Finding little time savers that worked for me was key.
#MACDOWN CITATIONS SERIAL#
Another example is my use of "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation" (aka Spritz) for getting through the initial pass of reading academic articles and textbook readings in graduate school. For example, I learned a lot of ways to automate my work just because I got sick of repeating the same steps over and over when doing reporting and other admin tasks.
If I understand the needed outcome, I will focus more on getting that outcome than the steps needed to get there. I am the epitome of laziness when taking on tasks. “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” I often think about the Bill Gates (but really Frank Gilbreath quote of: If you are feeling up to it, you definitely should! I think if I had tried to fit into a mold of the "perfect student", I would have floundered in the second half of my education. I thrive when I have a to-do list created every day, its just so hard to get myself to do one consistently that it rarely happens. I could imagine myself speaking out random thoughts to it for it to take notes for me. I look forward to the future of digital assistants if they ever move from the cloud to a local machine. However, I have a huge drawer at my work desk filled with little scribbles on notepad paper of a variety of things that I will never look at again. Sometimes I will take notes so the person that I am meeting with feels more comfortable with the conversation, as note-taking can be seen as a form of active listening for people.
#MACDOWN CITATIONS SOFTWARE#
I even got to the point where I wouldn't type out reports for grad school and instead used a voice software to speak my thoughts out loud.Īt work, I will sometimes take notes but it is mostly for requirements gathering or just a subtle to-do prompt for later. Instead, I have a google drive filled with every class lecture I attended. I finished a masters degree without creating these huge binders filled with cryptic text and short-hand. However, the way that I work and learn appears to be successful for me. It has worked out well enough, but it does contribute to my impostor syndrome. My mind just feels like its permanently set to big-picture mode. A recent HEXACO personality test found my level of perfectionism to fall well below the 10th percentile (10th-90th percentile score was 2.38-4.38, mine was 1.75). So I just stopped and turned the recorder on. I transitioned to recording lectures and replaying them on my walks/car rides and then when I am working on a project, I will document out a mental model and go from there.Īt some point during my undergrad, I found I was too busy writing things down rather than digesting what I was told. I quit taking notes about halfway through undergrad. I have tried to be a diligent notetaker but overall it feels like a waste of my time. If I write a note down, 99% of the time I won't look at it again. Memories fade, knowledge dies, but the written word may be eternal. This adds tremendous value to my life, I feel my memory is a little bit better off, I can quickly find references and ideas from a mass amount of different sources, and it has just made life a little bit easier to deal with by offloading my thoughts and backing them up to somewhere else. Easy to read through, write, sort, and create hierarchies. I also have a few 'Ongoing' folders that hold my notes on books, location research, general ideas, and a few other things.Īnother suggestion is to use bulletpoints, by far the best method of writing notes I have ever found. 09 2020) and place all my notes, documents, and various other forms in there.
I can't write by hand, but I do take them all in Word, and I create a new folder every month (ex. I treat my journals as a second brain and I end up writing about 3-10 pages of notes every day. I write notes on music I listen to, books I read, videos on YouTube, articles, and things that happen in my day to day.