It took me 20 years to perfect note taking!

A friend of mine was out celebrating last night with all of us after receiving her first A in Law School.  With three months left she will then graduate and take the bar and hopefully become my future lawyer, (hopefully her services won’t be needed). She said something that was very interesting: "It took me 20 years to get this A" noting that we are conditioned and trained until that moment our entire educational careers we reach our goal. That’s what I took with me today to work.  The majority of the successes we achieve, goal we reach or even ones which we are after all stem from the conditioning we endure as a student.

Today I realized note taking is one of those things.  I think each person has to tweak it for their own but the foundation is always the same. For the most part, we learn how to take them in high school, then shorten them or learning to write much faster in college and then take these acquired skills to the work force to be used particularly in meetings. Why does all this matter? 

I’ll give you a setting. My boss and colleges gathered for a small meeting. In which we would delegate tasks for an upcoming event.  As he  separated each task out to each person, he remarked on attendance, things we weren’t  sure about yet, times and etc. This had nothing to do with my particular task as I was just given a list of people to contact.  Most beginner students start off with the mentality, “ I only need to write down what is going to be on the test” or in my case I would only need to note what is delegated to me- here are the people, here are their emails. The experienced student knows "I need to take notes of the “core” of this conversation, but also jot down and highlight the contributing factors." It is usually these little facts that turn up  later in a discussion question. The meeting then ended and we went to our desks. I then realized that part of my task did in fact entail some of those contributing factors. I was given the task I communicating with the rest of our team the logistics of the event. If I had only jotted down only the names and emails of who I had been instructed to contact and disregarded time, place, flights, who from the press would be attending etc.  I would not have been able to communicate these logistics very well to the team. My major is communications so not being able to communicate is something that I look at as a very serious fail personally. It would have also made me look quite inadequate if I needed contact my boss  to have him repeat the majority of the information he just went over.

There is also the type of beginner student also takes notes viciously.  Everything and anything is in their notebook and so much that they often don’t’ have time to look up. This is an problem later in life if you cannot find the time to participate in class discussions and God forbid you take this habit into the work place and have no contribution to your meetings. There is no growth in this and even more so it makes the employee perhaps appear less interested, less of a contributing team member and so forth.  This is where those note taking skills you took from college come in handy. All or us college kids have learned to jot down the highlights and let these trigger the specifics. Granted sometimes the specifics are necessary. After all you can't just jot down the word time. You need to put 3:30-6:00pm. But this allows  the employee to  take what is needed from the meeting, go back  to reflect and elaborate while still having the time to engage the team and ask questions.

It’s funny how something that  as far as I know, people are not tested on, is such a big part of the workforce. Such a vital skill to take from your education… it took me 20 years to perfect the skill of note taking. Maybe I’ll go out and celebrate tonight J.

Ps. Don't be afraid of 2012. There's more ways to take notes than just on paper....
http://www.yourlifestyledesigner.net/articles/7-apps-note