Why You Need to Take Notes (and Take Note)

Are you a jotter, one who jots? Do you use a jot-book? Do you ever refer back to your random jottings for inspiration?

If you do, you’re in good company. If you don’t, maybe you ought to give it a try.

Because you’ve got to write stuff down. You’ve got to capture those stray thoughts when they bubble to the surface of your mind. Whether it’s on the train, in the shower or in the middle of the night.

You won’t remember them otherwise.

You can then revisit your jottings later. They might be rubbish. They might be pure gold. Who knows? But if you haven’t recorded them, you’ll never find out.

Capturing those fleeting moments

The thing is, we often forget things as soon as they’ve popped into our minds. Perhaps because there’s too much going on in our lives. Too many distractions. Too much noise.

So, jotting stuff down helps avoid that nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something important. Which may be lost forever.

Whether it’s a conversation with a client or a colleague. An observation about a topical issue. A thought about a piece of work in development. Or a funny reflection on something that appealed to you at the time. 

Note-taking is also a positive act. It forces your mind to engage with a subject as you summarise or condense a point. And as an active rather than a passive act, it reinforces learning.

It needn’t take long. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to jot as: ‘to make the smallest mark with pen or pencil… To write down in the briefest and most hasty form, to make a short note or jotting of.’

Notebook or electronic device? That’s entirely up to you. Though neither work particularly well in the shower!

Looking but not seeing

Of course, you could take the critical line proffered in a combative review of The Traveller’s Oracle by Dr William Kitchiner, published in 1827. The book was a set of maxims for travelling well, in comfort and in good health, which reflected the growing popularity of touring as a pastime.

The reviewer, an anonymous writer in Vol. XXII of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of that year, thought that Dr Kitchiner’s injunction to commit to paper whatever we see as we travel reduces us to a state of idiocy as we fail to observe, understand and memorise the true nature of things. Or distinguish between: ‘the jotting, the jotter and the thing jotted.’

If we would but look and listen, we would never forget anything worth remembering, for: ‘What are all the jottings that ever were jotted down on his jot book, by the most inveterate jotter that ever reached a raven age, to the Library of Useful Knowledge, that every man… carries within the Radcliffe – the Bodleian of his own breast.’

I’m in awe of these conjugations of the verb ‘to jot’. Ironically, the reviewer, clearly infuriated by Kitchiner’s presumptions about how we record and understand the world around us, actually underlines the power of the verb.

For sure, he’s got a point about the common human failure to look without seeing. It’s only when the mind decides to notice something that we actually perceive its true nature. Our thoughts shape our vision.  

This might sound like a problem. But the opposite is true. It means we can direct our attention to the things that matter to us. And give them our full attention. Which then gives us the power to comprehend and change our material world.

But you've go to keep jotting things down. As American writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron said: ‘Take notes. Everything is copy.’

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash