I began taking notes around age ten in primary school. Though my teachers certainly instructed us to do so, I don't remember if anyone actually taught me how to take notes. Like the rest of the class, I studied and revised using them. I followed the teacher's explanations with a pen in my hand, jotting down words, sentences, and diagrams in my notebook. I maintained this habit during my entire studies. Still today, I prefer to follow a lecture while taking notes.

I view this in-class note-taking as a one-step process: I capture the teacher's words on paper and the notes become directly usable for revising.

When I write at work, I produce a lot of notes. For example, during a meeting I capture the salient points of a discussion, but the resulting notes, in their raw form, only make sense to me and to none of my co-workers. A meeting possesses much less structure than a university lecture, the messy, somewhat unreadable in-meeting notes require an extra pass to render them usable.

When I read a technical text, I take notes. I don't underline or highlight words in books; instead, I jot down the interesting word or concept together with the page number. Later, I go back to each notes' page and form a complete sentence about the concept or idea.

A few years ago, reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens made me think about my own note-taking process which now involves three kinds of notes:

• Fleeting note: temporary reminder of an idea, thought, or piece of information.
• Project note: information relevant to a achieve a specific goal, often involving other people.
• Permanent note: distilled ideas and arguments that form the core of a knowledge base.

The process still starts with the capture step, but it contains two more steps which produce the project and permanent notes:

Let's see each step in detail.

Capture

During the capture step I write down any relevant information I want to hold on for later. I already mentioned writing meeting or literature notes; I jot down anything that switches on that light bulb above my head. The capture transforms an intangible idea into a fleeting note.

Since my school days, my capture method remained essentially the same. Depending on my mood I draft words, create lists, or sketch shapes and arrows. I don't follow any particular system; I characterize my technique as a mix of linear and visual note-taking.

I haven't seen two people take notes the same way so I suspect any method that produces legible written text yields usable fleeting notes. Wikipedia and many note-taking application vendors frame note-taking as this capture step.

Capturing fleeting notes became almost automatic to me, but this step alone doesn't produce useful notes. I now believe the notes' value only emerges when I do a second pass over my fleeting notes.

Who? What? When? Where? Why?

The activity, which I name after the Five Ws of journalism, starts if a fleeting note belongs to a project. As David Allen explains in Getting Things Done you cannot do a project, you can only do actions that bring you closer to the project's goals. When processing a project-relevant fleeting note, I identify actions and define the project's next action.

In my personal system, I maintain a list of actions per project; the next action appears as the first element. At work, I store the project notes in whatever system the team chooses. The implementation doesn't matter as long as the note reaches the people involved.

Rephrase

If a note doesn't relate to a specific project, I write a permanent note and store it in my reference system. These notes come in different kinds including data sheets, manuals, literature review, definitions, and outlines.

For example, I keep a list of tools I require for replacing my bike's break pads and a note detailing Git commands I use infrequently. I have notes about concepts and ideas from articles and conference talks, and I draft summaries of books I read.

Initially, I tried to segregate the different note kinds, but now I simply place every non-project related note in a single system.

Most fleeting notes demand work to reach the reference system. I rephrase the recorded concept using my own words. I write full sentences in one or two paragraphs, preferably in active voice, and I avoid lists and bullet points. For example, my permanent note about Paul Graham's essay Writes and Write Nots reads as follows:

In his essay Writes and Write Nots Paul Graham, predicts that in couple of decades most people will loose their ability to write. Clear writing requires clear thinking which makes writing fundamentally hard. When you have a more prestigious job, you require to write more.

Today generative AI tools may write for you, but they don't to the thinking part. Paul Graham's prediction that the world will split into those who write and those who "write not". Following his previous argument, this means we will have a split between "thinks" and "think nots".

It took me only a few minutes to write these two paragraphs. I can immediately recall why this article resonated with me and explain it using my own words to other people if I want to.

I admit, not all my notes look like this; sometimes I cannot find better words than the original. Sometimes I just copy over my fleeting notes and move on, but when I skip the rephrase step I know I don't get the most out my notes.

Summary

In the past few years I adopted a two-step note-taking process. I capture ideas as fleeting notes. For projects, I extract next actions from the fleeting note and record a permanent note in a system the project team can access. Otherwise, I rephrase it the fleeting note using my own words to create a permanent note, which I store in a reference system.