Back in the nineties, when I developed my notetaking habits, digital notetaking wasn’t a thing. We had paper, pens, and our hands. Over the years, I was exclusively typing my notes – mostly on my laptop, but sometimes on my phone and rarely, if ever on paper.
Having read some research about the benefits of handwriting notes, I decided to try it! I now handwrite notes all the time – at work, at home, while listening to a podcast… and in doing so I am going to test the research! In the meanwhile, I created a time-lapse video to show-off my notetaking while listening to a podcast to improve my listening skills.
One immediate benefit that I observed was that writing words legibly was MUCH slower than typing them. So, the skeptical part of my mind questioned what I was doing – it said, “if you were typing, you’d have gotten EVERYTHING he is saying, you’d learn more!” But I continued, and due to the slow nature of writing, only took down the key themes and notes.
As it turns out, this helped me remember MORE, and my unscientific self-test, confirmed the results of three different studies by Mueller and Oppenheimer summarized in this HBR post by Maggy McGloin. Plus looking at my creation gave a sense of pride, something my typed notes never did, which confirmed the assertions by John Coleman, in his HBR post.
And of course, here is another time-lapse video since you enjoyed the last one so much! 😀