My many methods of note taking.

Note taking

I just finished reading an interesting article Social media & learning – note taking on steroids by Donald Clark. He discusses the benefits of note taking and using social media tools. After reading his post, I realized I was using similar strategies.

Clark comments on note taking at conferences, and questioned why many professionals did not. I personally am an avid note taker at conferences. Lately, I have been using Evernote as my primary tool. You can read more about this strategy here. Evernote has been a great tool for collecting and later finding notes and ideas.  My friend, Deb Beck recently wrote about taking notes with pen and paper. While I appreciate her need to do this, I personally can not make the connection. My connection is with technology – having a digital record that I can quickly retrieve.

I also use Twitter to get the word out about items I find interesting. If I happen to be retweeting a link, I often capture the link into my Diigo account. Diigo is my actual note taking tool for keeping track of great finds in the wilds of the Internet. Most importantly, I use the Diigo’s tagging system to organize and make sense of all the links. Diigo’s search feature is also extremely useful.

For my academic and professional research, I use Zotero. I have gotten into the habit of reading books with a note taking focus. Once I have read a book, and scribbled notes in the margins, I then spend the time to add it to my Zotero library. When I started my library, I would only add notes regarding my academic research. I now add notes about all the books and journal articles I read. This has helped me on a number of occasions when putting together articles, reports, and grants. It has increased the breadth of my research. Here is a little more on Zotero.

Finally, I use this blog to pull my ideas and notes together. This blog helps me make sense of things I have read or discussed. Again, as Clark points out, it allows me to search through my writings, which I have had to do on a number of occasions.

I would be interested to hear how you use social media for your note taking, or even, why you don’t.

How I navigated the ASTD conference with an iPad, Evernote, and GTD

Evernote screenshot

I recently returned from the 2011 American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) conference in Orlando, Florida. On this trip I decided to approach my note taking just a little differently. Normally, I take notes with a traditional paper and pen. This time, I took all of my notes on my iPad, and it worked out wonderfully.

My primary application of choice has been and will be Evernote. Evernote allows me to capture my ideas easily and I can then organize them in notebooks, tag them, and make them available through the cloud.

Knowing I was going to the ASTD conference, I started to prepare early. Using strategies from Getting Things Done (GTD), I created a tag to identify my postings. At a minimum, I tagged them with “ASTD 2011.” I used other tags depending on the topic. All of my notes or postings were added to my Reference notebook because these were ideas I would use later but did not require a next action.

In preparation for the conference, I forwarded my airline, car, hotel, and conference information to the appropriate tag and notebook. It was very useful to have this information at my fingertips.

During the conference, I used the ASTD application extensively to schedule the sessions I wanted to attend. While in the session, I took notes directly into Evernote. I gave each session its own note page.  Any pictures I took during a session, I emailed directly to Evernote and appropriately tagged and placed in the Reference notebook.

Once I returned from the conference, I was able to use the desktop Evernote client to help assemble my trip report. By using Evernote and the GTD strategies, I feel I was more prepared and I worked less. Normally, I have to do double duty on my notes, when I write them on a legal pad and then transcribed them to my trip report. With Evernote, I had the additional benefit of being able to search through my notes immediately.

Here are a couple of lessons I would like to pass on: 1). ensure your iPad is fully charged before starting the day; I came close to running out of power and 2). spend time to prepare for note capturing before you actually get to the conference.

I had a tremendously positive experience using this method; I expect to continue to using my iPad and Evernote to capture conference notes well into the future.