Most of Your Notes Are USELESS, Try This Instead

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Coffee Wednesday. And in

today's episode, we're going to give you some more dirty or quick and dirty tips on how to improve your reading life or to bring back the magic and of course the pleasure of reading and self-education into your life. And in

today's episode, we're going to share one really powerful mindset shift that's probably going to really transform how you take notes in the future. And of

course, uh, this relates to a larger change that I'm putting in place for a lot of the content or a lot of the podcast episodes and a lot of the videos that I'm about to put out in 2026. And I think 2026 is all about really going

deep and about really plummeting the depth of different ways of reading and different ways to build reading into your life. because I feel like a lot of what I talk about on this channel and of course on this podcast, sometimes I tend

to get into the abstract a little bit too much. Sometimes I I like to provide the context for why certain pieces of advice work without really giving you guys the advice. So, I'm going to try to be conscious of that uh and be aware

that I'm operating kind of like from a hindsight bias here. Uh not everyone knows the kind of stuff to do when you face a book for the first time. In fact,

for a lot of people, it's a terrifying experience getting back into reading after not reading for a few years. So, instead of complaining about the declining literacy rates and instead of uh complaining about how college

students don't read anymore, let's talk about the solutions. Let's acknowledge

the problem. And of course, every week here, we're going to talk about one key solution to this problem. And of course, I'm very very very very excited to create more of these resources and create more of these um educational

material for you guys to really deepen and master this key skill that makes us human. So without further ado, today we're going to talk about this note

human. So without further ado, today we're going to talk about this note takingaking mindset where we're really going to change a lot of the anxieties that we tend to have around note-taking because one of the ways that we take

notes in schools and in meetings at work or if we're just doing a research project or just reading a book that we like, there's this anxiety around note takingaking. There's this anxiety of like I better read this chapter and

takingaking. There's this anxiety of like I better read this chapter and retain absolutely everything on my first reading. I better just note down every ancillary description. I better capture everything possible, any extraneous

ancillary description. I better capture everything possible, any extraneous variables, give them all to me. I'm going to write it in my notepad so I don't forget about it. But then what happens after 2 to 3 months? You look at

those notes again and those notes, they look so sterile. They look so dead and they look so detailed and clinical and you can't even remember why you read that book and you can't even remember what was discussed in the lecture and

you can't even remember what that what that meeting was all about 2 3 weeks ago. So that entire process and that entire way of note-taking or viewing

ago. So that entire process and that entire way of note-taking or viewing note-taking with a lot of anxiety and with a lot of kind of like anticipation of I'm going to get all the information out of this piece of lecture or reading

or this book chapter. That's an act of transcription. An act of transcription, the most poignant mental image is a a mad lab scientist walking around with a

recording pen documenting everything uh from like the texture of the floor from like uh what the lab rats look like from um his doomed love affair with a lab assistant and from all these extraneous factors that don't really matter at all

at the end of the day when it comes down to conducting research. It's very

possible that we are also collecting a lot of useless junk in our notes. And if

and in fact if you take too much information in and if this information exceeds your cognitive load a lot of the a lot of this information won't actually get computed into your brain. You wouldn't actually have insights into

what you're reading. You wouldn't actually have any kind of any understanding of the material that you're dealing with. what you're merely doing is regurgitating information. And

of course, this was what was rewarded in schools. So by the time we're out of schools, we still have this antiquated idea of taking notes as transcription without realizing that there is an alternative which is field notes. So

field notes is this idea of like you only take notes and you only document down moments of revelation or moments when you conceive an idea or moments when something makes sense to you. Maybe you read five pages of a book and all of

a sudden something clicks in your head. You're like, "Wow, I've never considered this topic from that perspective before." That's what you note down. You

note down those notes precisely when you encounter a new idea or when an old old idea got revealed in a new light or when three to four things that you've written those four to five pages started to connect. And that's what you document

down in maybe two to three sentences. So your note takingaking wouldn't look like you with a giant notepad or legal pad next to you documenting everything from the book down. Instead, it would look like you hunting for these ideas nuggets

because what that's going to do is that whenever you review these notes, that's actually going to take you back to the moment of discovery. It's going to replicate the conditions and it's going to make the this active active recall a lot more intuitive and

it's going to actually bring up your own understanding and the ideas that already exist in your head and how they connect with this piece of new idea. And of

course, these notes are going to read like absolute looney tunes to other people, but that doesn't really matter because it is your field notes. And in

practice, this looks like ragged notes uh in a book's margins. And this looks like in just unintelligible writing in a in a piece of notepad somewhere. And

this also looks like a few remarks from a two-hour meeting that makes no sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to you because that's kind of the point.

And field notes in this case achieves one of two things. So number one, your note takingaking is actually get a lot more succinct. You'll save a lot more time on taking your notes and you would actually you would actually end up with

a lot more powerful ideas in your note-taking process. Instead of dealing with all this useless junk that you probably won't review in a few years time or a few months time, you would actually end up with a few really

powerful ideas that really resonated with you from a information source, whether it's a book or a lecture or a meeting. And number two, these notes would make the finer details easier to memorize. So a lot of people are afraid

of this field note-taking method is because um it's because they think okay if I don't retain the details what if I need this piece of statistic in the future what if I really really need this one single detail if I don't write it down I'm going to forget about it well you're going to forget about it anyway

because this piece of detail is not contextualized anywhere and what a piece of field note wants you to do is that it wants you to contextualize it wants this uh finer grain of detail to have a Boom. So, by the time you get around to

recalling this piece of fact and by the time you get around to uh recalling the finer details, it helps to have where that detail exists and that usually is attached to a powerful idea in your field notes and that actually comes from

a moment of revelation. Otherwise, the the moment would not be too striking for you and you can't really memorize that piece of detail anyway. And in fact uh if you note down all the things in field notes as it's actually going to make it

a lot easier for you to go back to review the finer details if you ever feel the need to do so. So that's essentially the idea and the proposition here is that in the future instead of coming up with this this anxious

response to note-taking instead of coming up with this kind of I need to get everything out of a book instead consider focusing on a few key points that really impacted you. Consider a few key moments in a novel or a few key

ideas from a non-fiction book or a few key revelations or a few key insights that you've gained from a philosophy book and just use them as anchor points because there's always more time to go back and take more notes. And this is where rereading comes in, which I'll cover in a separate episode. That's a

whole different talk show in itself. But nevertheless, that is the whole distinction between transcription and field notes. And what I'm willing to wager here is that field notes will make your note-taking process a lot more

intuitive. It's going to make it a lot more pleasurable and it's going to let

intuitive. It's going to make it a lot more pleasurable and it's going to let you uh it's going to lead you to a deeper level of understanding of whatever it is that you're reading or you're watching what you're listening

to. So that's all I have for today's quick segment on some quick and easy and

to. So that's all I have for today's quick segment on some quick and easy and practical tips on how to improve your note-taking. And I hope that you guys have enjoyed this format, shorter video, uh more palpable in uh impactful actions

and a lot more practical tips. And I will return here next Wednesday for more. For now, Rob Walden here. Take care and goodbye.

more. For now, Rob Walden here. Take care and goodbye.