The other day my wife had a coaching session with our business coaching company, Shirlaws Cayman. At the end of the session as papers were being gathered and coloured pens put away, Kristen, our coach, asked Christina to take a moment and jot down her ‘key learnings. Why is this so important? Read on.
Every day in business we participate in meetings. We pull out the requisite notepad, scribble away, then generally conclude the meeting with some tasks to be done before the next meeting. What is different about recording ‘key learnings’? I thought about this for a bit, and reflected on my own past reporting of key learnings after my coaching sessions. The list below is not exhaustive, by any means, but reflects my thinking on the value of recording ‘key learnings’.
- IT FORCES REFLECTION. An hour or more in a meeting is a long time to absorb ideas. Taking a few moments at the end of a meeting to reflect on the core issues allows us to pull out the big themes from the clutter and reinforce them in our minds.
- IT CLARIFIES LEARNING. Often we will apply our own context to a meeting and our take away, our understanding, may not be what others in the session intended. A review of key learnings will confirm to all around the table that you either ‘got’ the concept or that perhaps you missed the mark a bit and some time can then be applied to clarify misunderstood points.
- IT SETS UP FUTURE REVIEW BULLET POINTS. Active note taking is a critical skill and some are better at it than others. There are so many ways to take notes. However, regardless the style or quality of the note taking system we use, the act of noting key learnings at the end allows for fast and efficient review and recall later.
- IT CONFIRMS AND AMPLIFIES LEARNING. By pulling out your key learnings others in the group can confirm that you have understood the material or the subject, but also, by actively thinking about them you are increasing the chance of recall in the future.
As I said, this is in no way a complete list. What is interesting is that some well-regarded note takers use similar methods for many of the same reasons outlined above.
Bill Gates is a prodigious reader and attends dozens of conferences and meetings each year. This blog post by James Vornov details the technique that Gates uses to set up his note taking. Gates has since expanded his writing into a blog, The Gates Notes, that places tidied up versions of the notes he has taken on books and other subjects of interest to him, and by extension given his place of global influence, to us.
Tim Ferris of 4 Hour Chef and 4 Hour Workweek fame is nothing if not OCD in the way he tackles any subject. Note taking is one such area of compulsion. For a guy that captures notes on a variety of subjects and drills down almost to a molecular level of understanding, notes, and more importantly finding them, are key. In this older blog post Ferris writes about his system of note keeping and how he indexes and uses keywords (short key learnings in a way) to rapidly find information in an analog system of notebooks.
This subject area is very personal to the user and many of you will have developed your own hybrid system of note taking, keywording, and follow-up recall. Take a moment to write a comment on this blog below if you have a system you are proud of and feel free to share links to other sites.
