Note Taking 2.0: Without a Pen or Paper – Part Two

April 10, 2013
image courtesy of davdibiase on sxc.hu

image courtesy of davdibiase on sxc.hu

In the last post, I showed how you can use an audio recorder to get all your ideas down. This is useful for coming up with story ideas, monitoring your thoughts, answering big questions that you need several days to answer, and remembering action steps that can change your life. Here, You’ll learn how to synthesize those notes into a simple system for finding them later.

This will work if you physically write down items as well, though you’ll need a file cabinet or folder system if you want to do this without a computer.

Find Any Idea You’re Looking For – Without Really LOOKING For It.

How long does it take you to find something you remember reading or hearing about? Does it take a long time to find something you wrote down to do later?

This can take tens of hours – just to find one item.

Your life is too important to struggle that much for something like this.

Authors like John C. Maxwell can typically find what they are looking for in under two minutes. That’s right, two minutes. With a system in place for storing your ideas, your brain can actually work for you. My system isn’t nearly as elaborate, but it is simple.

That is because I haven’t been doing it as long, or for the same reasons.

It is important with anything new that you keep the steps simple enough that you’ll actually do them. Keep it simple, then refine as it becomes habit.

Step One: It Starts With One Document

Create a folder you can easily access on your computer. Name this folder ‘notes’. In that, we will make one document. Name it “XX Month Notes XX YEAR” If you’re doing this in April 3030, you’ll write it as “April Notes, 3030.”

Step Two: Categorize

This is crucial for rapid recall. When you have to find the notes, you’ll want to search using a keyword category “CTRL + F” followed by writing in the catagory of note you’re looking for. When I record a note, I keep this category in mind as I’m recording it.

Here’s the format: [CATEGORY OF USE] + [SUBJECT MATTER] + [NOTE]

Here’s an example from a recent recorded note:

 stand-up comedy  – Celebrity/ Musician  note – Do you think Justin Bieber looks kind of like Ellen DeGeneres?

Okay, the joke needs more developing. It’s more of an intro to a routine than a self-contained punch line. Still, that’s how I record it into the voice recorder, and that’s how I write it in the note file.

Enter all your voice recorded notes this way, then delete them from your voice recorder.

Step Three – Rapid Recall

When you need to find all your favorite quotes, you type CTRL+F with your document open, then type the word quote (the category), or the subject (like ‘self-esteem’), and your document will instantly highlight the subject or category that contained that word.

Just in case it’s not perfect. Usually you can tell within 1/2 a year when you discovered a quote or story, or had an insight. If one document doesn’t have it, go to the next month, then the previous. It now takes 10 seconds to scan a document instead of 1/2 an hour. Your computer may even have a search function for all folders, so you can enter your category in the ‘find’ feature, and you’ll search all documents. Either way, your search time is reduced to nil.

Now, 2 years from now, if you decide to do a standup comedy routine, what do you do? Open your notes, search for all your ‘stand-up comedy’ notes, and you have 10-20 minutes of material to turn into whatever you want.

All that time, insight, and random ideas? You can harness them all, regardless of when they strike you.

What system do you use? And why do you use it? Let me know below in the comments.

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74 responses to Note Taking 2.0: Without a Pen or Paper – Part Two

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    I do something similar, but my files are separated by years, not months. I use month labels in the file, along with categories. This methods sounds more detailed though so I’ll keep it in mind in case my method no longer works.

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