Why I Quit Taking Notes and You Should Too
Good old notetaking. Capture those ideas before they get away.
However in the age of apps, notetaking is a time-suck that separates good ideas from your workflows and encourages procrastination on your grand projects.
At work, side projects, or personal hobbies, I rarely ever take notes anymore.
It made a real difference, and take my word for it — I don’t lose good ideas and I’m productive.
Not just the old fashioned pad-and-pen notetaking either, I’m talking about removing notetaking completely from your work day. Cold turkey.
No Pad and pen, no spiral notebook.
But also: no Evernote, no One Note, no Google Notebook, no Keep, no Sticky Notes (digital), no sticky notes (physical), no Notepad, and no Surface Pens.
At the very least, you should be able to remove notetaking from at least 95% of your life. Take a look at the activities a knowledge worker needs to get done in a single day.
- Chair three work meetings to discuss app requirements with clients
- Brainstorm with manager on presentation to the CEO for a new business idea
- Email three potential customers or partners
- Code review recent work by team-members and write some code to finish off a story
- Write one Medium post about a great productivity hack
- Digest the Google News of the day and compose a couple of super-witty Tweets about it
- Plan the billion dollar company you are going to start
These are different activities that each require different workflows. The stuff the human does to put everything together. Notetaking takes your work out of the workflow. Those ideas can be captured right in the tools, instead of outside it in a separate place.
For chairing the meeting, a meeting app, and calendar.
For the meeting with the manager, Google Slides, and our calendar.
For the code review, the source code tools of choice.
Google Docs or Onedrive, Medium and Twitter for the content.
No notetakers are needed to translate the notes into the tool where the ideas need to be.
Gathering client requirements for a complicated business software product can produce hundreds of pages of notes. But those notes can be captured in the stories themselves. Instead of One Note, right into the story it goes.
Don’t take notes on ideas for that email. Right into the draft email it goes. If you run out of thoughts and still have work to do, drop it and move on to the next activity.
Drafts serve as great to-do lists. Brain dump your ideas right into a draft Medium post. If the well runs dry before you finish, drop it and come back to it later. You shouldn’t need to take notes on ideas for putting together your brilliant Twitter observations or other social posts anyway.
Most important, is when creating your grand new project or genesis of your obviously billion dollar company.
What used to be your notebook, separated into ‘Projects’, is now actual drafts.
Draft code in git (and the code comments), draft documentation in Docs, draft presos in Slides, and on and on.
As far as rich snippets. Urls and such? Browser bookmarks. You can live most of your day in the browser. Create draft docs of all types as you progress on a project, but leave those notetakers behind.
