop, and so forth because you’re easily indenting things. Because when you go back and review your notes, guess what happens—you’re actually scanning the document and then the indentation—the bullet points, the bold letters, numbering, and so forth actually helps stand out. The most important or major points will be on the left-most side going more specific per indent. So, what’s going to happen is if you do it this way and you make sure that made your points, your key points, and everything are on the left-hand side; and then you have your indentations, then it’s going to stand out. You’ll know—okay, that’s the heading, that’s a key point, that’s a keyword, and so forth. You’re able to help your brain categorize 3 different categories here. This works really well if you are familiar with the topic or if the presentation is also an outline form, because you’re scanning it; you’re able to detect these specific categories. But if you’re using a tablet or any other online app, which you can easily edit, that can work really well as well. So that way, you don’t really have to convert it from text to electronic.
Now, let’s talk about reminders. Reminders are always good to have. These are often your personal observation that can add more context to your notes. If you have something like a personal observation that you noticed during the lecture itself, you have those reminders, that are actually going to help later on because you can be reminded that something happened or something that they’ve said and stuff like that. An example of a reminder could be also red flags or possible questions that you have about a certain topic. What you can also do is you can also flag a topic by adding a ‘?’. If you feel you need to look at it more later or do more research, or even refer back to the lecturer, speaker, or instructor. That way, you know you can go back later on.
Now, let’s talk about columns. Columns will basically allow for easy filtering, sorting, and scanning notes. If you look at here, if you have your key points and everything categorized and everything like that, it’s just going to make it a lot easier when you’re going back to scan the notes. Yes, it may be a little bit of a pain in the butt at the moment but I can guarantee you, it’s going to make your life a lot easier and you’re just going to be a lot happier. Plus, it works really well in an online format.
The next thing and the third thing, we have mapped. So, with mapping, you can start your outline from the top of the left going from a more general idea to more specific as you go down the tree or as the ideas branch out. If you think about something like a genealogy tree or something, you start from the top and you have a general idea and you move more specific down as you go. That’s another method that you can use for note-taking is to map things out. Or you can use something like a mind map, to map things out. That way, when you look at something, you understand the process better, especially if on the webinar, on the lecture, they’re talking about specific strategies, processes, some sort of step-by-step form of lecture, you could take that and map it out. That way, capture the information completely and accurately when you come back to it, then you know exactly—okay, step-by-step, they start from here, they got here, they go there, and so forth. This works really, really well with visual-type folks.
If you think about it, there are 3 different types of main learning types—there’s visual, there’s kinesthetic, and of course, there’s auditory. Visual type people, prefer to actually see things and then do it. Kinesthetic type learners prefer to actually do it while they’re actually hearing it and so forth. Sometimes, you can’t do that but by actually doing something using your hands, kinesthetic people will actually remember it better. Auditory, taking notes, and taking textual notes and things like that are actually more effective as well. Mapping really, really helps and it works really well if you have a little idea of how the topic is going to be presented, and then of course you break it down and be more specific. That brings us to Video #5 where we will be talking about Asana’s exciting capture of the information completely and accurately feature.
