Get Better Advice by Taking Notes
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
If you've ever tried teaching someone something, this happens to geeks all the time, someone asks you a question right? How do I calculate the average of all the values in this excel spreadsheet? So you tell them. Then the next day, same question. Then the next day, next week... same question.
People just don't pay attention. They don't want to work. They don't want to work to rearrange their neurons so they can remember things. They'd rather remember what they have programmed to record on TiVo when they get home.
If you don't really value what the person is saying, don't waste their time by making them think you care because you are taking notes.
Take notes if you care. The irony is, if you care, you'd be taking notes without reading this lifehacker stuff. You'd be taking notes so that you don't have to waste that person's time with the same question over and over. You'd actually take the time and put the energy into learning and committing to memory inside your brain what you are hearing.
As with everything about the human brain, its all in shades of gray. The logical part of you might care a lot, but your subconscious is distracting it with memories of that cute girl from last night, and so on.
I've learned that its very useful to give your higher brain functions some external help. Sometimes this means throwing out all of the snacks when you go on a diet. And sometimes this means taking a notepad with you and taking notes even when you don't really think you need to.
"Pretending" to care by taking notes quickly turns into really caring and paying much more attention to what you are doing than you would otherwise.
I find software leaves much to be desired. I need the ability to tack graphs, formulas, side notes where ever I please, like Photoshop. Yet I need better text editor support, like Word or OpenOffice.
Doing it by hand is fine, but I can't take notes as quick as I can by typing. I have full control over a page, but there is no Ctrl-Z for spelling mistakes which can leave notes disfigured and unsettling to study from.
The solution to all of this would be to copy by hand and then re-type on the computer but this again takes a lot of time. Perhaps something like LaTeX etc. would help but again.. too much time spent on actual documentation preparation when it should be spent on note-taking.
Can anyone relate to what I'm ranting on about?
I got fast enough at hand notes, and found that if I kept my book open during the lecture, that I could skip note taking on a portion of the lecture if it was covered adequately in the book.
This is purely a function of practice. 5 years ago, a friend of mine could TeX math notes substantially faster than I could write them by hand, including reasonably complex commutative diagrams, lots of tricky formulae, etc. A big part of TeX speed is setting up a bunch of personal macros for commonly used symbols (e.g. \a instead of \alpha, etc.).
[I've had good experiences with Teeline shorthand; was able to learn the system in an evening, and from there it's just building up speed. Avoid Pitman's shorthand like the plague]
It hadn't previously occured to me do this in the doctor's office, but it's a good idea - the info a doctor gives can sometimes be (or should be) fairly involved. It's worth writing down.
Furthermore, taking notes allows you to process the information on two levels. The technical details (names of things, etc) can be relegated to the notepad and forgotten. Important general concepts can then receive your greater attention. A doctor who gives more involved advice to a note-taker is a doctor who knows that you can handle more information if you're writing some of it down.
Now if only I had a way to handle the situation where someone attempts to perform a task, but forgets an important step or two along the way.