Note-taking is proven to improve your memory and increase your productivity. Writing thoughts down in your own words will force you to think about what you write and make it easier for you to understand and remember. Don't blindly copy-paste content to your notes.
David Allen, the father of the Getting Things Done method, introduced the "Capture" concept. In short: Write all your ideas.
You might find yourself thinking: Where and how? What kind of ideas? Oh, someone has probably thought about this already. That is completely normal. We don't get world-changing ideas all the time. Ideas grow over time and through connections they become world-changing. Don't try to overanalyze whether a thought should be written down or not. Write it down without any consideration.
You cannot know which ideas and thought actually end up being most valuable. That's the beauty of working with a system like Organizedly, it will help you in releasing ideas that you wouldn't otherwise think of. This is how your best ideas are born.
Thoughts you might think are worthless at a time, might end up as a chapter in your book in ten years, as a Twitter post, or in any other unthought-of situation. Material that you produce today might be life-changing in the future. Think long-term and the payoff can be enormous. Your ideas do not degrade, rather, they get better. Once you have multiple ideas, in multiple areas, you can create meaningful connections and spark new ideas and gain deep understanding.
Once you have formed a habit of writing, you will always start from a solid foundation. This way, you will never start from scratch with your new initiatives. You're always one step ahead before you start.
Don't create a new note for everything. Append information to existing notes instead. Traditional note-taking systems tend to get disorganized after appending too much information. This is the reason we have introduced blocks. They keep your notes tidy and clean even when there is a lot of information.
A good practice is to always start writing using the daily notes feature. Once a block is done, you can change its parent note to an existing note or create a new note with that block.
Keep your blocks short and sweet. Too much information in a block will make it hard to find. Focus on one topic or area per block.
A good practice is to create a new note per entity, such as a person, company, or project. When adding information specific to that entity, create a new block for it. To get the most out of these entities, create connections between them and other notes. More about that in lesson three.
Step 1
Form a habit of writing. Make sure to have a place where to write notes always available. This can be a physical notebook or an app. We'd love if it was Organizedly for you.
Step 2
Find a place to write your thoughts. We recommend using our daily notes feature as it is designed to allow you to write notes without friction and with a very low cognitive burden.
Step 3
Reflect on your notes daily or a couple of times per week. For ideas that you find useful, create a new note and format the idea in a way that you will understand when revisiting it weeks or months later. This will be useful when creating connections from and to this idea, more on that in the following lessons.
Step 4
Make your notes permanent. When writing a note try to formulate it in a way you would understand it yourself after many months. What may seem obvious now, might be hard to understand later on.