Embracing My OCD: Taking Notes and Rewriting Them

Next up as I “embrace my OCD” is the topic of taking notes. You have heard about my binder in prior posts but to go deeper I should discuss the notes within the binder. I have pages for people, pages for projects and pages for topics. During meetings I take the notes down sorted by date and topic. These may be key points, open items or decisions that have been made. I try to capture as much information as possible and I find that keeping it organized by section and topic allows me to reference it later (which I do very often).

I find that I process information best by writing it down and that is why I like taking notes. I then will look at them and if the points have been updated or I don’t like the content in there (e.g. I have taken notes for items that no longer matter) I will often re-write the notes. This rewriting perpetuates me to remember the key messages. I will also rewrite notes for people if most of the actions have been closed, as they are no longer ‘note worthy’ and are messing up my pretty pages.

I recognize it is almost 2014 but I do still like to take notes on a physical format and then go back to revisit them…over and over again.