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I am a visual recall person.

I have a very difficult time remembering anything that I only hear.

To compensate, all my life I have taken extensive notes. I write as fast as I can to capture what is being said so that I can SEE what is being said. By seeing what is said I have a chance of remembering the discussion.

I have decades of portable moleskine notebooks for these notes and sketches.

Then I discovered Goodnotes on the iPad. I use Goodnotes as my Commonplace Book.

Taking Notes is about capturing what was being said to me.

In developing KnowNow, I insisted on having a time stamped notes capability for our meeting notes features. I wanted to be able to directly link my notes through the time stamp to the video and automated transcript.

Greg Buckles is another note taker. He noticed that with the shift to time stamped meeting notes that are accompanied by a video with a transcript that he had transformed to MAKING Notes. Instead of just taking notes so that he could remember, the automated transcript could capture the full conversation. He could now listen and MAKE notes on what knowledge relationships were being triggered during the meeting. If an important idea was discussed that he wanted exact quotes for, he could hit the highlight button, and thirty seconds of the video and the transcript would be highlighted automatically.

As Greg described his transformation from TAKING notes to MAKING notes, I realized I made the same transformation.

When we added the Meeting Summarization capability, it was now easy to capture the MAKING notes and highlights and still have them in context of the full transcript for the exact discussion.

As I looked at my use of Goodnotes in conjunction with my Kindle Highlights, I realized I was doing the same thing. The ability to copy exactly the text from a Kindle book into Goodnotes was the same as the transcript. Then using the Apple Pen I could MAKE notes on what I am reading. I wasn’t just taking notes which were a summary of the book text, but I was making notes about relationships to what I was reading.

The switch from TAKING notes to MAKING notes is a key part of Tiago Forte‘s Building a Second Brain (BASB).