How to Remember Everything

I’m an elder millennial. I’ve been brought up on digital goods and services, my whole adult life. I prefer text/email to calling, I prefer ordering things online to shopping in person, and I prefer telling the Google Assistant to turn my lights on and off to flipping the switches myself.

But there’s one digital trend that never caught on for me: note-taking apps. I’ve tried them all and I always return to my trusty old A5 notebook. So how do I keep up with my digital first colleagues? Let me share my secrets:

The purpose of taking notes is to be able to recall information when you need it. It’s like putting a little tidbit of knowledge in a bank, so you can come back for it later. I’ve always found that physically writing on physical paper with a physical pen and has made this easier for me. It might not be for you, but keep this purpose in mind when evaluating different note taking strategies.

The purpose of taking notes is to be able to recall information when you need it

The tradeoff I’ve always found with physical vs digital note-taking is that digital note-taking makes it really easy to ctrl-f and find a particular word or phrase (or tag if you fancy) but it’s really bad at giving you the context of what was happening around that point. What else were you thinking about? Did you just have a meeting about a related topic? How can you keep track of the path your brain took to get to its current location?

I also hate that too much energy is wasted in the “where should I put this note” phase, which causes too much cognitive friction and can get in the way of good note-taking. We want to get more of what’s in our brains onto the paper, so we need to make that process as smooth as possible.

To that end, here are the strategies that I think are critical for taking good notes, however you decide to take them:

1. Have a structure, but be flexible Like any other situation as a leader, it’s important to have “strong opinions, loosely held.”

Your notes will never be perfectly organized. Say it with me: Your notes will never be perfectly organized. People often try to optimize note taking for one of two things: 1) to make taking notes quick and easy; or 2) to make finding notes quick and easy. Both of these strategies miss the mark and forgot the objective that we talked about before: The purpose of taking notes is to be able to recall information when you need it. Optimizing for note writing often yields a messy mix of all sorts of interrelated notes, sometimes tied together by tags or some other arbitrary grouping tool. This makes finding what you’re looking for an exercise of “what would I have tagged it?” If finding your note requires manually getting your brain back to the place where it was when you took the note, then you’re just relying on memorization, which is the opposite of note-taking in the first place.

Your notes will never be perfectly organized

On the other hand, optimizing for note finding can be equally fruitless. To end up with a beautifully organized hierarchy (or graph, if you’re into that) of notes requires so much forethought in terms of “where should this note go?” thinking that it often causes you to forget the important thing you wanted to note down anyway. “Should this note about implementing a custom sign-in for a customer go in the customer folder? Or the authentication one? What if I made a new folder for Implementations?” blah blah blah and before you know it, your brain has scuttled on to something new and the important nugget you wanted to jot down has trundled away.

Acknowledging that your structure will never be perfect liberates you to use as much structure as necessary at the time. Here are the general patterns I follow:

a. Threads

Every “project” or “person” or, more broadly, “topic” gets a thread. A thread is a collection of discrete pages in my journal that must start with an index and overview page, and then uses the margins of each page to denote where the thread continues in the journal. When I’m on a call for a certain project, I turn to the most recent page for that thread, and take my notes there. When a new project starts, I create a new index and overview page. Each time I write a note in a thread, I date the entry so I can maintain some sense of chronology.

The threads themselves are pretty structured: they have an index page with a table of contents that points to all the other pages in the thread and the important details/dates on each. Each page of notes has a link to the previous page of notes and to the next in the top corners. The notes within the thread are relatively unstructured. They’re doodles and chicken-scratch and stream-of-consciousness — you know, brain-stuff.

b. Monthly/Weekly Views

The most structured part of my process are the Monthly and Weekly views that I create at the end of each month, in preparation for the next month. In just about any line of work, planning is important, and this helps me keep tabs on things that are upcoming or particular deadlines that I need to meet. In my journal, I dedicate a full, two-page spread for each monthly overview, and a full two-page spread for each week in that month.

The left page of the monthly view has a line per day highlighting the events/milestones for that month. The right page contains monthly goals/objectives at the top, and the bottom third is reserved for the next three months, so I can get a good view of the next quarter at a glance.

Each weekly overview is a two page spread as well. The left page has a 2 x 3 grid with a cell for each workday, plus one for the weekend (if you have enough going on in your life that you need two cells to plan for a weekend, more power to you!) Each cell has the date and day of week, and then I leave the rest of the cell to function as a daily task list.

The right page of the weekly overview is intentionally left blank as a scratchpad for other notes/thoughts/ideas that come up while not in meetings, or to track longer term items from week to week. This can be trip planning, paperwork, dog training schedules, etc. I think it’s important to always have a clear place to jot down random thoughts that come into your head without having to think too much about where they go. Having these scratchpad pages connected to each weekly view gives me at least some form of chronological connection when I come back to them later. (I can see the weekly tasks/events that were on my mind at the time, which can help give context to my otherwise random doodles)

c. Tasks, Events, and Notes

The other piece of structure that I do my best to keep to is using different types of bullets to signify different types of notes. I use a closed circle bullet ( • ) to signify a task that needs to be done, an open circle ( ○ ) to signify an event, and a dash ( — ) to represent a plain-old note. I also circle the bullet or dash to represent priority tasks or notes/ideas that merit more attention.

When a task is complete, I cross it out with a nice big cross ( ✕ ) through the bullet, so it’s clear which items are left and which are done.

2. Review, Review, Review A central tenet of the Bullet Journal method is the “migration.” A migration is the process of reviewing all your unfinished notes from a period (a day, a week, a month, etc) and deciding what do to with them. You will typically take one of a few actions:

a. Migrate it forward Move it to the next period. For example, if a task from my Monday cell of my weekly view didn’t get completed on Monday, I will migrate it to Tuesday. If it’s important, I might circle it to prioritize it for the next day.

b. Drop it Intentionally de-prioritize a task or event to get it off your plate. Sometimes, you’ll decide that a task isn’t worth doing anymore, or a problem has resolved itself. I signify this by drawing a down arrow ( ↓ ) through the bullet. This action is pretty satisfying 😎

c. Delegate it If an important task is just not getting done, I’ll often look for peers and folks on my team who might be able to take it on for me. I signify this by drawing line through the task and capping it with an arrow and the name (or initials) of the person to whom I’ve delegated it

I follow this migration pattern at the end of each day to prepare for the next day, at the end of each week to prepare for the next week, and at the end of the month. The month-ending migration is a larger exercise for me because I sketch out the pages for the next month’s overview and all the weekly views, plus I review my digital calendars for the upcoming three months to fill out my monthly view’s upcoming quarter section.

3. Write. It. Down. Finally, the most obvious (but often overlooked) pillar of my process: write it down. Everything. All the time. Things move too fast, work interruptions are too swift, and good ideas are too fleeting to rely on your brain to remember what’s important all the time. Assume that if you don’t write it down, you’ll forget it. If you hear something important, or if you think of something novel, get it on paper. Your future self will thank you.

In Sum There’s no silver bullet to taking better notes. There’s just what works for you. The common thread that I’ve notice among all successful note takers is that they seem to write down everything, all the time. They have a system that lets them both: a) get ideas down quickly, and b) find what they’re looking for quickly. They regularly review and prune their notes to make sure that their system is performing well.

I hope that you can make some use from these observations. The only wrong way to take notes is to not take notes, so start writing, and go from there.