From someone who episodically takes notes in haphazard fashion and very rarely looks at them again, and thinks he's probably woefully working harder than he should as a result.
If I need to recall I just go back and read it again.
Edit: Why not record? Because people get weird about it, I’m not allowed to, or literally illegal. Also, playback at 3x speeds still too slow vs reading. Scanning skipping and repeat also too much friction.
The two things I do track are specific action items: those get a star in the margin so they can be found quickly and sometimes executives use specific wording they want you to emulate; that gets underlined and then offloaded to a reference document.
I also make sure to be aggressive about giving my notes dates and titles for meetings so I know where/when notes are from.
______
Step One: Choose the Concept You Want to Understand.
Write it on the top of a sheet of paper.
Step Two: Pretend You Are Teaching the Concept to a Child.
Write an explanation of the concept on the paper as though you were teaching a child.
Step Three: Stuck? Go Back to the Source Material.
Re-read or re-learn the material until you can complete step two.
Step Four: Simplify & Create Analogies.
If your explanation is wordy or confusing, simplify the language. Create an analogy to help understand the concept.
_____
The ideal note-taking instruction would present each note-taking strategy (Cornell notes, verbatim notes, strict memorization, etc) and then let the student choose for themselves. The way it is now, most students (myself included) won't ever use Cornell notes again out of principle even if we can admit that the system is better than our own.
Even better, apply Auftragstaktik[0] and let the students use whatever they will to complete the task, judge their results afterwards for being able to recall a block of material, and make a competition out of it.
- When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting or the organization
- Then, in a separate step, structure and transcribe the notes into org-mode (or OneNote or Roam or Evernote or …)
For me, having that two-pass system really does a lot to improve retention. I can type a lot more quickly than I can write by hand, so the actual time commitment for the transcription step isn't very high. But I've found that forcing myself to go over my notes (at least once) in order to get them into an organized and searchable format does a lot to improve how well I remember what I've taken notes on. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to be as messy and disorganized as I need to be in order to get the information down in the first step, because I know that what I'm writing down isn't the "final version", and I'll be going back over it again to edit.