Part of our team just spent a few days at the Digital Summit conference here in Atlanta, and it was excellent. We picked up some great tips and ideas that we’ve already started to use, and I’m sure more will come out as we unpack further.
My thought for today is “what does unpacking really mean?”
More specifically, I saw a number of folks taking photos of slides that had solid content on them. I agree with them taking photos of those, but I’m curious what they did with the photo after the conference was over. In most cases, I think the answer is “not much”.
I think that’s the problem with a lot of note-taking in general. There are noteworthy benefits to simply taking notes when it comes to understanding and memorization, but the real value comes in processing your notes afterward.
I took most of my notes at Digital Summit directly on my laptop into Tana and I’ve spent time working through them, trying out new apps that were suggested, adding some pieces to Anki, and simply making sure that I will remember and utilize the parts that stood out to me.
In a similar vein, I watched Robert take many pages of notes by hand, but he’s since gone back through them and summarized them in a post you can find here. I suspect in the coming days he’ll dissect them further and have some ideas for things we can implement at GreenMellen.
I try to be good about taking solid notes, thought sometimes I fail to do so. When I’m able to get solid notes, though, I always try to take the time to work through them and make sure the gems don’t get forgotten. If I don’t, why did I bother to take the notes in the first place?
Taking a photo of a slide is a good first step, but it doesn’t help much if it never leaves your phone.
