Improve your note-taking: 5 techniques

Although you are very attentive, your short-term memory capacity is limited. Without notes, it's hard to remember everything from an oral or written speech. It could be a meeting, training, conference, seminar, etc. And even harder to remember all the details, at least the outlines, after a while.

According to the website www.medium.com, the average person reads between 200 and 300 words per minute during a silent reading session.

A conversation, to be understood, is between 150 and 200 words per minute. When writing on a keyboard, the average rate is 32 words per minute. Writing by hand varies between 22 and 31 words per minute.

Unless you can break the world typing record of 150 words per minute, you may struggle without a good method. So, note-taking does not mean writing everything down, unlike shorthand.

Your aims are to listen actively, to understand better, to keep a written record and to be able to organize your ideas afterwards.

There are many techniques on the net, your friends will recommend this and that to you. You could try them all, at the risk of wasting precious time. That's why we've chosen the five best techniques to improve your note-taking.

Let's start with the 5W method. This method is widely used in journalism and police investigations. It allows you to leave no information out and to bring logic to your note-taking by placing context in time and space.

We will then teach you the Cornell method and mind mapping. To write faster, we will discuss the principle of SMS language, which shortens the content as much as possible while keeping it understandable for you.

This is the most important thing; you don't want to end up with incomprehensible notes. Finally, we'll give you some tips on how to tinker with your computer to make it more comfortable.

Taking this online course will be a great benefit to you: you will be able to come back to points that are still unclear to you. And you'll see, you'll save time and performance.