How to take notes

Taking notes is the most important skills that you can have.

Notes can help you:
• Remember the things you will definitely forget after some time
• Organize thoughts, knowledge and ideas in your own perspective
• Create artistic product
• Build a legacy
• Communicate with others
• many other reasons ......
So it is very important to talk about how take notes.

There are many useful resources about this topic, I only list two in here:
• Lin Xiuhao's lecture on how to take notes (in Chinese)
• Thomas Frank's Youtube Channel

In next, I will talk about taking notes in general, then we will divide note-taking into three categories: study notes, research notes and life notes. At last we will talk about some techniques in note-taking and give you some examples about famous people's notes. Now let's begin:

What do we need to think about note-taking?

There are 3 principles in taking notes:
• Admit that you will miss something (even something important)
• You should have different note's styles for different purposes
• Write your own understanding and questions in your notes

There is a lot of debate on whether you should take electronic / paper notes. My opinion is: No matter which one you choose, stick with it! Just like marriage, it is bad to change in the middle of your life, so you need to think through.

My personal preference is electronic notebooks, since it is easy to copy, store and modify. The software I've used so far are: Microsoft OneNote, EverNote, Shimo Document (An online document tool in China) and this blog. But I think I will focus on this blog from now on, since it is very convenient to access it, look it on my phone and tablet, and share my article with others.

Besides, if you do like taking notes on a paper, please remember to scan it after you finished and store it electronically. It will prevent some horrible things happen to your notes (like theft, burning, etc.)

Taking notes is one of the best way to "test" yourself whether you really understand something or not. When you are confused about something, try to take a note about that, write down everything that you know and try to do it in a way as you are teaching someone, this is generally called "Feynman's Technique". If you can do it smoothly, then you know everything about that; but if you are stuck at some point, then you know where to look for. So either way, you gain something.

Also, it is very important to record the time and place that you took notes, it can help you track your life, which is very important when you get older and have more things going around your head.

Now let's talk about three important types of notes for everyone, I call them: study notes, work notes, and life notes. We will start with study notes.

Study Noes:

This types of notes is used for studying. No matter you are a student, an employee or a CEO, you need to learn something, and you should learn from website, audios, videos, webinars or actual lectures. The nature of this type of learning is that it is one-way communication. The lecturers talk about something that you don't know, so you need to take notes. Taking notes can help you relax and concentrate on what the lecturer says without trying to understand it now, you can always go back to your notes. So the only purpose of your note is to provide you a tool to go back and understand it further.

There are many templates for taking study notes, one of the most famous templates is Cornell note-taking template. You can see it in below:

Figure 1. The template for Cornell note-taking system

This image is cropped from: Cornell Note-Taking Website

Cornell note-taking system contains three major parts: Cue column, note-taking column and summary section.

Cue Column: In the Cue column is used for keywords and major questions in this section. Once you finished the notes, you can cover the note part and try to remember everything from cue column, it is just like using feynman technique.

Note-taking Column: This is where your notes go. Keep in mind the 3 principles of note-taking we've talked about earlier in this article. Trying to use hand-drawn pictures and arrows to represent the logic, do not use lots of words since that will slow down the writing process. Your notes can be imperfect at first time, you always have time to rewrite your notes, so just feel free to write the way you like.

Summary Section: Once we've finished taking notes and recite them from cue column, the most important ideas / thoughts / models / procedures will be summarized in the Summary section. This part will be most useful late when we go back to the notes in the future.

I'm sure you have noticed that there are 5 steps that you need to go through in order to get maximum results from Cornell note-taking system. Those steps are:
1. Record
2. Questions
3. Recite
4. Reflect
5. Review
The meaning for each step is given in Figure 1.

Let's move to our second type of notes: Work notes.

Work Notes:

This part is very important to me, because I'm a PhD student and a programmer. In research, I need to write research notes; in programming, I need to write documentations for my program. So most of my notes are work notes.

Unlike study notes, which is created from something that has already been organized, in work notes, everything is determined by myself. I need to choose the structure of notes and what I need to record in the notes. But no matter what research project that I'm currently working on, there are several things which are universal in all areas, I can name the three stages of research as: pre-work, work and post-work stages.

In pre-work stages, our notes should contain:

• The problem that I want to solve
○ Introduction of the problem
○ Give some examples (if can)
○ Current understanding of this problem
○ Clearly state the problem that I will solve
• The method that I tend to use
○ Theoretical / Experimental background about the methods / techniques
○ Examples of that (usually reference to some paper, could add a little bit explanation, about how they apply this method)
○ Research Procedure (This is very important!)
§ How do you design the procedure? Why is that?
§ What parameters do you use? How to get them?
§ Is this method / procedure from previous literature? Or you are creating a new method?
○ What kinds of data I need to have? And how to process them?
• The results I tend to have
○ State different results that I need to have.
○ How do I use these results in order to answer the main question?

In work stages, our notes should contain:

• Actual procedure we take (like a log file for computer system, chronically recorded everything you do)
• All the questions we have and their solutions (should be referenced to the log file)
○ Write down the details about the problem
○ Write down the thoughts about the problem
○ Write down the solutions
○ Reflect how to prevent the problem
• Raw data that we've got in each step (Periodical results)
• Processed data according to the methods we listed in the notes from pre-work stage

In post-work stages, our notes should contain:

• All the data, figures we need for our manuscript
• All the interpretation for our data and discussion / thoughts about other's results
• Other useful information for publication (research) / distributing (computer programming).
 As we can see, work notes are much more complicated than study notes, which makes sense because work notes can be used as a secret weapon for a team or a company.

There are many useful tools and resources for you to use:
• Jupyter: A python-based note-taking app, it starts in the browser and you can basically do everything in there.
• Latex: A mark-up language that is widely used in scientific and also programming community. On Mac MacTex is the best tool, for windows is CTex (for chinese users) and CTAN.
• Write the DOCS: A website that teaches programmers how to write documentation.
If you keep writing professional work notes, after a few years, your value will increase dramatically. If you share your notes with the world (like this blog), then you are making the world a better place.

Life Notes:

Studying and working complete my life, so OK, bye!

Just kidding. There are many memorable moments in your life: marriage (one's own and friends), new born baby, get a promotion, anniversary, birthday. These moments should be noted and kept forever.

There are many digital albums and blogs online that can help you with that.

Just as I said, I devoted most of my time into studying and working, so I didn't have much life here.

Summary:

I hope after reading this article, you will know what to do about taking notes. I mean, just do it, you will see the benefits very fast.

I hope you like this article. See you in next one!

Take care, bye bye!