Note-taking: methods, systems, and templates for capturing what matters
Good note-taking isn't about writing more, but thinking better - capturing purpose, meaning, and connections that actually support understanding.
Good note-taking is not just about writing more. While writing large, extensive notes, if not done right, they are more often that not wasting your time and energy instead of helping you. Good note-taking is done by focusing on capturing the right things, summarizing them in a way that resonates with your mind and organizing them so they are easily retrievable and connected to your other notes.
In this article we'll go through some common methods, workflows and lightweight systems you can use to improve your note taking.
What is good note taking?
It is important to preface this article with the importance of note-taking being a very subject practice, so despite there being scientifically effective systems and methods for taking notes, it all comes down to how you personally get use out of your notes. Remember, notes are meant for yourself, except if you're actively taking notes for someone else, like in a meeting, and thus a very subjective act.
Many of the methods and systems we'll be discussing in the article can be used as inspiration in your own personal note-taking, so you can mix-and-match different methodologies to craft your own style of notes.
With this said, let's dig into what good note-taking is:
Good notes have a purpose
There are many purposes of taking and saving notes, with some of the most common ones being:
To help remember a subject
To brainstorm and deepen understanding of a subject
To externalize thoughts and reduce cognitive load
To create a reference you can return to later
To communicate or share understanding with others (meetings, documentation, teaching)
The important thing to notice here is that each purpose implies a different kind of note.
If your goal is recall, your notes should be concise, structured, and optimized for retrieval.If your goal is understanding, your notes should reflect thinking, not transcription.If your goal is sharing, clarity and context matter more than personal shorthand.
A lot of people skip this step entirely. They don’t decide why they’re writing certain notes, they just write. While the result is often large, beautiful and well-formatted notes that look productive, they don't actually fulfill their purpose.
Notes without purpose are just storage, which alone does not equal understanding.
Notes are tools, not artifacts
A common trap (especially seen among students) is treating notes as an end product. The goal becomes making them complete, pretty, or exhaustive. It's common seeing the "ideal" student in class having set up their notes to cover everything with beautiful charts, definitions, quotes, slides, you name it, and the usual thought is often that this person's notes are certainly in order.
But if the actual process of the note-taking didn't actually make you think, question, compress, or connect any ideas, then very little learning has actually happened. Again, the notes are now just storage.
Good notes are not meant to impress anyone. They're meant to change how your brain understands a topic, which is why the process of note-taking is just as important, if not more important, than the resulting notes.
As Al Khan from LeanAnki puts it in his post on taking more effective notes:
Good note-takers condense and synthesize the information in their brain before writing them down. They learn while taking down notes.
This is why straight copying, from slides, books, articles, or even recordings, is usually a weak strategy. Copying is a passive activity. It bypasses the hard and valuable part, which is the internal interpretation of the resources being studied.
Exception
It's important to note that there are exceptions to this, and that this article is biased towards personal notes. There are cases where notes as artifacts are more important than the process, one of which is when the notes are meant to be shared among peers, such as meeting notes. In this case, the result of the note is more important than the process. If you're interested in improving how you take notes during meetings, we have an entire post dedicated just to taking better meeting notes.
Writing notes is thinking
For most of the purposes listed above, effective notes require you to actively use your brain while writing them. Of course, if you're writing notes as means of future reminders or similar, the process may not be more important than the note itself, but even then, the act of writing that note will subtly ingrain the reminder in your subconscious, making it naturally easier to remember without the physical reminder. This focus on the process is also something we discuss in our post about how to make good outlines for your writing.
Below are some easy tips and techniques you can apply while writing your notes, that puts the process ahead of the outcome:
Rephrase ideas instead of copying them
Ask "why does this matter?"
Note what you don't understand yet
Connect new information to things you already know
Putting focus on the thinking part of note-taking is one of the core mechanisms in many popular note-taking methods - so with this in mind, let's dig into some of the most common and popular note-taking methods that can act as a framework for improving your note-taking.
Popular note-taking methods
Methods are ways to put a "framework" around your notes. This can in part be by enforcing helpful structures to your notes or incorporating steps into the note-taking workflow that help make your notes more valuable to you. It's again important to note that you are not obliged to stay loyal to a specific note-taking method, and that is recommended that you tailor your note-taking workflow to what best suits you.
Cornell Method
The Cornell Method is a structured approach that splits your notes into three parts:
Main notes – the core ideas, written during the lecture, reading, or meeting
Cue / summary section – short prompts, questions, or keywords
Summary – a brief synthesis written after the fact
The real power of the Cornell Method is not the layout itself, but the forced reflection. Writing the summary requires you to step back and ask: What actually mattered here? The cue section then turns your notes into a lightweight self-testing tool, which is great for recall.
Works best when:
Studying for exams or learning structured material
You want to balance understanding with memorization
You can afford a short review pass after taking the notes
If you skip the summary step, the Cornell Method loses most of its value. The thinking happens after the notes are written.
Outline Method
The Outline Method organizes information hierarchically using headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Ideas flow from general to specific, making relationships explicit.
This method is simple, flexible, and familiar, which is why many people default to it without realizing they're doing so. When done well, it helps you see the structure of a topic at a glance.
The main risk is slipping into transcription mode, where everything becomes a nested bullet without any real compression or prioritization.
Works best when:
The material already has a clear structure (lectures, textbooks, documentation)
You want clarity and logical flow
You're willing to actively decide what deserves a higher or lower level
Good outline notes are opinionated. They reflect your understanding of what is important.
Mapping / Mind-map Method
Mind-mapping is a visual approach where ideas branch out from a central concept. Instead of linear notes, you create a network of related ideas.
This method mirrors how the brain often associates concepts, which can make it powerful for exploration and sense-making. It encourages connections over completeness.
However, mind maps can become messy or overwhelming if overused for dense or highly detailed material.
Works best when:
Brainstorming or exploring a new topic
Understanding relationships between ideas
You want to surface connections rather than details
Many people use mind maps as a first pass, then later convert them into more structured notes.
Charting Method
The Charting Method organizes notes into tables, columns, or matrices. Each row represents an item, and each column represents a category or attribute.
This method shines when comparing things side-by-side. It reduces cognitive load by making differences and similarities explicit.
It is less suitable for open-ended thinking, but extremely effective for clarity.
Works best when:
Comparing concepts, options, or cases
Studying factual or categorical information
You want quick scanning and retrieval
If you ever find yourself writing the same type of note repeatedly, charting is worth considering.
Sentence Method
The Sentence Method is exactly what it sounds like: writing one idea per line as a sentence. Each new thought gets its own line, without worrying too much about structure upfront.
This method is fast and low-friction, which makes it useful in real-time situations. The trade-off is that structure and meaning often need to be added later.
Works best when:
Taking fast-paced lecture or meeting notes
You don't want to interrupt your thinking flow
You plan to review and clean up later
Think of this method as capturing raw material for future thinking, not finished notes.
Zettelkasten (as a linking-and-thinking system)
Zettelkasten is less a note-taking method and more a thinking system. Instead of large topic-based notes, you write many small, self-contained notes, each capturing a single idea.
What makes Zettelkasten powerful is linking. Notes are connected to other notes through explicit references, forming a growing network of thought over time. Meaning emerges from relationships, not folders.
This system strongly emphasizes writing in your own words and treating notes as long-term intellectual assets.
Works best when:
Doing long-term learning, research, or writing
You want ideas to compound over time
You enjoy revisiting and evolving your thinking
Zettelkasten is not about capturing everything. It's about capturing what changed your thinking.
Which method should you choose?
No method is universally better than another. Each enforces different kinds of thinking, and each aligns with different purposes of notes.
To re-iterate, the most effective note-takers don't rigidly follow one specific method, they borrow structure when it helps, and abandon it when it gets in the way. There's no need to brute-force your note-taking style into a certain method or structure if it doesn't align with the way your brain works. The goal is not to be consistent, but to be intentional about the process, purpose and resulting note.
Turning methods into a workflow
Knowing different note-taking methods is useful, but the real benefit comes from how you use them together over time. Most effective note-takers don’t take notes once, they capture, revisit, compress, and connect them.
A simple, lightweight workflow could look like this:
Capture freely using a low-friction method (sentence method, rough outline, quick mind map)
Review shortly after and decide what actually matters
Compress the notes into summaries, charts, or clearer structures
Connect useful ideas to existing notes or projects
This doesn't need to be rigid or time-consuming. Even a five-minute review can turn passive notes into active understanding.
Connecting notes over time
In a similar way to having a workflow on a note-per-note basis, it can also be a good idea to have a broader system for how you organize and connect your notes.
If you want a concrete way to do this using simple building blocks like folders, tags, titles, and links, see our guide on how to better organize your notes.
By nature, notes become far more useful after they're conceived, if they gradually connect them as you learn about topics and subjects. Connecting your notes and creating a knowledge graph of your entire note-taking system is a practice often done when creating knowledge bases.
Knowledge bases aim to organically evolve as they grow, resembling how our brains work by clustering similar information. The point isn't to create a perfect web of notes, but to make it easy to build on top of previous notes, again so notes aren't just storage but something you can retrieve to amplify new learnings.
If you're interested in how knowledge bases work and how they can be used in different settings (personal or business-wise), be sure to check our article on what knowledge bases are.