Learning & thinking · a life skill
Note-Taking Systems
notes you can find again when you need them
A note-taking system isn't an app or a tree of folders. It's a short path every idea takes: caught in one place, turned within a day or two into a note that says one thing in your own words, and tied to something you already know. The only real test is whether you can find it again when it matters, so this page has you run that test first.
- Moderate to start
- High impact
- Learn it: 2 weeks
- The test: find five things
The scrap alone would have been lost in a week: it has no source and no words you'd search for. Five minutes the next morning gave it a title, a source and two links, and that's what made it findable.
The habit
Try it now.
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Keep one inbox
One place every idea goes first, always with you: a notes app, a pocket notebook. Catching should take seconds, so don't sort anything yet.
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Within a day or two, give it a claim for a title
Turn each scrap worth keeping into a note whose title says what it claims: "Testing yourself beats rereading", not "Memory". After a week the scrap won't make sense even to you.
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Write it in your own words, with where it came from
Two or three sentences you could explain from, and the source. If you can't restate it, you haven't understood it yet.
Copying a paragraph is quicker, and it's the version you won't understand in a month. -
Link it to one older note
Ask what it relates to that you already have, and link it there. One link is enough. That's a second road back to it besides search.
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Test the system by finding five things
Once a month, think of five things you know you've noted and look for each. What you can't find, or can't make sense of, tells you which step to fix.
When to break the rule: not everything needs writing up. Shopping lists, meeting times and phone numbers can stay as they were caught, or be deleted. Process what you'd want to find again in a month.
Test your notes
Find five things you know you wrote down.
Write five things you're sure are in your notes somewhere: a book you meant to read, a recipe, what someone said in a meeting. Then go and look for each, with the clock running. Anything that takes more than a minute counts as slow. For anything you can't find, say why, and the board tells you which step of the system is leaking.
Your system
Look for the first thing to start
Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. The timer runs in this page only, and you look in your own notes, wherever they are.
The study behind it
Pen or laptop mattered less than claimed: in a careful replication, test scores came out the same.
In 2014, a widely shared study suggested that students who took notes on a laptop did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand, because they copied lectures word for word. Heather Urry and colleagues repeated that study as closely as they could, with 142 students: 74 on laptops, 68 writing by hand.
Half of the original result held. Laptop notes had more words, and more of them were copied verbatim. The headline didn't: scores on factual and conceptual questions didn't reliably differ between the two groups. And whichever tool they used, students who wrote more tended to score higher. A small meta-analysis of eight studies of the same question gave a similar picture.
The honest limits: this was one recorded lecture and a quiz in the same session, not notes you come back to over months, so it says little about a system over time. What it does say is that the tool isn't the deciding factor. Pick the one you'll keep using, and spend the effort on what happens to a note after you take it.
The idea
Why it works.
Most notes fail at one of three points. The idea was never caught. It was caught, but nowhere you'd think to look. Or it was found, but it was a fragment only you-on-Tuesday understood. Each step of the path closes one of those gaps, which is why the five-thing test can tell you which step you're skipping.
Writing an idea in your own words is also a small act of learning: you have to understand it to restate it. And a claim for a title plus one link give future you two ways in, a search for the words you'd actually use and a route from something nearby, instead of trying to remember which folder it went in.
When it goes wrong
Habits that help.
- Keep catching quick and unsorted. If saving an idea takes two minutes of filing, it won't get saved on the bus.
- Empty the inbox on a schedule. A short slot each day or week. An inbox that only grows is just another junk drawer.
- Title notes as sentences. "Testing beats rereading" can be searched and linked. "Memory stuff" can't.
- Don't rebuild the folders. Reorganising feels like progress. Finding things is the measure, so rerun the test instead.
Go deeper
Keep going.
Practise this in HourLife.
In Learning: Captures. Track the books, courses, podcasts, videos and articles you are working through, log where you are, and keep what you take from them.
