Two Strategies to Take Notes Efficiently

Nicole Hilbig
1 min readJan 1, 2022
Photo by Olly on Adobe Stock.

Do you spend enormous amounts of time writing notes, but don‘t understand what you’ve written?

Here are two strategies for you:

1. The Salience Hierarchy

Start by writing the most noteworthy or the most touching. What makes notes salient is subjective and depends on the particular context to make them memorable: temporal, spatial, or otherwise. Because background knowledge influences which points are selected for notes.

2. Comprehensive Note-Taking

You systematically and comprehensively write down everything that happened during a period of time. It forces you to recreate events in the order they happened. This helps recalling details that might have been forgotten. Because people tend to retain information in specific ‘knowledge structures‘ why remembering one aspect of an event might trigger recall of an entire sequence.

„As Freud might put it, we cathect our notes — they become part of us.“ — Nicholas Wolfinger

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Nicole Hilbig

I love learning and writing about the changes in our digital era. My topics are future, work, productivity, writing, education & personal stories.