Productivity
How To Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens, is a book about learning and self-development, disguised as a book about taking notes. He focuses a lot on improving the performance in the academic setting, understandable by the fact that Ahrens is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen, but the lessons are clearly translatable to the workplace.
Read MoreThe quest for the perfect note-taking application: A never-ending saga full of excitement over the new shiny app followed by disappointment when the new-found love fails to meet a need I just realized I have to solve. I really tried them all. But they all ended up sucking in one way or the other. But as I putting down some of my thoughts around jobs-to-be-done, I realized that note taking is in fact a solution to a multitude of problems. There are many cases when taking some notes is the the answer, but understanding the question can help one in choosing between one approach and the other.
That led me to thinking about my own set of jobs for note-taking. This is not meant to be a guide on note taking, but as a personal example on how a simple tool (in this case notes) can serve a lot of jobs. Here we go:
Read MoreIf Evernote feels like a drag to use, but you can't explain why (especially when everyone around you is raving about it) it might be because you have a different goal for note-taking. You might be using the wrong tool for the job.
Evernote wants to act like your second brain. But storage of data has no intrinsic value by itself. Even saving itself is devoid of any goal. In my case the secondary brain is a wonderful analogy but my main interest is in saving information in my primary brain. I want to remember the things I am saving, not burry them in a database. My goal, in that sense, is to record and organize the information I collect so I can create my own repository of knowledge. That is what I am going after and note-taking is just a tool, not a goal in itself.
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