The action of writing things down involves multiple senses working together to create a stronger memory.
Taking notes in your own words forces you to think deeply about the ideas beyond the passages. To truly understand an idea is not the same as merely comprehending the written text. Sometimes, the materials are misleading, and sometimes, you don’t have the necessary background context or simply misinterpret the text. The translation process is the essence of note-taking and validates the veracity. It integrates the newly learned idea with your existing knowledge network. The benefit of linking your knowledge is more like compound interests instead of linear addition. On the other hand, copying text word by word doesn’t automatically make you understand the ideas.
Taking notes in meetings and conversations helps us concentrate and avoid daydreaming. It is instrumental in the age of working remotely with back-to-back Zoom calls.
Notes crystallise our thoughts in the precise moment when they emerge. Any form of coming back later is a waste of time. Repetition doesn’t guarantee a better understanding of the ideas because our memory is very selective. The action of highlighting for later is the same as putting things on your back burner. It’s better to deal with them now or discard them completely. Wasting mental energy to manage more back-burners is counterproductive. Our short-term memory and focus are all limited, overloading them will only cause us stress.
Taking notes empties our short-term memory. This means we can use our main focus to think about the order, the relationship and the clarity between the ideas we are trying to make sense of. Writing down thoughts doesn’t mean we are going to forget about what we have learned. Linking the ideas in our slip-box lets us store the knowledge in an external brain and recall it when needed. The idea of freeing out short-term memory is also used in David Allen’s Getting Things Done.