The Lonely Savage

I had the privilege of an evening without anything important that Had To Be Done yesterday; just the way I like it, so I decided to take 90-minute hike over to TEDtalks. I often enjoy just picking a random lecture and listening to whatever it is about; the wisdom and insight offered by these people potentially offers life-changing advice at the rate of a suggestion a minute. Instead of trusting my inspiration and my memory to serve me during these 90 minutes, I decided to take notes.

Note-taking is a form of art that most people never indulge in. We go through school scribbling down words as fast as we can, hoping that we cover the essentials and that we catch what’s important. Re-reading our notes as short a time as a week or a month later can be a hassle as we never really know exactly where we were; there are inconsistencies, irregular headers – if any! – and ugly formatting that makes it unattractive to revisit.

Knowing that my own note-taking was no better, I once decided that it was a good idea to develop a note-taking system that would help me. So as to avoid reinventing the wheel, I looked around the Internet to see what other people had done and compiled their knowledge into a system that I’m now using. It is a slightly modified version of the Cornell Note-Taking System, for those who already know some of how this works. Here’s how I do it:

The first thing you want to do is to draw a horizontal line at the bottom of the page. Make it about four rows high. You now have a big box at the top of your page (let’s call this one the body) and another smaller box at the bottom (risking sounding like a webpage designer, let’s call this one the footer). The next step is to draw a long vertical line straight down through the body of your page, leaving the footer alone. Draw these two lines for several pages at a time so you don’t have to interrupt your note-taking flow. Use a ruler, be precise and don’t make a mess. You generally want to make this vertical line so that one part of the body of the page is roughly three times as wide as the other. What you end up with should look something like this:

This page will contain all the notes which you take. While the design resembles a mirrored version of the Cornell Note-Taking System (their ‘thin’ bar is on the left, not the right), the way that the boxes are used is quite different in my system.

In the big box, you will take notes as normal. This is where you write “Both Charles and James were advocates of the Divine Right of Kings, but James listened to the views of his subjects and favored compromise and consensus“, for example. On the right-hand side, in what we can call the sidebar, we insert headings and important references. This is where the history student would write “Charles I” and/or “Kings of England, p.153″. If you’re taking classes where a single subject spans multiple dates, this is also where you could write your divider, writing in “September 2nd, 2009″ in the sidebar to show where the new lesson started. Make absolutely sure that the notes in the sidebar are on the same horizontal level as the note in the body of the text. This is to ensure that you know exactly where to look when you’re searching for information.

The bottom box is, in the Cornell Note-Taking System, used to summarize the information on the page, but I find that this is usually a bad idea. A single page can contain notes on many different subjects and using a box like this doesn’t always work well for summarization. The sidebar will act as a table of contents which still gives a pretty good at-a-glance summary. Instead, I use this bottom box for simple “To do”-lists. The bottom box might contain, after a history lesson on Charles I, the following content:

0 – Who was John Cooke?
0 – Why did England enter the Thirty Year War?
0 – What were other European ruler’s reactions to his beheading?

The circle in the beginning is a personal reference so that I can, quite literally, check the box once I have moved this question to myself into a task management system like Things. Once I see circles while going through my notes, I know that I need to move something into my task management system and then put an x in the box. This footer is excellent for noting down homework, too!

To summarize: The body is used to take notes. The sidebar is used to indicate key vocabulary, concepts and references. The footer is used to write quick follow-up questions and take notes about things that need to be done.