Switch to Paper and Pencil for Taking your Meeting Notes
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Switch to Paper and Pencil for taking your Meeting Notes!
It is more effective then using a laptop!
A series of studies have found that it is more effective and efficient to use good-old paper and pencil for taking notes in meetings.
I have always liked to use good old Paper and Pencil for taking notes during business meetings.
But many people look at my funny when I pull out my Circa Leatherbound notebook and my favorite ZEBRA F402 Pen during meetings.
(Read more about the Levenger CIRCA Notebook system which I use and recommend!)
It used to be that paper notebooks with pens or pencils were the only way to take notes during meetings.
But over the years, there has been a transition to laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
I have found that I am actually in the minority when it comes to taking meetings notes by hand.
Instead, most people at meetings open-up their laptops and start clicking away.
But I honestly have no idea if they are actually taking legitimate meeting notes, or (more likely) just processing their Emails and multi-tasking on other activities instead of paying attention to the meeting that is currently underway!
I recently came across a study that was performed a few years ago that provides support for the advantages of taking notes by hand. Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.
The results of their research were documented in a study aptly named “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking”.
The study authors conducted three separate studies, each investigating the use of laptop note taking compared to manual (paper and pencil) note-taking.
The results of all three studies were the same - they found that laptop notetaking was actually less effective than longhand note-taking! The key reason was that when you use only a laptop for taking notes, you do not absorb new materials as well as if you take notes by hand.
The key reason they found is that because when you are busy tying notes, it encourages you to perform “verbatim transcription” of the proceedings, instead of paying attention and only writing down important and relevant content.
“When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can.”
In fact, although the authors found that the laptop note takers took significantly longer and more detailed notes then the manual note-takers, they were not actually learning or remembering the material they were transcribing.
“Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears.”
The key finding of these studies is that you are actually better off taking your meeting notes in longhand on paper and pencil instead of using a laptop.
And although it may be faster to take notes on a laptop and allow you to easily store more information, “faster is not always better”.
It is actually the fact that it is SLOWER to take notes by hand that makes it more effective
“The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”
So instead, consider switching to paper and pencil for your note-taking activities!
By using paper and pencil to take your notes:
You will be more focused on actually listening to what the speaker is saying.
You will be more selective in deciding what specific information to include in your notes.
You are more likely to summarize and rewrite key information in your own words, instead of just transcribing what is being said.
