How I finally got the habit of productive note taking
For many years I tried to get the habit of regular note taking, but it was only once I started to write research notes for clients that I understood how to do it properly.
My first proper job was working for a big British IT consultancy called Logica. Logica did serious IT - finance, aerospace, military, intelligence services, that kind of stuff. I worked in the finance division, just off Oxford Street in central London. I worked on a system called Fastwire, which acted as the switch for banks to send money internationally. The system moved hundreds of millions of dollars every day between international banks, and it couldn’t go wrong. So we used rigorous software development techniques, the kind of thing NASA does. Which was simultaneously very interesting to find out about, and extremely boring in practice. There’s no room for creativity when every single thing you do has a strict established process. Even the documentation procedures had documentation procedures.
Anyway, I was a newbie, and there were a number of old-hands (you became extremely valuable very quickly with these skills). One of the things that fascinated me, and I wanted to emulate, was that all of the old hands had “day books” - Black ‘n’ Red notebooks where they dilligently wrote down everything they did every day. Some of the engineers had shelves of identical notebooks going back years, and they could reference back to anything they had done in their job.
I recognised the utility of this. There was also something fascinating in the neatness of it that appealed to me. So I decided this was something I should do myself. So I tried to keep such a notebook. But habits are hard, right? It never stuck. I tried again and again over the years - different types of notebook, journals, digital apps - I could never make the habit stick.
But now I’ve finally got it. How did I do it? Not by trying to stick to the habit of writing things down. Writing things down for the sake of it isn’t actually very useful. I finally managed to get the habit by understanding what I wanted to keep track of, what was useful, and how to store it.
Using a journal, where the main reference to a note is the date, isn’t the way. If you just want to keep a record of stuff, but not actually use it, then a chronological journal may make sense. A diary of emotions or whatever, notes for your autobiography. But for useful notes, chronological tools are not the answer.
The answer came to me by making notes for other people - for my clients. I do research and write findings and recommendations for clients. This means writing a lot - writing about the findings and recommendations. Of course these need to be useful for the client - I need to spend my time doing stuff that is useful for them, and I need to communicate that to them. So I write individual research notes for clients, containing sections like Issue, Current status, recommendations, detailed findings, Links and references. These notes need to be conscise, useful and actionable. I realised that what I needed to do was exactly what I was doing for clients, but for future me.
So that’s what I now do. I make research notes to help future me take action.
