I’ve always struggled as a coach to take good notes and then later organizing them so that I can easily and efficiently access them. When I was younger, I would take great notes but lacked a good system for filing and being able to access those notes later. Over the past few years I started typing my notes using a laptop or iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard which makes searching for information at a later date and keeping things organized much easier but, I have found I struggle with keeping my focus on the speaker rather than my keyboard. Some coaches use their phones to take pictures of presentations slides but I’m not sure how much they can parse from the average Power Point slide.
Most people can type much more than they can write by hand, however, new research shows that students who write notes down by hand, retain more information than those who type them out. With this in mind, I have gone back to taking notes by hand when I am at a clinic or conference.
If you have a smartphone, Evernote has a fantastic app that will allow you to digitize your handwritten notes and combine them with digitized versions of printed handouts and pictures of presentation slides from your phone. Here is a quick and easy process for how I combine the best of both hand written notes, and digital organization.
This is how I take notes and organize them:
- Using a regular pad of paper, I take as many notes as I think are important or interesting. I have found by experience that transcribing a lecture or presentation doesn’t work for me so I try to summarize, abbreviate and generally tighten up anything that I want to be able to review.
- Using my smartphone, I take pictures of any slides that I think are important or interesting.
- Once I get home, I create a note on the Evernote App on my smartphone. Select the Notebook that you want to put the note in. You can do this by subject or however you’d like to organize your notes. I have set up a Notebook for clinic notes.
- Then I add a hashtag to help me sort notes by topic. You can create as many of these as possible so I like to categorize them by topics such as #hunh, #culture, #programbuilding, etc.
- Once I’ve created the note, placed it in a notebook and tagged it for search later, I tap on the camera/photo icon within the Evernote app to take pictures of the handwritten notes I’ve taken that weekend. If will ask you if you want to take photos or use your camera roll. You’ll want to take photos. Once I’ve taken all the pictures I need, I save them to the note.
- Next, I add pictures from my phone to the note. If you tap on the camera/photo icon withing the note, you’ll want to select adding photos from your camera roll. Tap on all the pictures you want to use and then add them.
What I think is great about this process is that it combines the cognitive processing of hand written notes with the organization and easy search function of typed notes.