A few months ago, I started carrying a notebook again.

I hadn't done that in years. But I'd recently fallen back in love with reading, and something interesting started happening. I kept wanting to capture things. I'd be reading and want to write down a sentence. I'd be standing in front of a painting at a gallery and suddenly have a question I couldn't shake. I'd think of a book I wanted to read, or get an idea for something I wanted to write, or feel one of those quiet little nudges that shows up out of nowhere.

And instead of letting those thoughts disappear like I usually do, I started writing them down.

That's when it hit me: note-taking was never really about remembering information. It's about paying attention to your own life.

That's what this post is about.

Why I think we're losing the art of taking notes

We consume an enormous amount of information every day. Podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, books, Substack newsletters, conversations, museums, courses, AI tools, documentaries — it never stops.

But consumption isn't the same thing as learning. You can take in fifty pieces of content in a week and remember almost none of them by Friday.

Here's the line I keep coming back to: information becomes knowledge when you stop consuming it and start interacting with it.

Taking notes is one of the simplest forms of that interaction. Cornell's Learning Strategies Center makes a point I love — good notes aren't necessarily the most comprehensive notes. They're the notes you'll actually use. And there's research to back up something that feels intuitive: handwriting tends to encourage deeper processing than simply transcribing what you hear or read.

Why this matters even more as we get older

I think this hits differently for women, and I don't think that's an accident.

So much of a woman's life is spent being useful to everyone else. You're the one who remembers the appointments, the birthdays, the things your kids said when they were four, the things your friends are going through, the things your partner forgot. You become the keeper of everyone's memory before you ever get around to keeping your own.

And then life moves — a new decade, a new season, kids leaving or arriving, a career shift, menopause, a diagnosis, a move, a loss — and you look up one day and realize you can't quite remember what you thought, what you wanted, what you believed, before all of it happened. Not because anything is wrong with you. Just because nobody was writing any of it down.

This is where a notebook becomes something more than a productivity tool. It becomes a record of you — not the version of you that shows up for everyone else, but the one thinking her own thoughts, asking her own questions, noticing her own life.

Writing things down doesn't just help you remember facts. It helps you stay in relationship with yourself as you change. You can look back at what you wrote five years ago and see a version of you who was scared about something you've since walked through. You can notice what kept showing up long before you had the language for it. You can watch yourself become who you are now, instead of just arriving there and wondering how you got there.

That's not something you get back once the years have gone by without it. It's something you have to be building now.

So if you take nothing else from this post, take this: start documenting your own thinking, not just everyone else's needs. Future-you will be grateful someone was paying attention.

note taking inspiration via @writeandtell

The neuroscience of taking notes

Why does note-taking actually help you remember things?

Because good note-taking forces you to process information instead of just receiving it. You're constantly making small decisions:

What matters here?
What do I actually think about this?
What do I want to remember?
How would I explain this to someone else?
What does this connect to?

That's a completely different mental process than highlighting an entire page and calling it a day.

Studies comparing handwriting to laptop note-taking have found that handwriting tends to lead to better conceptual understanding, while typing produces more notes overall — you capture more, but you process less. A 2024 meta-analysis pulling together 24 separate studies found a similar pattern: an achievement advantage linked to taking and reviewing handwritten notes, even though typed notes were more voluminous.

There's also a study I find genuinely fascinating — handwritten note-takers outperformed people who simply photographed the material in front of them, even when both groups had equal chances to review it later. Researchers pointed to reduced mind-wandering as one likely factor behind that gap.

The takeaway isn't "handwriting is magic." It's this: the goal was never to capture everything. The goal is to think about what you're capturing.

The difference between collecting information and collecting ideas

You don't need to write down everything you encounter. That's not the assignment.

Instead, I've started teaching myself to capture six specific things:

Something you want to remember — a fact, a quote, a concept, a name, a book, an artist.
Something you want to understand — a real question, not a rhetorical one.
Something you want to explore — a rabbit hole worth falling into.
Something you want to create — a blog post idea, a podcast topic, a business idea, a recipe, a painting.
Something that moved you — a sentence, an image, a conversation, a song.
Something that keeps returning — this is your intuition category. If a thought won't leave you alone, write it down.

This is where note-taking stops being a study skill and starts being a way of paying attention to your own life.

This isn't a new idea — it's called a commonplace book

If any of this feels familiar, that's because it is. What I'm describing has a name, and it's been around for a very long time: a commonplace book.

For centuries, readers and thinkers have kept a single notebook where they copied down passages, quotes, and observations that struck them — not as a diary of what happened in their day, but as a collection of what mattered to them from what they read and noticed. Marcus Aurelius did some version of this. So did John Locke, who wrote an entire method for organizing one. Virginia Woolf kept them. So did countless people whose names history never recorded — because a commonplace book was never really about being a writer or a scholar. It was just a way of paying attention.

What I'm calling a "thinking notebook" or a "monthly notes" system is really just a modern version of the same instinct: don't let the things that move you disappear. Write them down somewhere they can accumulate, so that over time, the collection starts to say something about who you are.

You're not inventing a new habit here. You're picking one back up.

My favorite note-taking rule: don't write down everything

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: don't become a transcription machine.

If you're reading a book, you don't need to copy the author word for word. Write down what the book makes you think.

Here's what I mean. Instead of writing:

"The author says women often abandon their creative impulses because of..."

Try writing:

"I wonder where I've abandoned my own creativity?"

See the shift? The first is a summary of someone else's idea. The second is your thought, sparked by someone else's idea. That's the whole point. The value of a note isn't in storing someone else's words — it's in connecting those words to your own thinking.

The three notebooks I actually recommend

This is the closest thing I have to a real system, and it's simpler than it sounds.

1. The purse notebook

This is your capture device. A Moleskine, a $2 notebook from Target or a cute composition book, whatever you actually enjoy carrying. It goes everywhere — the museum, the coffee shop, dinner, the bookstore, on a trip, on your nightstand. You're not trying to make it pretty. You're trying to catch a thought before it disappears.

2. The monthly notes app

This is your digital brain. I already did this naturally before I ever thought of it as a "system" — one running note per month, in whatever notes app you already use, where everything goes. Mine looks like this:

AUGUST 🩷🧡💛🤎

Books I want to read
Podcast ideas
Things I want to research
Random thoughts
Quotes
Business ideas
Things intuition keeps putting on my heart
Things I noticed
Questions
Things I want to buy
Places I want to go
People I want to reach out to

One note. One month. Everything goes in. It doesn't need to be a complicated productivity system to work.

3. The thinking notebook/journal

This one is different from the pocket notebook. This is where you actually sit down and think — questions, reflections, longer ideas, things you're trying to work out. It's the notebook you bring when you're reading or studying something deeply, not the one you grab on your way out the door.

Take notes according to the situation

A generic "take better notes" tip doesn't help much on its own. Here's what it actually looks like in different moments.

When reading a book, write down:

Ideas that surprise you
Ideas you disagree with
Ideas you want to remember
Questions
Connections to your own life
Quotes
Words you don't know
Things you want to research
Things you want to implement

And above everything else, ask: what did this book make me think about?

At an art gallery, don't try to remember every painting. Instead, ask:

What do I notice?
What do I wonder?
What does this make me feel?
Why am I drawn to this?
What would I like to know about this artist?

You're not documenting the artwork. You're documenting your response to the artwork.

During a podcast, don't transcribe. Write down: the one idea you want to remember, the thing you disagree with, the question it raises, the idea it sparks in you.

During a conversation, capture the thing that stays with you. Sometimes the most valuable note isn't "she said X." It's "why did that comment stay with me?"

The "question list" — one of my favorite ideas

Start keeping a running list of questions. Not answers. Questions.

Because learning almost always starts with a question, not a conclusion. Try collecting things like:

Why am I fascinated by this?
Why does this idea keep coming back?
What do I want to understand better?
What am I curious about right now?
What would I love to learn this year?
What book could answer this question?
Who knows more about this than I do?
What does this remind me of?
What am I being drawn toward?

Carry that list with you. Over time, it starts to function like a personal curriculum for your own life — one nobody assigned you but you.

Your intuition has somewhere to land

This is where note-taking and something a little more personal start to overlap for me.

I want to be careful here — I'm not claiming neuroscience proves intuition, or that every nudge is divine. That's a different conversation, and I don't want to overstate it.

But I do believe there's more than one way to be spoken to. Scripture, prayer, other people, circumstances, wisdom — and sometimes that quiet internal nudge that says, pay attention to this.

Writing the nudge down doesn't mean every thought is some kind of sign. It simply means I'm willing to pay attention. That distinction matters to me.

Maybe intuition isn't always an answer. Sometimes it's a question that refuses to leave you alone.

Divine breadcrumbs

I've started calling these moments "divine breadcrumbs" — not as a formal belief system, just as a personal framework that helps me notice.

A book. A sentence. A person. A painting. A question. A podcast. An idea. A recurring thought. A conversation. A sudden desire to learn something you've never cared about before.

You don't have to know where any single one of these is going. You just write it down. Then, every so often, you look back — and you start to notice patterns you couldn't see in the moment.

This is where a note system stops being a productivity tool and starts becoming something closer to a record of your own becoming.

How to make your notes actually useful

Here's the problem nobody talks about: most people who start taking notes end up with thousands of them they never look at again.

So build in a simple weekly review. Once a week, ask yourself:

What did I learn?
What surprised me?
What am I still thinking about?
What keeps recurring?
What do I want to explore next?
Is there anything here I want to turn into something?

That last question matters most if you're a writer, a creator, or just someone who likes making things. A note can become an idea. An idea can become an essay, a podcast, a post, a product, or just a really good conversation.

My "better notes" formula

If you want a simple framework to hang all of this on:

CAPTURE → QUESTION → CONNECT → CREATE

Capture what catches your attention.
Question why it matters or what you want to understand about it.
Connect it to something you already know, experienced, read, or believe.
Create something with it — write, talk, teach, research, make, or change something.

The different ways you can actually take notes

There's no single right method. Some options worth experimenting with:

Handwritten notebook
Phone notes app
Voice memos
Annotations in books
Kindle or e-reader highlights
Index cards
Cornell notes
Mind maps
Bullet-point notes
Question-and-answer notes
Digital knowledge databases

Cornell's own learning center recommends experimenting with different systems rather than assuming one method is universally best. So don't build a complicated system before you've built the habit. A plain notebook you actually use beats an elaborate app you abandon in three weeks.

What NOT to do

Don't try to capture everything.
Don't turn reading into homework.
Don't copy someone else's words without thinking about them.
Don't make your notes so aesthetic that you're afraid to actually use them.
Don't create 47 categories.
Don't let the perfect note-taking app become a procrastination tool.
Don't assume every note has to become something.

Sometimes a note is just a note. Its whole job was to help you notice something. That's enough.

Coming back to why this matters

I started carrying a notebook again because I wanted to remember things. But somewhere along the way, I realized I was doing something else entirely.

I was becoming more observant. More curious. More engaged with the world around me. More willing to follow a question instead of dismissing it. More aware of what actually fascinates me.

In a world that's constantly telling us what to watch, what to buy, what to think about, and what to care about, taking notes is a small act of sovereignty. You're deciding: this matters to me. I'm curious about this. I want to remember this. I want to follow this.

And maybe that's one of the simplest ways to start hearing yourself again.

Frequently Asked Questions About Taking Notes

Why is taking notes important? Taking notes turns passive consumption into active thinking. Instead of just absorbing information, you're deciding what matters to you, which helps you retain it and actually use it later.

Does taking notes actually help you remember things? Yes — but not because writing something down magically stores it in your brain. It helps because the process of deciding what to write, and how to phrase it, forces you to engage with the material rather than just receive it.

Is it better to take notes by hand or type them? Research suggests handwriting tends to support deeper conceptual understanding, while typing lets you capture more volume. If your goal is genuinely understanding and remembering, handwriting has an edge. If your goal is capturing a large amount of information quickly, typing may serve you better.

How do you take notes while reading a book? Write down ideas that surprise you, ideas you disagree with, questions, connections to your own life, and quotes you don't want to forget. Most importantly, ask yourself what the book is making you think about — not just what it says.

Should I take notes while reading or after reading? Both have value. Jotting quick reactions in the moment captures thoughts before they disappear, while a short reflection after a chapter or the whole book helps you process the bigger picture.

How do I take notes without writing everything down? Focus on capturing things you want to remember, understand, explore, create, or that moved you — not a full transcript of what you read or heard.

What should I write down when reading a book? Surprising ideas, points of disagreement, questions, personal connections, quotes, unfamiliar words, and anything you want to research or apply.

What is the best note-taking method? There isn't one universal best method — it depends on your goals and how you think. Experimenting with a few approaches (handwritten notebook, Cornell notes, digital app) is more useful than assuming one is objectively superior.

What is the Cornell note-taking method? It's a structured system that divides a page into sections for main notes, key cues or questions, and a summary, designed to make review easier and notes more usable.

Is it better to highlight or take notes? Taking notes generally requires more active processing than highlighting, which is why it tends to support better understanding and recall. Highlighting can still be useful for quick reference, but it's a more passive activity.

How can I organize my notes? Keep it simple: a pocket notebook for quick capture, a single running digital note per month for everything else, and a separate notebook for deeper thinking. Complexity is usually the enemy of consistency.

How often should I review my notes? A weekly review is a good starting rhythm — enough to notice patterns and turn a note into something, without letting notes pile up unread for months.

How do I take notes from podcasts? Skip transcribing. Capture the one idea you want to remember, anything you disagree with, and any question or new idea the episode sparks in you.

How do I take notes from a museum or art gallery? Instead of documenting every piece, write down what you notice, what you wonder, what you feel, and why you're drawn to a particular work. You're documenting your response, not the artwork itself.

Can taking notes improve focus? Yes — research comparing note-taking methods has linked handwriting in particular to reduced mind-wandering compared to simply photographing or passively reviewing material.

What should I do with old notes? Revisit them during a periodic review. Look for recurring themes or ideas, and consider whether any of them are ready to become something — a piece of writing, a project, or a conversation worth having.