It’s not just a mater of productivity, it’s a matter of creativity.
You can’t analyze and synthesize what you can’t remember. But in an era of multi-tasking, Zoom calls, and notifications, how can you sharpen core skills like active listening, remembering, and note taking?
Here are some tips to improve all three skills and their overlapping benefits:
Listening
How can you really listen in a sea of external and internal distractions? It involves more than just your ears.
👀 Listen with your eyes:
Focus your eyes on the person speaking. (Yes, even – or especially – in a virtual meeting.) Reduce visual distractions from devices and electronic notifications. (Yes, even – or especially – in a virtual meeting.)
✍️ Listen with your hands:
Make notes. Don’t transcribe, paraphrase. React. Ideate. Sketch. Doodle.
🧠 Listen with your head:
Listen with curiosity. Look beyond isolated facts. Think about the context, the objectives, and the connections to the bigger picture.
💖 Listen with your heart:
Stall judgment and focus on empathy. Why is this important to the speaker? What is the underlying concern? Listen to understand, not to reply.
Remembering
There are lots of tricks and tips for remembering specific types of information, but what are some foundational elements of improving recall?
🏆 Motivation:
We tend to remember what is important and interesting to us personally. Ask yourself: Why is it important to remember what is said here today?
🎯 Focus:
Whether you are listening or reading, reduce distractions. Make notes. Listen and read to comprehend. Build in some quiet space between meetings so you can reset and re-focus.
Consider carefully the reading habits you’ve developed when reading on a screen. If you find your brain is in skimming mode, force yourself to slow down, especially where comprehension and nuance are important.
It’s probably not practical to print out every bit of text you want to read, but paper-like e-readers or browser extensions that enable reading mode can provide a welcome break from digital distractions.
🕸️ Association:
Connect what you learn to what you already know. Be observant. Read widely. Make a mental habit of looking for analogies across seemingly unrelated fields. Be like a spider. The bigger your web of existing memories, the easier it will be for the next idea to stick.
👀 Visualization:
A vivid mental image, a simple sketch, or even a well-chosen emoji gives you another strand in your web of association.
🔁 Repetition:
At the end of a meeting, review your notes. Repeat the main points to yourself. If you find a gap in your memory, go back and fill it in. Explain something you learned to another person. Build in some quiet space between meetings so you can review, reset, and re-focus.
To help you remember, that’s Motivation, Focus, Association, Visualization, and Repetition…Did you write that down?
Note Taking
Note taking is a critical skill for focus, comprehension, and retention. What are some elements of effective note taking?
💬 Paraphrase:
No, not parrot-phrase. 🚫🦜 A parrot can repeat words without understanding them. Paraphrasing requires comprehension.
For exact quotes, rely on recordings and AI transcripts. For understanding, put notes in your own words.
💡 Ideate:
Don’t transcribe. React. Record more than what you hear, jot down ideas sparked by what you hear. Use a different color, placement on the page, or a simple symbol (like an exclamation point) to distinguish those sparks of inspiration or ideas you want follow up on.
✍️ Ditch the keyboard:
For increased focus, comprehension, and retention, create your notes by hand rather than typing them. Allow enough white space for indents, shapes, arrows, and sketches that capture the relationships between ideas. Invest in writing tools that feel great and work well. (i.e. Pick a pen and notebook you can wax poetic over.)
Alternatively take electronic notes with a stylus. Paper-like note taking devices like the reMarkable are a great way to combine the benefits of handwritten note taking with the power of digital tools.
We surveyed some of the sharpest marketers around and almost 75% use hand-written notes all of the time or most of time:
🔁 Review:
Retention is increased by reviewing your notes shortly after they are taken. With the ideas fresh in mind, expand on phrases you jotted down to preserve context that future-you will thank you for. Mark-up and highlight key takeaways.
Or type a summary of your hand-written notes for documentation and to share with your team as needed. (This is also the moment when you have the best chance of deciphering your own handwriting.😉)
More Reading & Resources:
Want to dive deeper into the relationship between listening, note taking, and remembering? This way down the rabbit hole 👉🐰🕳
- [NPR] Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning
- [Popular Science] Why writing by hand is better for remembering things
- [A List Apart] Habit Fields – With strategies for strategically reshaping the associations between habits, behaviors, focus, and memory.
- [Psyche] What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read?
- [Ness Labs] Intentional Curiosity: Get your Brain to Focus on What Matters
- [Lea David] The Ultimate Guide: How to Take Effective Meeting Notes
- [engadget] The best E Ink tablets for 2024
