Note taking has grown into a much more important skill in daily life than most people would assume. Put simply, note taking is the perfect example of embodied cognition: it involves actively paraphrasing, organizing, concept and vocabulary mapping information. This improves memorization, and can be invaluable when working in different fields.
Lawyer and educator Gareth has a Digestible Notes piece about memorizing mountains of text during law school to get familiar with the special jargon. He, like many others in the field, highlights how notes must be personalized systems that prioritize information in order to make memorization more efficient.
This is a practice that lawyers carry into their career and, is only one way that proper note taking has become essential. Many other jobs benefit from deliberate note taking, and we'll take a look at a few more examples below.
Note Taking for Consultants
Consultants — from business consultants and therapists, to coaches — serve as information specialists or content experts for clients, and are hired to provide solutions to a problem.
For marketing consultants, firms like McKinsey show how important presentations are for capturing clients' attention. Note taking skills are essential while prepping these presentations, as the best decks often come from notes that are insightful and well-organized.
However, consultants need to actively practice this skill during and after presentations, as well. They need to actively retain old and process new information continuously: the contents of their decks, any client insights, and key decisions reached. Note taking through various methods — either outlining or even mapping — allows consultants to do both while staying engaged during crucial meetings.
Note Taking for Professionals
Professionals constitute a wide range of careers across different industries, and all of these careers require a deep understanding of specific information. They need to be able to pull out information and discuss it at any time.
Market researchers are another example of professionals that handle huge amounts of data. Maryville University states that data-driven marketing focuses on using the latest data analytics capabilities to analyze how sales are made. However, 87% of marketers still consider data to be their organization’s most underutilized asset, despite 64% strongly agreeing that data driven marketing is the key to success. Being able to absorb and organize this data through proper note taking so they can be processed into media like infographics or presentations is part and parcel of market research work.
The right note taking tools and skills are crucial for professionals to be able to organize ideas and data into actionable programs. Just like market researchers, lawyers also make use of note taking to organize the vast amounts of information they handle in their work.
In terms of specific methods, Lawyerists suggests arranging notes in Cornell fashion, means separating them into a note-taking portion, key points, and a summary. This maximizes productivity by easily calling out follow-up items and keeping the writer in active engagement, which is also crucial in other types of professional work like those who work in psychology or teaching.
Note Taking for Project Managers
Project managers are in high demand thanks to the digital age. No matter the industry, project management professionals must be capable of capturing, editing, transforming and communicating over hundreds of unique data points in order to maximize relations between the project, the team and its status. Our previous article on Information Management stresses simple and reliable tools as necessary for organizing a lot of information like meeting notes, project timeline comments, delegations, or finances. Notes can help present these dense data in a visually effective way that allows users to capture snippets of information as mini-images. This is an irreplaceable technique that maximizes the efficiency of note taking across different careers. The human eye sees visual patterns 65,000 times faster via picture, which is why breaking up data into easily digestible "cards" or "snippets" is so important. NoteDex is stepping ahead of our competitors by aiming to be a true visual view of all the information on a card. With NoteDex’s rich information view, consultants, professionals, and project managers can see more than 20 notecards on a screen in order to easily pick out the information they need across the mountain of otherwise impenetrable data.
Author: Ruth Jackie
Article exclusively written for notedexapp.com