Latest / Inside Strategic Relations / How Much Do You Benefit From Taking Notes?

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How Much Do You Benefit From Taking Notes? · Inside Strategic Relations

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The question is real, how much do you actually benefit from taking notes?
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When you use a second brain product or a note taking application, are you
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really benefiting yourself when it comes to being more influential in marketplace, having more
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knowledge and access to knowledge, or being able to solve problems in business?
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I'm going to address that right here. I'm just a hit with Inside Strategic
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Relations. I'm that guy online that has eighteen thy seven hundred and fifty three
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notes in his Obsidian note taking application. Now, the current count today is
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in that video is probably a couple of years old. The current count today
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is twenty seven one twenty seven notes. And the question that came in,
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a very real and important question that came in is how much do you benefit
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from taking these notes? And this person is not being sarcastic. They have
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the same dilemma. They're probably like me at times, feeling like they're wasting
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a lot of time when you can actually read or learn something. Now here,
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this is very important in the language. Let me read it exactly how
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they put it. I feel like it's wasting a lot of time while you
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could actually read, for example, or learn something. Well, my notes
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are the result of reading. Now I read on purpose. I don't read
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as much entertaining material. I do read from a very wide range of topics.
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In the range of topics, if we were to make a list of
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the professional topics, which is risk management and business development, and then there's
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subtopics on that which could be information management, documentary, retention, how do
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we learn creative, creative and critical thinking. So if we laid out those
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subjects of work related, consulting related activities, and then we compared it with
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the topics in which I read and might even take notes about, I have
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a much broader list, so I read about agricultural topics, environmental topics.
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I'm a master naturalist, so I have notes where I've attended a seminar on
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beneficial insects, and then I've taken some notes here. All of this is
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in the system. So twenty seven thousand records seems like a lot of records,
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but it's a misnomer number. It's kind of like a headline, a
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clickbait headline, because it's how are those notes taken? And more importantly,
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why are those notes taken? And so a lot of folks can take notes
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because it feels like you're doing something and At times, I'll have an idea
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come to mind and instead of writing it on a piece of paper that's on
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my desk, and now it's a little hard to do drawings I used to
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do. I used to have one of those notepads that were digital notepads,
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so I could do a drawing and end up as a PDF file. But
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now I end up with hundreds of PDF files because when I have an idea,
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I take a note. And the reason I'm looking around here is because,
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unfortunately, there are piles of papers, literally piles of papers that include
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notes that haven't yet been processed. So I will agree that note taking can
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be counter productive or even unproductive if done the wrong way. And you might
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say, well, justin you're doing it the wrong way. But a lot
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of my thinking is done externally. So first we've got to start with how
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do you think? How do you process information? I can sit down and
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read a book. I read pretty quickly. I've taken speed reading classes.
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I can read through a book in one sitting. I could just sit down
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and just read one hundred pages in one sitting. I enjoy that. If
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it's a topic I'm interested in, I'll go through it pretty quickly, but
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I'll time save the moment. So sometimes I'll be reading. So if I'm
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reading The True Believer by Eric Hoffer and there's a note in there and it's
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like, wow, that makes sense. I want to remember that. I
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don't necessarily remember it in my brain. I might write it down somewhere.
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And so some of the notes in my obsidian are files that include hundreds of
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notes. Now the notes could be I organize the notes topically because I'm using
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it Zeel cast In method, but topically within atomic notes. So let me
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break that down. Why is this important? So, first off, if
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you consume a lot of information, so you're a knowledge worker and you read
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books or you're working on projects, it is necessary to take notes to synthesize
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the original material or multiple pieces of materials. So I might read five books
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on the same topic, and I want to synthesize those ideas in order to
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implement the ideas into solving some problem. And so I might read a book
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like the Eric Hoffer book and I might say, wow, this is very
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interesting. What does it mean to me? So that could be one note,
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it could be just the quote. It could be three notes, It
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could be the quote and some commentary. It could be a note with some
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bullet points. But there may be a time that I'll sit down after I've
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clustered notes around a particular topic, and I might say, hey, this
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is interesting, maybe I need to write a paper about this. Now,
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the professional area of risk management, business element, and then the subcategories there
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are going to be the primary areas that I'm going to build a report or
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I'm going to write a paper, or because I'm not in college anymore,
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so when I was in college, I might do all this reading on purpose
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to write a paper. But now I'm collecting notes because well, that's interesting.
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I don't want to forget it now. One thing that I found is
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very important, because I did show you the pile of paper on my desk
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here, is that I actually use engineering notebooks now. So instead of having
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piles of paper everywhere, I might write something in my engineering notebook. And
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this book is from twenty twenty one. I filled this whole notebook with this
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whole notebook up in twenty twenty one, this one in twenty twenty one.
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This is a way of processing called journaling. Now that's different from the zetlcast
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and method because if I'm going to type it up in the computer and make
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it searchable. I want those atomic notes that cross reference, and I can
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do cross referencing in the engineering notebook, and the engineering notebook has numbered pages.
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But my point is the capture of information is part of my way of
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processing information. I don't want to rely on my memory, primarily because I
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took a college level class on how the brain works, and the brain doesn't
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work very well. The brain can be easily tricked. That's why a lot
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of people take notes. They feel like they're productive, but then when they
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look back on the notes, they realize they've got a pile of notes and
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nothing else. So Number one, if you're a student, and I am
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a lifetime student, you're going to take notes to capture key ideas and concepts
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to create a mnemonic reference. Now what's mnemonic mean. It means a memory
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tool that's going to help you remember specific and useful information that you may need
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to recall in the future. So if you're taking notes about things that doesn't
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really matter to you, it doesn't have a high level of interest, you
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are wasting your time. But if it's career related, if it's subject or
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topical related, to a course of study, if it's related to some problem
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that you have that you're trying to solve. These are notes that are highly
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productive. Now, the act of taking notes itself is not productive at all.
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You could sit down, read a book, immediately implement the book,
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and then get the results. That was the reason you read the book in
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the first place. However, life is very busy. There's a lot of
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distractions. You could get a telephone call there, something could happen, and
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so the notes also provide a placeholder for knowledge. Now, I also have
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notes that include all conversations online. I don't engage in social media or answer
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comments to the web, to the blog posts, or answer comments to the
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videos just to do it. I don't need that kind of social engagement.
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If I didn't have a computer, I could find enough social activities to do
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now. However, I do prefer social activities that are role based. I
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guess that would be like melay based. I guess I'd rather get a message
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from somebody and then answer that message, like we're doing right here. With
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this particular comment that was made on the Massive Obscenian Vault graph view with eighteen
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seven hundred and fifty three notes. Again, I have twenty seven thousand notes.
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Now what I find is by having this external memory, I do tend
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to take the same notes more than once. And this is very important to
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understand the concept. Let's say, and I got an example here. I
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have read these books, so I have at times staff, I have virtual
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assistance, a secretary, somebody who's doing administrative work. And I have read
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all three of these books. Okay, and these books are about being a
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great personal assistant. I actually read these books and use these insights myself to
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have better executive function and skills. Now, this is very important to pay
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attention to. I had not taken any notes about these books because the notes
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are in these books. So this is the consumption of information. And not
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all these books have highlights or anything on it. But sometimes the consumption of
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information is about as you're processing materials, taking notes in the margin, highlighting
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things. But now we have the problem that that's trapped in a book.
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And I actually thought these copies had I actually have PDFs as well that have
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annotations in them. But so there's like one book market here. I think
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these are the copies that I have. I'm actually sitting in my conference room
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where usually assistant would sit. I don't have any assistants at my house right
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now. This is my home, one of my home office areas. Anyway,
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here's my point. I can reference that book anytime I need it because
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I know mnemonically, I know that that book contains a subset of information on
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administrative services, and like for example, the Definitive Personal Assistant and Secretarial Handbook
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has specific activities on how to accomplish certain tasks in business. I times I'm
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responsible for bookkeeping, I'm responsible for following up on emails, I'm responsible for
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correspondence. But in those times that I'm not, I wanted consistency in the
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implementation of those activities, and so we use the book as a note because
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it's got a great table of contents, it's got a great index, it's
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easy to recall the information. Now, what I find is beneficial about note
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taking applications like Notion, like City, and like all these other platforms,
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even a bunch of textpiles in a folder, is that if I want to
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recall information, I can search for that information. Now, every note I
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have, if it's as a result of reading a book or piece of material,
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has the original citation in it, and so when I go search,
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for example, I have up on my screen. I have a challenge here
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with doing interviews. So I do interviews, I answer questions, and the
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recording is not always clean, and it takes a lot of time to get
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out of the office to publish for my newsletter, or to publish for my
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consulting work, or to publish as a response to somebody's question. Now what
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happens here is it I don't want to watch a thirty minute video. I
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don't want to watch a twenty minute video. I don't want to read a
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book. I don't want to go in all the details. But those key
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points that caught my attention are now searchable in a text based platform. Now
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the text is very important because I might write a Python script to cluster you
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know, I might be doing text analytics and clustering ideas because I'm writing a
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new book. But again, what is a deliverable? Why are you taking
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notes? And then how do we have notes that are conducive or are aligned
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with those areas in which we may need to produce an output. So I
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do have notes in here that when I search for the note and it comes
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up, it is gobblybook. I found a few lists of keywords for so
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I used to have a hosting company and I was doing a lot of work
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for hosting companies. I had lists of keywords about virtual private servers and all
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those keywords. That has no value to me. Now that's not useful to
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me, it's probably not useful to anybody else, So I just delete that
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note. So, yeah, you're gonna get notes in the system that are
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a complete waste of time, that are a distraction. Maybe you're just sorting
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out an idea. And when you look at the notes in the future,
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it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't seem it's useful. However, if
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the structure's good and the note is a mnemonic, so it's memory aid,
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it may give you. It may trigger an idea. You may look at
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that note and say, and this says right here, objective colon, clean,
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interview with guests, normal volume on both sides, ability to share screens.
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Okay, so that might trigger my brain. I need a product to
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help me do this, or I need an assistant to help me with this,
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or I need to hire an editing company. It hasn't solved the problem,
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but it has reminded me that I have this thing go on and on,
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so that when I take the note, I can just let it go
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of my brain. I don't have to fill my brain up with a bunch
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of stuff that hasn't that isn't going to benefit me today. When it comes
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to administrative assistant activities. Have I liked these books so much? I dedicated
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a space on the desk next to a person who would be doing administrative work,
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and I just I use these books too, And so when that administrative
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person was in here, maybe I've hired somebody new and they have a question
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about how to respond to emails or the difference between white mail, which is
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correspondence from potential customers versus administrative mail. That might be, you know,
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a copy of a digital copy of a bill. How do we manage those
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things. I don't have to answer that question. I can say to them,
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Hey, there's a couple of books right next to desk, wy don't
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you browse through those and then come come back to me with a procedure or
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a process. And then that procedure or process I may codify it in my
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note taking system, print out a PDF file to them, and then that's
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the proceed you we use in house, but all the notes getting up to
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that point, all the details are about preference. All of that can come
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together in a cluster of ideas to produce that paper faster than if I had
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to sit down and read all three of these books right away and then write
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a procedure. And in many cases I might get in here and say,
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oh, look on page one forty six, just do that. So we
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have to and to avoid that wasting of time, we are optimizing our time
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to build artifacts and tools that will again move you towards an outcome, a
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specific outcome. We have a program about outcome management. A lot of people
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today are trying to start businesses and they're trying to do this, try and
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do that, and then the shiny objects and distractions have them all over the
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place, and the original intent why is it that they start at the business
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in the first place, is completely lost and next thing you knew, they're
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feeding social media platforms, they're feeding the YouTube algorithm. They're trying to make
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friends and influence people, and they're not making any money in business. The
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reason you would start a business might be for the tax simplification implications. It
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may be to serve a specific customer group and exchange value. But again it
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can be easily distracted. So the notes become an anchor. So in my
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note system, for example, I have project profiles and so that I can
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pull up with a particular tool here, and I'm not sharing my desktop right
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now, because if we were doing a coaching, I would tailor what I
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show you based on your specific needs. And if you were a business owner
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or an executive and you want it to be more productive, these notes provide
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a personal preview of where information is stored and such. A lot of solopreneurs,
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for example, copywriters, marketers, folks that have small agencies, they
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can use a note taking application to organize ideas as they're writing content organized ideas
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as their manager day to day marketing campaigns Now is a second brain or note
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taking application the end all not necessarily if you have a team of people.
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For example, if you're researching, if you're in a research lab. I've
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worked with academics before, you may have a bunch of researchers that are bringing
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together information and you may want to all be in the same repository. So
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platforms like Lotus notes, SharePoint, any kind of document management system where you
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can search those will help library key information and then help you manage and delegate
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a team to gather that information up. Because again, the note taking is
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about simplifying, translating, creating reference to, and delivering large complex sets of
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data into smaller, bite sized chunks so that we can make informed decisions as
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we create some kind of deliverable When we're looking at this, what is the
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benefit of taking all these notes? Well, if we use the notes and
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we can easily recall the content from these notes, then the benefit is that
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I save a tremendous amount of time I would still read the book. So
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sometimes I'm going to solve a problem. I'm going to buy five books on
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the topic. I'll read all five books. I'll outline the key ideas and
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concepts that are relevant to the problem that I have. I'll from that outline
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build out underneath that, maybe some procedures, maybe some checklists. These are
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all notes. An outline is a concept for notes, and then at the
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end of that I will go use the outline or the procedures or the checklist
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in the course of business to get the outcome and result. Now, in
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my case, because I own a publishing company. I might use those procedures
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for five or ten years. I might develop notes and profiles and preferences around
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those procedures, and then after ten or fifteen years, I might be able
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to come out and just publish a book about it. So I have a
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program called Podcasting for Profits. I've been podcasting for more than twenty years,
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and I've made profits podcasting, and so I've now gone from notes on how
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to do something years and years ago to tuning my skill set as I progress,
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being a continual learner, being a lifetime learner, and then ultimately I
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end up with a big library of materials. What I like about opcity is
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it allows me to do these clusters. Now you can do that with machine
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learning, you could do that with text analytics. But it does a good
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job of giving me a cluster. And if I see a cluster that's highly
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concentrated and I've had ten or fifteen questions from clients about that particular topic,
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I might publish a report or a paper, or i might write a course
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for example. And now I'm going to monetize those notes. Now, when
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I wrote those original notes, the intent for the note was so that I
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could do a podcast, and then I realized, well, creating a podcast
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doesn't have a lot of value if you don't have listeners. It doesn't have
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a lot of value. If I don't have specific target listeners, it doesn't
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have a lot of value. If those listeners aren't willing to pay me to
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solve a problem, it doesn't have a lot of value. If I don't
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consistently and see all that timeline, that long timeline, develop notes, and
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I refine the notes because it's part of a thinking process to produce an outcome,
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to clarify information, and then to ultimately get to where I am.
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And then because I have the notes, those are artifacts. I might even
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have articles. I might have a podcast about podcasting or a report about podcasting.
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I can then flip those materials into a book, deliverable into a course,
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deliverable into something else. Now, a lot of my materials, and
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to be fair, a lot of my notes were commissioned, and let me
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share what that means. So I can read something, I can learn something.
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I can attend a course. But over the years, I'm going to
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attend supplemental materials building on my previous lessons. But there are times a client
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will come to me and say, justin you're good at writing technical documents,
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you're good at doing research, you're good at managing small teams to do these
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things. I'd like you to create for me a report on So, for
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example, when COVID first happened in November of twenty nineteen, a client came
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to me and said, Hey, something's going on here. What's the opportunity.
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So they asked me to write a report because they wanted to know how
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they should handle COVID in their business. And I did, say twenty nineteen,
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this was before it was in the news. Very often, the notes
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I've taken in the past positioned me as someone you turn to when you need
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answers for obscure topics. And so I did my research. I pulled my
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documents, and when I'm doing research, I'm downloading all the original PDFs I
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run into. I could be creating PDFs. I'm taking notes in my note
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taking system. I'm using Zotero to manage my references between different documents. I'm
20:47
analyzing information and then writing a summary analysis. So that particular client, I
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said, look, we've got three issues here. We've got origin, we've
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got how to respond, We've got other connotations or issues, and I said,
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which of these you'd you like me to cover the most. They weren't
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as concerned about the origin, but they were concerned about how their company should
21:07
respond and the legal liability associated with their response, because again my area of
21:14
expertise is risk management, and so they say, Okay, what's the human
21:18
resources risk if we send everybody home versus keeping them in the office, if
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we require vaccines or don't require vaccines. So I ended up having several clients
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to write the commission report, because the way I do a commission report is
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I have five or six clients and I'm writing one report for five or six
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clients. And so again I gather their questions, I gather their areas of
21:38
concern, I gather the frustrations that they have. I gather the outcomes that
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they're looking to accomplish. And then they don't worry about it. They go
21:45
on with the regular course of business. They've got important things to do.
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And then I bring in my researchers. I bring in what I do.
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I build these note sets, and then from the note set I turn around
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and create a commissioned report, which then the client will provide feedback, and
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then we will tailor the report to finalize based on their feedback. Because a
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lot of times, why commission a report if the report isn't going to give
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you a plan of action or multiple plans of action so you can solve a
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specific problem. Again, why do I show you that whole workflow? Because
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in my world, as a technical writer, as a copywriter, as a
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marketer, I create a lot of collateral materials that have a high value to
22:26
recycle, and so if you're going to take notes, you want a high
22:29
value to recycle. Now again, maybe I'm different. Maybe I'm special because
22:34
I recycled my Punic Wars report from elementary school through high school, and I
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kept adding to the report, and I kept expanding the report. I can't
22:45
find the damn report, and I don't remember anything about the Punic Wars.
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But I do know that as I recycled materials, I could write the report
22:52
faster, I could write it at a new level. I wasn't turning in
22:57
the same report. The elementary school report was elementary school quality, the middle
23:02
school was middle school quality. But ultimately I didn't have to go back.
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So I've got notes that are more than twenty three years old in this system
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that from time to time will be recovered. But if I were to look
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at the activity of these reports, so twenty seven thousand notes, probably only
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twenty percent of the notes are being used today. The rest of them,
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if they were deleted, I wouldn't know, I wouldn't care, wouldn't necessarily
23:25
care. However, my business model is as a writer, is built on
23:32
specific topic areas, and while I'm maybe taking notes on areas of interest,
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it's more for memory purpose. So if I take notes on specific areas of
23:44
interest, I might just use that because I'm interested in the topic, and
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I might be thinking later, Hey, you know, I'd like to I'd
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like to attract some beneficial insects. Do I have any notes on beneficial insect
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habitat? And then I might have that it may not fit the need a
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purpose of what I'm trying to accomplish. Then, but I might have links
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to webinars or to a link to a YouTube video or something where I can
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get additional information. So again it's a very important question. A lot of
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folks are wasting time taking notes because they don't have a system for using the
24:18
notes to create some kind of deliverable. A lot of folks take notes without
24:22
following a guideline that works for them. So zedel casting works for me because
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that's how I was already taking atomic notes twenty years ago before I knew what
24:30
zedel casting was, and I was making cross references. And again the engineering
24:34
notebooks. I've used engineering notebooks a long long time, even into high school,
24:40
because I grew up near pax River and there's a lot of engineers and
24:44
they use engineering notebooks. And I love the fact that in the corner there's
24:47
a number for every page. So if my notebook has a code, so
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this is notebook zer zero four, I can go zero zero four dot whatever
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page and recall information. I've been doing that for twenty years. I had
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no idea what z'lcast it was, because I was shown that by engineers.
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And then these are legal logs, by the way, and so when you're
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inventing things or coming up with new ideas and concepts, this evidence is my
25:14
original thought. That may not be as anal you may not be that antal
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retentive, you may not care. But again, when I was in college
25:21
and I had to write a twenty page paper, I can knock that out.
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In fact, this skill set was so valuable that I have written other
25:29
people's doctoral thesises, so I can take any topic. Now, I don't
25:33
do this for any topic. I do it for topics that I have some
25:36
level of interest in, because it is an arduous activity to write somebody's master's
25:40
paper or doctoral thesis. Again, if you're just taking notes for business,
25:47
maybe you're a content developer and you're writing content for a newsletter. Having these
25:52
atomic notes on different ideas and concepts, having copies of conversations with customers,
25:59
those things actually make it useful to write content that somebody cares to read.
26:03
Because again, if you're writing notes that you can't use or notes that you'll
26:07
never use, then why write the note in the first place. Now,
26:11
reading the book, Reading the book is important. I've read some books multiple
26:15
times, and like I said, I've taken notes inside of books that I
26:18
find very useful. But I've also done, in the course of my consulting
26:22
activity, deep level analysis of books. So the book rules for radicals,
26:27
I probably record it maybe eight hours of the concepts of the book. This
26:33
was a commission with a client during the BLM riots. And then there's other
26:37
January sixth and stuff. People have come in and ask stuff. So I've
26:41
looked at okay rules for radicals. There's mass delusions. There's a bunch of
26:45
different books. I might have gone in and read those multiple times. And
26:48
so those books actually have notes inside the book Archipelo, the Gulag book.
26:53
I can go back and reference my notes on that. I wouldn't want to
26:56
read that almost thousand page set of books again. So we've got the original
27:03
text, We've got notes that provide a mnemonic reference to what's in depth in
27:07
the book itself, and then we can build on top of that whatever the
27:11
deliverable is. And I keep going back to the deliverable. Do you have
27:15
to write a term paper? Are you writing a master's thesis? Are you
27:18
writing a doctoral thesis? Are you writing a paper for business purposes, a
27:22
white paper, special report. I'm the author of Establishing Instinct Credibility, and
27:26
the premise of the book is that you're going to write a report for a
27:30
specific audience that demonstrates your ability to do complex services so that they'll hire you
27:37
for high ticket services or they'll hire you as an employee. Again, taking
27:41
the notes makes that easier. Taking the notes makes it helps you discover new
27:45
ideas, But if you're not going to use the notes, then don't bother.
27:51
I believe the second brain tools make it easier to take notes, but
27:55
that ease often makes it easy to take notes about things that don't have any
28:00
use their value. Also, you have to be careful not to be contemplating.
28:06
There's a lot of distraction on social media where people are contemplating things that
28:11
have no real application in their own life. And so if you fill your
28:15
notes up full of those conversations, you know, the latest burns and comebacks
28:19
that you can use on social media, it's not going to be beneficial.
28:25
Could be entertaining, but not necessarily beneficial. So again the question was how
28:30
much did you benefit? I make my living off of these notes and these
28:36
observations and the analysis of these notes, and the derivative materials created from notes
28:41
and observations combined. Is it wasting time? It is by fifty percent of
28:49
what I do. Like this pile of material. I cannot search through this
28:52
pile of material. I have to literally sit down every day and pull this
28:56
material out. Where in a in an engineering notebook, I've got a table
29:02
of contents which I just picked that up and stuff fell out of it.
29:06
See it's not perfect. But if you're too focused on making it perfect and
29:11
making every note productive and making every book you read tied to your career or
29:17
tied to your area of interest, you're going to you're just going to burn
29:22
a lot of time and you're never really going to become a subject matter expert.
29:26
Now taking notes, I didn't know twenty three years ago, or even
29:30
thirty years ago that taking notes was going to help me become a subject matter
29:34
expert. I had no idea. I just knew that taking notes made it
29:38
easier to write a paper. I could take notes on index cards, and
29:42
then each index card had a unique title, a unique subject and a little
29:48
title. And I knew that if I put those index cards on the floor
29:52
or whatever, you know, put them on a table, I could organize
29:53
those notes into an outline, and then it made it easier to write a
29:56
paper. And so these are skills sets that overlap that the tools themselves can
30:03
distract. But it's not a waste of time if you're using the notes.
30:08
Now, if I made a giant pile of index cards, and each index
30:15
card had a nice little title and a little note on it and had perfect
30:18
cross references, and I never put it in an outline, and I never
30:22
filed it in a cabinet in an organized way, and I never recalled those
30:26
materials. Then yes, I would be wasting time. I actually I have
30:30
complete books. I have a book on how to optimize business to business websites
30:33
that's a stack of index cards probably about that thick. And I never wrote
30:37
the book ever because I didn't have an audience who wanted to buy the book.
30:42
And if I'm in the business of writing books and reports and courses that
30:45
people buy, why write the course that nobody wants to buy? And then
30:51
the underlying fact here is that how do I know nobody wants to buy it?
30:55
Because I have methodology for publishing. So if you work from the methodology
31:00
for publishing, you know, demand focused activity, then you're likely to take
31:07
highly valuable notes. But even though if you just take notes, you know,
31:11
notes that don't tend to be valuable, if you can do them in
31:15
a fast way, then as long as you're not focusing too much time there,
31:18
you'd be good to go. So I hope this has answered your question.
31:22
I do actually go back and read the books. How do I know
31:25
what books I should read? Because the notes are nomonic device? And why
31:29
do I take notes? Because I write documents and reports and I publish materials.
31:34
But I also take notes in areas of just general interest gardening. Actually,
31:41
the notes in general interest ended up becoming a blog. I have a
31:44
blog that has you know, it's pretty. It's kind of popular, not
31:48
super popular, but again it's my outlet. So I think the last thing
31:52
is because he says read, for example, or learn something. I think
31:57
the notes are part of my learning process. And so if I'm shoving a
32:04
lot of stuff in my brain in topic areas tied to my work and career
32:08
and my professional life, and then a lot of topics tied to my personal
32:13
life, I know the brain doesn't remember things. It actually reconstructs ideas and
32:19
memories. I don't want to reconstruct it the wrong way. Okay, So
32:23
I want to take the notes so that if I have to answer a question
32:27
like in this case, I can give you authoritative answer. Now let's end
32:31
this with this last bit here. So I've gone on thirty three minutes about
32:36
how taking notes is useful. And this video is not transcribed. It's simply
32:39
loaded to YouTube and I reference it in the comment. And I did that
32:44
because I can answer the same question many times, So if somebody else asked
32:46
this question, I can link to the same video, so it's a time
32:50
saving activity. But I don't have the transcript of this video somewhere, so
32:54
I'll have a note that represents this video and has a link to the video.
33:00
So if anybody ever asked a question how much do you benefit from taking
33:02
notes? I don't have to answer the question again. I can point to
33:07
this video if they have additional questions, more specific questions, or they've hired
33:13
me for consultation, because maybe they're a publisher, maybe they're a writer,
33:16
Maybe they're a copywriter or a marketer. Maybe they're a business executive who's taking
33:21
notes throughout their entire career and then wants to publish a book when it comes
33:24
time for retirement for passive income, for example. Then I've actually built a
33:30
stream to drive leads into my course of business, and therefore that original note,
33:36
as insignificant as it is, will help me find this video so that
33:40
I can share it with the next person. So I hope I've given you
33:44
a couple practical examples of how note taking can be very productive but also a
33:47
big distraction. I hope I've given you some ideas on how note taking is
33:52
only part of a larger process for publishing or creating some kind of deliverable And
33:59
then finally, I've hope I've shown you how note taking is actually a mnemonic
34:04
device to help you recall information in a way that's actually beneficial to creating an
34:09
outcome. Because I didn't even go into artificial intelligence, but essentially the querying
34:15
mechanism you use to recall these notes. We want to make sure that you
34:20
understand what you're recovering so that you can use what you're recovering in your note
34:24
taking system or thank you for being a part of what we do here.
34:28
This is now a podcast episode, so that's a third use for this particular
34:31
video, and I hope I'm stimulating those ideas and concepts because as a knowledge
34:37
worker, you're paid on productivity that is difficult to measure, and you also
34:44
have to have evidence in many cases when you're in higher stakes activities, and
34:47
so note taking is a critical part, but not a primary part of getting
34:52
results. I'm justin hit with inside strategic relations, where we help business owners
34:57
and executives, knowledge workers and professionals use knowledge to gain influence, whether that's
35:04
a better career path, whether that's layoff, proofing your current position or creating
35:09
a business on your own. We show you how to use, store,
35:14
manage information in such a way then it works on your behalf. I'll never
35:19
have to go take those notes again if I take good notes in the first
35:21
place, and then I'll use those notes many times so they'll pay for themselves
35:25
if I have that outcome focused. You can visit us at www dot inside
35:30
strategic relations dot com to ask questions or put some questions in the comments below.
35:35
I would love to answer your question because it challenges all the notes I've
35:39
taken in the past. It challenges all the professional skills and insights that I've
35:45
gained, and gives me an opportunity to package this up and hopefully be useful
35:49
to you. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next one.