There hundreds of note taking apps. My favorites are Evernote, GoodNotes, and Quip. I’m not going to get into the benefits or pros and cons of each application. There plenty of BLOGs, youtube videos which do this in great detail. Here is how I used them:
-
Evernote is my document and note repository.
-
GoodNotes is for taking handwritten notes on my iPad, and the PDFs are loaded into Evernote.
-
Quip is for team collaboration and sharing notes and documents.
I’ve been digital for 4+ years. Today, I read an ebook from Microsoft, entitled “The Innovator’s Guide to Modern Note Taking.“ I was curious as to Microsoft’s ideas on the digital note-taking. The ebook is worth a read. I found there three big takeaways from the ebook:
First - The ebook quotes, “average employee spends 76 hours a year looking for misplaced notes, items, and files. In other words, we spend annual $177 billion across the U.S”.
Second - The ebook explains that the left side of the brain is used when typing on a keyboard, and the right side of the brain is when writing notes. The left side of the brain is more clinical, and the right side of the brain is more creative, particular asking the “What If” questions. Also covered on page 12 of the ebook handwriting notes improves retention. Lastly on page 13 one of my favorites as I am a doodler, “Doodlers recall on average 29% more information than non-doodlers”. There is a substantial difference in typing vs. writing notes, and there is a great blog article from NPR if you want to learn more.
_Third - _Leverage the cloud, whether it’s to share, process, access anywhere.
Those are fundamentally the three reasons that I went all digital for notes. As described before I write notes in GoodNotes and put them in Evernote, I use the Evernote OCR for PDFs to search them. My workflow covers the main points described above. Makes me think I might be ahead of a coming trend.