In Praise of Taking Notes

I grew up going to a library and taking notes for my school reports. I thought I was doing this simply to gather information, but there was something else going on.

Coin-operated photocopy machines showed up when I was in college. Instead of taking notes, I made copies and highlighted them. I thought this was more efficient.

The World-Wide Web came along, and I started cutting-and-pasting and downloading. Later I started bookmarking web pages. This seemed like a super-efficient way to gather information. 

As my browser's list of bookmarks got longer, I had lots of information at my fingertips, but I found it harder and harder to use it. 

Recently I decided to slow down the information-gathering and take notes . . . longhand . . . in a notebook.

I'm finding this very satisfying. It takes time and effort to read a blog post, for instance, and decide which parts to write down verbatim, which parts to summarize, and which to ignore. I become very selective because It takes even more time and effort to write the note or quotation in my notebook. 

When I take notes, I not only gather information, I also think about it. I move some of it from short-term memory into long-term memory, and somewhere in my brain I must be connecting the new information with things I already know. Now I'm ready to use it when I want to write something new. 

I see now that all that photocopying, highlighting, cutting-and-pasting, downloading, and bookmarking was only postponing this process. Some things you just can't automate.