on taking notes
Writing is one of the most important innovations of humankind. Use it!
Once you put something on paper, you start interacting with it. Ideas lead to ideas and relationships among them become more apparent.
As time passes, your self-dialogue with the text matures, accumulating small insights that eventually avalanche into a big insight.
Your embodied memory is finite, but with proper organization you can store an unlimited amount of information in writing.
Offloading stuff from your memory is relieving, allowing you to focus on new things with renewed vigor.
Putting open ended ideas on paper allows you to see everything in new light and recognize phenomena that no one else is paying attention to.
Once an idea is written down, it becomes more real and arises a greater urgency to be completed.
Once you throw a bunch of ideas together on paper, they start to grow like bacteria samples on a petri dish. Contradictions that we were not clear from the beginning start to appear. Some get dissolved through additional text. Others get dissolved through deletion of one of the initial ideas, just as one bacterial colony enlarges to engulf another.
Taking notes help you to get to the gist of the matter, compressing and synthesizing information. It is a waste to carry around unprocessed data in your brain.
Business-specific remarks:
Some boast about their memory and never take notes in meetings, forgetting that writing is not a passive activity. (As in Parkinson's law, people with better memories exhibit a greater tendency to fill their minds with junk.)
In a meeting you have to write a note anyway, to share it with your colleagues and add it to the collective memory of the company.
People feel important if you take notes while they are speaking. But, in order to not dilute this effect, you should not take notes all the time. Even the most delusional people know that not everything they say is remarkable.
If you take notes all the time, then people in a meeting may think that you are a complete novice for whom everything being discussed is new. This may not be a great idea if you are supposed to display an already-built mastery.
