Ask HN: How do you take notes (useful note-taking strategies)?

The most important thing is to find a note keeping method that works for you. Once you've found one, stick with it. For me, even little things matter, like using the right paper and pen. Once I found the right tools, I bought a ton of them so I always have them on hand.

If I'm meeting with someone else I take all my notes on the following planner:

http://www.mead.com/mead/browse/product/Cambridge+Limited+Me...

I like it because it forces me to record information that will help spur my memory later. If I have tasks I need to complete, I put them in the action items box at the bottom.

I take all my other notes on legal pads. If I run out of space on the meeting pad, I take additional notes on a legal pad. I have at least one least one pad for each project I'm working on. When I finish a project I tear the pages out of the notepad and staple them to the back of the meeting page (if there is one) and record the date I finished the project on. Then I file my notes in chronological order. This makes sure I don't waste too much time sorting things. If I need to use categories, I use the broadest possible topics, such as which department a given project was for.

When taking notes, I focus on information that either will be difficult to remember later, or information that will help me search for more information later. This can be jargon, URLs or file locations of important documents, who I should talk to about certain subjects, etc. You need to be kind of active when taking notes like this, and ask questions if you don't have all the information you need. People tend to forget what they know, and have a hard time communicating all the information that you need to know what they know. Some questions I have to ask a lot are:

Has this been done in the past? | When was it last done? | Was it done differently in the past?

Is there anywhere I can find additional information on this? | Is there anywhere I can learn more about this?

Was this ever called something different? | Does this have another name?

Note taking is all about realizing how you remember things -- this information might be completely useless to you, but hopefully someone else finds it useful. The worst thing you can do is try to force yourself to use a note taking method that doesn't work for you.

Finally, if you don't know something, it's better to ask someone for help early, rather than take a lot of time trying to figure it out and realize you still don't know it. When you ask for help, figure out how you could have found that information yourself. There are some things that you'll never be able to figure out without asking someone, you'll eventually have a way of figuring out pretty much everything else.

For students: Read chapters BEFORE your class and write them down. While in the class, all you have to do is listening and recheck your notes you done before. Pre-reading is way more important than note-taking. This suggestion is straight from my grade A friend to me when I notice he didn't do any note-taking in the class, but his notes is my life-saver.

For non-students: Just use Cogi https://cogi.com/

Get what's the most important things on-site and focus, not your note-taking. I remember some big companies against note-taking when meeting. I once hear my boss said "...Some people can't remember things, so they have to do the notes. The funny thing is, their notes just a page long..."

At work it's largely the same, but now I do a lot of note capturing in org-mode on my laptop, either at the time I'm learning/acquiring information or after the fact by transcribing my handwritten notes.

A lot of things get forgotten, but C-s finds most of it.