SUYU Notes — A Recap

^Use these summary notes to remind yourself of the main ideas and techniques that make up the SUYU Notes system. ^These are written as notes that will remind you of the concepts and help you use them — this is not an article to 'teach' the system from scratch. A key to the symbols / markup used in these notes is below.

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Key Principles:

A good note-making system will help you balance the effort you put into producing notes with the benefit you get from using them. )) Maintaining this balance is what it means to stay in the ‘smart zone’ – see diagrams below. The underlying logic of this is:

• High quality notes generally take a lot of effort to make.

• There’s not enough time to make all your notes high quality.

• You won’t end up using all the notes you make either– not all notes produce benefits.

• If we rarely or never use a set of notes, we get very little benefit from their existence.

• Therefore, we need a way to prioritise which notes to invest effort into; and

• We need to rationalise how much effort to put into the different notes we make;

• We can get the maximum benefit from our efforts; however

• We must make upfront decisions about the effort and quality, before we know if it will pay off.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Being iterative in your note-making will balance the level of effort and benefit over time. This means you are learning from attempts to actually use and rely on your notes which gives you the clearest possible understanding of how to make the notes better.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Smart note-taking usually means finding ways to make the smallest possible upfront investments (in your notes) with the largest potential payoff later on when those notes are being used. This is because the future need and value of the notes is often unknowable at the time of making the notes.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

We create and use notes far more often than most people recognise. For example. goals, recipes, shopping lists, to do lists, journaling, brainstorming, handovers, etc. are all different notes. Whenever you are converting information from a thought your mind to an external placeholder outside of your mind (and predominantly storing the information as words), you are making notes.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

The primary reason we take notes is because we don’t want to take the risk of ‘losing’ the information by failing to keep it in our minds — in other words, we need to store and manipulate important information outside of our mind until we can trust that it has been retained in our mind.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Always write notes as if they are for someone else who ‘wasn’t there’ even when you are certain the only reader of the notes will be yourself in the future. )) this was because, by definition, if you need to return to the notes well into the future, you will have forgotten most of the details of when you were exposed to the information. So, at that point in time, you will need it conveyed to you in a way that doesn’t rely on you remembering these details.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Becoming more consistent at making and storing notes creates a virtuous cycle. The more predictable you become to your future self, who becomes more consistent at checking for old notes, and then benefits from the notes more. This makes you more motivated to make and store notes for them, and so on. 

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

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The SUYU Notes system:

The SUYU Notes system is a double-loop cycle that keeps you iterative and keeps you from over-or under-investing in your different notes. The goal is to move your notes through the cycle quickly and repeat the cycle, to really find out how good your notes need to be, rather than guessing at this.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

It has four steps:

1. You encounter information in the world you expect to be important or useful in the future.

2. You capture some notes that represent the information.

3. You improve those notes by making them easier or better to use.

4. You use the notes to take better actions in the world.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

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Practical Note-Making Techniques

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CAPTURING notes

It should be extremely easy to start making a note – no more than 15 seconds. If it takes too long to start, you may miss information or not bother. A note you don’t take has no value and no potential, whereas a  note that you do manage to take, even if it’s hasty or low quality, can still help you. It can still be improved and made useful.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Speed matters – take your initial ‘capture’ notes in a way that gives you the option of writing a lot of notes quickly. )) Often people will tell you to summarise and only capture the ‘main’ points, but if you are a complete novice in the topic, or there’s some advantage (or requirement) to capturing detailed notes (like meeting minutes), then speed and coverage become important. It’s also easier to cut details from notes than it is to add detail over time. )) # From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

The indented bullets method is a good option (sometimes called “outlining”). It allows you to structure the information for coherence while also capturing it quickly.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Write notes in your own words where possible. This helps your ‘current self’ to solidify their understanding of the material and helps you/them remember it. It also resonates better with your ‘future self’ who may be re-learning this material after some time. There is not always enough time to write in your own words, but there is always a small overlay you can add. For instance, you could:

• Write a summary/debrief paragraph of about 100 words at the top of your notes document (approx. 2 minute investment); or

• Write a summary/debrief sentence within each section (approx. 30 seconds per section); or

• Write a single sentence to your future self about what the notes say and how they could be useful (approx. 20 second investment).

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

The title of your notes should tell the user enough to know what they are and if they’ll be useful (without reading them!). )) This takes a few extra seconds, but has a huge payoff in 5, 10, 20 years when you’ve forgotten most of the context. A good formula is:

• [YYMMDD] – the date backwards

• What the notes are e.g. notes, list, brainstorm, minutes, etc.

• Where they are from e.g. book, course, meeting, etc.

• What they are about i.e. the topic.

• 240408 Notes from SUYU Notes course about note taking and productivity

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Store your notes in the fewest places possible )) The less places your notes could be stored, the more chance your future self has of finding them (and then benefitting from them), which makes it more meaningful and motivating to make notes to add to these locations, and so on. It’s a virtuous cycle.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

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IMPROVING notes

Try to only spend time improving your notes when you are already handling them. Mostly, this means making the improvements when you have the notes open to use them. You could also make a few improvements immediately after capturing the notes (but keep these kind of improvements small).

This eliminates the need to find a separate time to come back and fix up old notes (which never happens), and it rationalises how much effort you put into each note. The upfront investment is capped, and further effort is only going into notes that are being used. 

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Add symbols to your notes to denote any major changes speaker or voice. Easy-to-type symbols probably only slows down your note capture speed by 2-5%, but has huge benefits later on when you go to use the notes.

Here are some symbols which are effective:

• )) at the end of a sentence means you are quoting the source material exactly.

• * at the start of a sentence means it is your own reaction or opinion.

• ^ at the start of a sentence means you are commenting on the notes themselves.

• && at either end of a sentence means it is an action that needs to be taken.

• # at the start of a sentence (usually at the end of a paragraph) is providing just enough information to get back to the source material (see next point below).

These symbols are all near your index fingers on ‘qwerty’ keyboards.

When you read back old notes that have this markup included, you would instantly know:

• Your own thoughts vs the authors’

• When you are quoting the author

• How to get back to the source material

• What you need to action

• The notes’ strengths and weaknesses / ways to improve them.

Such markup can seem weird at first, but you get used to it, which makes them more efficient and less intrusive. You can make up more symbols as you need to.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Keep just enough information in a note to get back to its source material. Fully referencing everything is rarely necessary, but knowing your sources is extremely helpful. Examples would be:  

• # From the book [name of book], chapter 2, halfway.

• # From article in [publication] called [title], link here: [link]

When you know for certain you can never get back to the source material (e.g. a live speech), write down more details about the source so you could fully reference later it if needed.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Organise notes by topic, not by source )) Your ‘future self’ – who wants to use the information – will be thinking about topics, not sources, and will want to find all the notes they have on that topic quickly. Our tendency is to keep our notes attached to the initial exposure to the information (e.g. notes from [training], notes from [book], notes from [meeting]. This tendency is strong but unhelpful.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

Be open to the diverse ways to improve notes. Improving notes is simply preparing them to be used. Different people will find different things useful and different types of notes might call for completely different improvements. For instance, notes on what to do in an emergency situation might need to look very different to your notes from a book about political philosophy – because they’re going to be used very differently.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].

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USING notes

Using notes produces the ultimate form of feedback you need to make your notes good. It tells you – with accuracy – how good the notes are, and how good they need to be. It is the best way to find out how much more effort you may need to put into the notes.

# From SUYU Notes course, repeated across both workshops.

Using notes and paying attention to the results is the linchpin of the whole SUYU Notes system. The feedback you get from trying to use your notes, even before they are perfect, helps you avoid the need to take wild guesses at how much effort needs to go into them. # From SUYU Notes course, repeated across both workshops.

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Troubleshooting your note-making habits

Where a lot of people make mistakes is not reaching the next step in the cycle. If your note-making system is not working for you, it’s probably because the jump from one step to the next is too large or too hard. Look at the ‘gaps’ between each step (encounter, capture, improve, use) to see if there’s a better way for you to bridge form one to the next. For example, lots of people capture notes well but don’t store them properly, which means they never return to the notes to use them or improve them. 

Most of the techniques taught in the SUYU Notes course are about making it easier to connect two or more steps in the cycle. 

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 1, slides saved in [location].

Formal education like school and university tend to create bad habits in note-making. You may be carrying over some of these bad habits.

In these environments, you will almost always know – in advance – exactly when and how you will ultimately use your notes, and you know how important their use will be to your overall life satisfaction and goals. This means you can forecast with extraordinary accuracy how much effort you need to put into your notes. As a result, you can pick basically any note-making strategy, whether it is efficient or not, as long as it gets the notes to the quality you need. The absence of feedback or reward/punishment for different note-making approaches in this environment gives the impression that everything works.

# From SUYU Notes course, workshop 2, slides saved in [location].