Re-working Your Notes Improves Your Creativity

Although I attend many meetings a week and write stacks of notes I’d be exaggerating if I said I got a lot out of them. The notes, that is, not the meetings!

I am, however, not the only one it seems. Talking to a bunch of teachers at a planning meeting the other I noticed how all of them were keeping copious notes during the two hour session.

When, however, I asked them about what they did with their notes after the meeting I was surprised by their response: most of them said they would either keep them for reference, file them away or “probably never look at them again”, as several admitted.
Too often people use note-taking as a means of keeping awake during a meeting. Or a chance to doodle. But if you develop the proper kind of routine you can actually turn your notes into wonderful ideas, plans or schemes that will help you reach or establish new goals .

The important thing to realise, however, is that approaching your notes with an “active” frame of mind rather than a “passive” frame of mind can make all the difference to your creativity. In short, don’t just close your notebook and forget about what you’ve written.

Instead, after a meeting, seminar or session of note-taking alone with your book(s), find time to review your notes within 24 hours.

• Edit for words and phrases that are illegible or don’t make sense.
• Write out abbreviated words that might be unclear later.
• Edit with a different colored pen to distinguish between the separate times you worked on your notes.
• Re-write the notes in the form of a mind map so you can visualize your notes more clearly.
• Actively note things of importance, and perhaps create a “important ideas” section in your notebook.
• Transfer your notes onto your computer and simplifying them in an outliner or mind map software

At the very least this will help you remember what you were taking notes about more clearly. What’s more, the actual process of reviewing your notes opens up the possibility for new ideas. Just as editing a text a day or two after you wrote it allows you to bring a certain mental freshness to the piece, you also gain a more creative insight into the work you’ve noted. A creative space of possibility, so too speak.

As the British mathematician & philosoher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) once said: “Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.”