Taking Proper Notes, 1 – the Cornell Method

Suppose you’re at a conference, a workshop, a lecture, a meeting.

Someone’s talking, giving you information.

You want to take notes to not forget the important stuff. I get it. Makes sense.

Here’s how I do it. I use a variant of the Cornell method.

I take notes by hand, usually. I use my trusty Dingbats dotted book.

I draw a horizontal line a third from the bottom of the page.

I draw a vertical line a third from the left margin of the page.

A bit like this:

It’s time to take notes.

In the big, top-right section, note down anything that feels worth writing. Don’t overthink it, we’re filtering later.

Once the event is over, while it’s still fresh, on the left column you want to distill the learnings of the right section. Kind of like margin notes.

You can copy specific sentences that are the key points, or summarize the actual key points from the larger set of information. Doesn’t matter. However, you should make sure your summaries are self standing and don’t need you to refer back to the larger set of notes.

Once you’ve done summarization on the left side, you go to the bottom section. There you write your executive summary: what’s the condensed version of the page or maybe few pages? Just a couple of sentences per page, or a short paragraph will do.

The idea is to keep it condensed and easy to parse: write once, read many.

That’s it. Now we go digital.

Whenever you have time, go through your notes.

Open a text file on your laptop, in your notes app.

Write first your executive summary. Then, a bullet point list of all the summaries. Literally type them: this improve retention of information.

You can have many notes for one event – one per key learning, possibly.

And that’s it.

Enjoy your new information, and your ability to find it and consume it time and again easily!