How I Arrived at my Current Note-taking Practice
Someone asked me this past weekend how I learned to take such good notes during meetings, and honestly the question has been bumping around my head ever since.
There is the professional answer: I learned to take effective meeting minutes during an internship when I saw my first project manager dealing with a mixed team of designers, engineers, and UX researchers. When I had to write my own reports, I had to dump all of the academic language I went to grad school to learn and just write stories for people who built things about the people they were building things for. Bullet points ruled the day. So did graphs and tables.
There is a slightly squishier answer as well: I read a lot of books about asynchronous work and communication, as well as a bunch of stuff from neurodiverse people, most of which boiled down to "please say what you mean and what your exact needs or expectations are." Next step lists and a few bullet points that answered "so what? What does this mean for me/you?" were absolutely instrumental.
This directness was a breath of fresh air after all of the unstated and murky rules of academic writing and publishing that everyone seemed to expect me to be good at because I read a lot, but which I actually struggled with because I could see the power dynamics behind it all and got frustrated with having to pretend I wanted to play by those rules. Also, I really just wanted to write about two things at once and never seemed to find the venue for that, even in Linguistic Anthropology.
There is the answer my parents give: that I was always writing as a kid - stories, diaries, what have you. Since first grade I had to keep a journal at school where I noted what I did throughout the day (a deeply Montessori thing), because everyone in class was doing something different. Naturally this and my anxiety taught me how to use planners when I transitioned to a traditional school system and dealt with rigid classrooms and homework for the first time. I used to draw boxes on each of the days - one for each class - so I could quickly scan to see what I needed to do. I was always worried about forgetting something in a system with so many detailed parallel paths that didn't flow with the waves of my brain.
The real answer, the one that builds on top of all of these but is the loudest at the moment, is having a chronic illness and disabilities. Nothing happens in isolation, but getting sick crystalized a number of insights for me in new and paradigm shifting ways.
When I was first transitioning out of academia, I stumbled upon The Bullet Journal Method and How to Take Smart Notes - both books that, on some level, hinge on the power of thinking non-linearly and in bullet points rather than paragraphs. This was a minor miracle to me after 6 years of trying to think in full paragraphs and theses. It gave me ways to work non-linearly, to capture the small thoughts and connections I made between things, and then come back later and flush them out to smooth one thought into another. It helped me write my last academic paper, which I actually enjoyed delivering - for the first time ever. This experience, combined with my internship and writing for people outside my field, helped me break away from the jargon and style of academic writing, at least a bit.
Having such a system let me see that I actually had deep and theoretical thoughts about what I was reading and experiencing. It was the first time I felt like I had insights - something to really offer others - that actually felt clearly articulated. For context, I had spent most of my academic career knowing that I was deeply unremarkable in my work, Jack of all, ace of none, but that I cared and worked hard enough to sometimes ease the difference. I was dedicated and willing to sacrifice a lot for the sake of a project. The idea that I actually had interesting thoughts that, when I shared them with others, seemed to ripple through them? Mindblowing. This started changing my relationship with myself, if not deeply altering my note style.
But I said that chronic illness and disability are my loudest teachers right now, and they have been, for the last four years or so.
The problem with being so identified with depending on hard work and sacrifice to define not only what I have to offer others, but also how I see myself, is that as soon as that work isn't possible anymore, everything crumbles. In March of 2020, I got sick and I never really got better. Now I struggle with ME and fibromyalgia, which for me, means that I have super low energy and deal with a ton of brain fog. All of a sudden, my ability to just pour energy into things until they worked, was gone.
Brain fog, for those who are lucky to have avoided it so far, can sometimes be like forever knowing there is a word you want and rarely being able to find it. The fatigue is more than just being tired, it is the sort of physical and mental tired that only happens to the multi-day sleep deprived. Combined, it can take me longer to find an order words, and I have less capacity to edit them into a comprehensible form. Time can also blur together, yesterday and a month ago can feel equally distant. Sometimes the morning feels like days ago by the time I get to the evening - I just can't depend on remembering it. Plus, now I had a whole bunch of new things I needed to keep track of, like symptoms and medication changes.
Where before I took notes for the person who cared about a meeting but didn't have time to get up to speed until 5 minutes before hand, now I was taking notes for myself. My notebooks became a way of passing notes to my future and past selves. I started writing instructions on how to do things on days when I had more clarity for the days when I didn't.
In typical me fashion, I fell down a research rabbit hole, trying to research how to take better notes, how to manage projects, as if I could somehow organize my way out of how lost I felt. Because the reality was, I felt like I had lost who I was. I couldn't work the same, I couldn't force myself to have the energy to write emails or make sense of a book or a meeting on a given day. Dependability had been my trademark, what I could trade as an jack of all trades. I could show up when scheduled and work until the project was over. But not anymore. There were a ton of books that purported to help people build systems to deal with information, and they did help me in some ways, but they also gave me the illusion that I could organize my way out of my identity crisis and acute distress at being newly disabled in a non-static fashion. The reality was, no matter what I did, I was never going to be the same as I was, for any number of reasons and in any number of ways.
Instead, I had to embrace where I was and how that changed throughout the day. I had centered others for so long that I had to instead shift inward, to learn from myself and the new topography of my inner world and physical reality. In some ways, it was easier - I could just iterate on the fly - instantly dump things that didn't work, keep what did, but in others, it was harder because I had to accept whatever reality I was in, in that present moment. Accepting limitation is rarely fun, and in chronic illness and disability, it can be a forever shifting landscape, but I have figured out a few tools I can draw on when I need. No day is the same, but I have some structures and tools to play with to try and support myself as best I can.
In short, my system now embraces 2 ideas:
- when in doubt, use specific brevity - assume that future me may have brain fog and need the obvious spelled out
- use bullets to give a general broad sketch of a day or an activity - often just a detail or two can help unlock a more specific memory
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