Effective note-taking

Note-taking can be messy. You may find yourself with notebooks filled with unorganized, hastily written notes, with no clear format.

If you’d like to bring some structure to your notes, consider the outline method. It’s a way to organize notes in a clear, structured format. It arranges information by importance using main topics and sub-topics. This helps show how ideas connect and makes it easier to remember the material.

When using the outline method, you begin by writing down the main topic at the top of the template. Then, write down related sub-topics underneath, followed by in-depth points in the 'Evidence' section to add detail. In this way you’ll organize your notes into main topics and subtopics, making it easier to understand and review.

Do you get side-tracked by the many thoughts, ideas, keywords, and associations that come to you when covering a large subject, but still want to get them down on paper?

Think inside the box, and make your notes easy to review and revise, later. Navigate the flow of information and lay out the topics by writing headers for each column. Instead of having to draw the boxes yourself, you can spend your time clustering the information into five subtopics and boxing it in.The trick is to identify subtopics and make descriptive names. If one of your notes is placed under a heading that doesn’t fit, use the selection tool to place it in the right box.

This template is great for making presentations, dividing what you want to say into slides, and for taking notes – whether it’s shopping lists, creative doodles, or a lecture

Keeping track of study notes can be challenging.

The charting method is designed to help organize and compare information, making it easy to recognize patterns, find important details, and combine data from different sources.

This template has three columns for different topics, each representing a subset of the topic you’ve studying. While researching or listening to a lecture, simply write down your notes in the appropriate column, adding information, ideas, or facts as you go. Then, review the template to add any last-minute thoughts or additional information.

Need help organizing and remembering your notes?

Consider the sentence method — it helps structure your notes and keeps you engaged, making it easier to understand and remember the material. It’s also simple to review later on.

Here’s how: When you’re listening to a lecture or doing research, write down each new idea or topic as a sentence on a new line. Our numbered template makes it easy to fill out the page as you go. Then, review your notes to find the main points of the material you've covered.

If you’re using the sentence method while listening to a lecture, use abbreviations to keep up with the speaker.

Do you ever find that meetings sometimes don’t end with a productive plan of action? Or that, when you look down at your meeting notes, you’re not sure how to make them useful?

That’s where the quadrant note-taking method comes in. The idea behind this template is that every note you add during your meetings goes into one of four categories. Questions top left, general notes top right, personal to-dos bottom left, and assigned tasks for others bottom right. Now that your notes are already organized, you can more easily put those plans into action post meeting.

The quadrant method is rumored to be Bill Gates’ go-to strategy for meeting notes. Surely that makes it worth a try at least?