In this article, we will cover how effective note-taking at your workplace and help you reach greater success. We'll see the advantages of consistent node-taking, which have benefits such as increased productivity, better memory recall, and a clearer comprehension of your objectives and priorities. Additionally, we'll see some useful strategies to make note-taking a more mindful practice.

What is Note Taking?

In simple terms, note-taking is a brain dump of your thoughts in the context of a situation. This could be meetings, one-on-ones, company town halls, or even personal thoughts. In this article, I will focus on note-taking in a corporate or enterprise setting. Keep reading to discover a bonus side effect of good note-taking that can help in different contexts of corporate life.

Why Should You Take Notes?

Unless you have a photographic memory or are really good at keeping track of every detail in life, this might be relatable. There is so much context switching in our lives that we often tend to forget or misplace a thought, which might not have been important at the moment of forgetting it, but could later surface as a missed deadline or an opportunity.

As someone who is constantly jotting down ideas, thoughts, and to-do lists, it can be frustrating to have a cluttered and disorganized system of notes. That's why it's important to have a systematic approach to taking and documenting your thoughts. You don't have to go hardcore on this and start with bullet journaling, Obsidian, or Notion templates. The idea is to start slow and build a system that works for you and doesn't feel forced.

Let's talk about note-taking in a corporate setting.

Many people who join a new company might not have a process to document things from meetings, have a to-do task list at hand, or forget important discussion points. Note-taking doesn't have to be fancy and you don't need any fancy tools. You just need one common place, maintain daily logs, make it searchable, and most importantly, make it complement your style of documenting things.

I am a forgetful individual, and there is even an ongoing joke within my family and close ones. But in my work environment, I was able to overcome this and be organized by having my own system of note-taking. During my career, my juniors and peers have reached out to me asking how I have context on different things. This could be the product co-relationship or cross-team context to discuss something new happening in different parts of the company. I didn't realize that not everyone does this until I mentored some of my juniors and peers about my system of note-taking. It helped some and they were able to stick with it, but for others, it felt like something that might help them.

What is This Note-Taking System?

As I mentioned earlier, it's not a template that people can adopt out of the box. I want to encourage you to develop your own system based on the following points. Since I have worked with organizations where developers were provided with Windows machines and restrictions on other software that I can install and use, I leveraged Microsoft's OneNote software. It came out of the box, and had basic support like pages and sub-pages, search, and cloud sync. I agree it's not the best tool, but it boils down to how you use the tools available to you.

When to Document?

1. Weekly and daily
2. Monthly, if needed
3. Meetings: one-on-ones, design and planning meetings, product development meetings, etc.

I would plan for the upcoming week on Friday or even as early as Thursday of the previous week. This plan doesn't have to be solid; just an outline should suffice to give you an overview of your week. During the current week, you might get some ad-hoc requests to review something offline; jot it down under the next week section immediately.

At the beginning and end of the day, take notes. Begin with what's on your plate, and end with the major points for the next day.

What to Document?

Minor Details

Apart from your standard tasks on JIRA, DevOps-Azure, and Github, document the nuances of different discussions you might be having. Especially for freshers joining the corporate world, you might have discussed a solution of a given task. During the discussion with your lead or manager, you might have discussed minor implementation details or different approaches that you can try. These things get easily missed out if you don't remember what you discussed and could result in a dip in productivity if there is more back and forth.

Advantage: You will never miss anything out. If you feel like something is slipping through your thoughts, you can search your notes.

Meeting Notes

Another suggestion to younger people just joining the corporate ladder or even doing freelancing: when you are on a call, try to take meeting notes. In the beginning, it might feel difficult to keep up, but the idea is to develop a habit of jotting down points in a brief manner. This can be something that makes sense to you alone, like your own keywords and abbreviation style.

Advantage: If you don't understand something or are unable to document it in simple words, you should ask a question in the call to help you understand the said topic better. If you are shy and don't want to disturb the flow of the meeting, add a small marker ‘need to understand this better?’ which can act as a follow-up with the relevant folks at the end of the call or offline if needed.

Important Links

Based on your company policies, you might or might not have a good browser with bookmarking capabilities. Or, you might just not be comfortable bookmarking certain links, or these might be links that have expiry dates, like beta server URLs or dev server instances. Another point is the ability to organize links.

I used to maintain one page of notes documenting important links with headings and subheadings, apart from bookmarks.

Advantage: You have a one-stop shop for everything where you can search through to find and share things with your colleagues quickly. Note that this can also be nested within a project page that you might be maintaining.

Thoughts

Problem Solving

Since I am a software developer, I'll use an example related to this field. At any level, the number of things we might try to solve a certain problem statement can quickly exceed and we might lose track of what worked and what didn't, and repeat certain mistakes. So, it's important to document your thoughts for problem solving: what you tried, what worked, and what didn't work.

Advantage: An organized approach and not missing out on something, which leads to increased productivity with less back and forth with your lead.

Success or Wins

When you complete a difficult problem, document the win, even the message from your manager or lead or director, and take a snapshot of it. This isn't restricted to problem solving; if you make someone feel good or help someone when they are stuck, document it. Document the emotions, too.

Advantage: Whenever you feel low, come to this section of your notes and see what all you have achieved. Understand that life is like a cyclic wave; ups can lead to downs and downs will definitely lead to ups.

Failures and Learning

Documenting your failures is even more important. It's true that failures are not easy to forget; they stay in your mind longer. But documenting them can give you a new perspective, help you analyze the failures, and contemplate possible root causes. It will help you build a system on how to avoid being in the same situations.

Advantage: This will help you build an experience of what works and what doesn't. With enough experience, and when you start mentoring others, this becomes your greatest toolkit.

Anything Else That Feels Important

I used to document even people, like XYZ person in my team likes ABC things, their birthday, and so on. This was personally important for me to make sure the team culture is good and I have good social connections in the organization.

If you have people who report to you, documenting their growth is also a good idea.

Advantage: It helps you be well-rounded and a better person with whom people can relate.

How to Document?

As mentioned earlier, I don't want to give you a template; I strongly recommend you come up with your own system. Start small and keep building, and eventually you'll have your own productivity-enhancing machine.

What worked for me? Here's a glimpse of my note-taking:

Below are the pages in order of hierarchy:

1. Sections: These are a bunch of pages organized under one folder.
   1. This is most likely the project or team name I'm working with.
   2. I also have a general Overview Section to keep generic pages, such as:
      1. Important links
      2. One-on-ones
      3. Wins and learnings
      4. Socials
      5. Others
2. Pages:
   1. As mentioned above, I have different pages within a given section, which can represent a feature my team is working on, such as a draft technical design document or brainstorming ideas for new features.
   2. Some common pages across sections include:
      1. Daily notes: I nest the weekly notes here, as it helps me have everything in one glance.
      2. Important links: Pertaining to a given section (project/team).

Unfortunately, I can't show you a screenshot of the system I developed, but I hope you get the picture.

Bonus Side Effect

For freshers or even experienced people, if you follow the above points to a certain extent, especially the wins and failures, you won't have to rack your brain when the time for review cycles comes. You can go back and refer to these and collate your own performance for the given year or bi-yearly cycle.

I've seen many people, myself included, struggle to write a good self-review backed by data. Once this system was in place, I was able to breeze through review cycles.

For leaders who have people reporting to them, if you have a page dedicated to your team members in your notes, it becomes much easier to write reviews for them, again backed by data. This can also help you make recommendations for their promotions and help you with your own.

TLDR

• Note-taking is a brain dump of thoughts in a given context (meetings, personal thoughts, etc.)
• Advantages of note-taking include increased productivity, better memory recall, and a clearer comprehension of objectives and priorities
• Note-taking in a corporate setting is important because it helps with context-switching and prevents missed opportunities or deadlines
• Develop your own system for note-taking, based on when to document and what to document
• When to document: weekly, daily, monthly, and during meetings (one-on-ones, design and planning meetings, etc.)
• What to document: minor details, meeting notes, important links
• Start with what is an available tool, then transition to what works best for you
• Take meeting notes and develop a habit of jotting down points in a brief manner
• Organizing important links is also important for effective note-taking in a corporate setting.