Okay sorry about that! The title is (but also isn’t) misleading. I’m going to write this from an I.T. perspective but in all truth it applies to anything you may be studying.
In the field of I.T. it’s a given…You will always be studying/learning new things. Only always as some would say. Things move so fast, and tasks, technologies, plans, procedures, etc are always changing. It’s really the same in any field to be honest.
One thing I was taught well back in early elementary school was to write it down because writing it down helps you remember it. Well in my case two things, I’m a south paw (aka left handed) and yes I have that stereotypical left handed writing that even if I write the word “the” on a piece of paper odds are tomorrow I can’t even read it 🙂
The second thing is it’s such a digital world and well, I’m kind of a technology guy so I choose to type out my notes. For a few reasons such as be able to search them, and the ease of sharing them with others. Or even collaborating on note taking. And as noted above to be honest, so I can actually read them later!
I’m going to write this as my strategy for note taking using a specific platform/software, as well as based on a self paced course. At the end I will outline at a high level the same(ish) strategy for things like exams or specific technology or books. I’m hoping to get a guest write up from someone that still prefers to hand write their notes because I think that’s a super fun way to do it I just can’t because my handwriting looks like I gave PacketPup a pen and piece of paper.
In my case I prefer to use Microsoft OneNote. For me it makes it simple to share across devices, collaborate, organize, and search. Also allowing me to export to PDF’s or whatnot for storage/archive purposes. I’d like to hear from others what platforms/software you use for digital notes and how you use them. If you’d like, we can set up a guest post to share.
My outline for this is going to based on the (currently) free Junior Cybersecurity Analyst self paced course on Cisco’s Networking Academy (NetAcad).
One of the first things I do is create a new OneNote notebook titled the same as the course (etc) I’m following. This helps because then I have a notebook for every Topic/Course/Book/Exam/Technology I study.
I won’t bore you with the first step of creating a notebook in OneNote as I have a hunch I can put a Benjamin on a bet you all know how to do that even if you don’t use the application. So we’ll start with my process of organizing.
First thing is first I peek at the courses outline or (exam blueprint/book chapter/topic structure). Usually (not always) the self paced learning plans anywhere are organized into a hierarchy of the course as a whole, with sub courses and within the sub courses modules (whatever term they use) and within a module topic areas.
That’s how I like to organize my notes. I build a notebook, within the notebook I create what Microsoft OneNote calls section groups for each course in the learning path in the case of this Cisco NetAcad course. Then within the section group I create a section for each module. In the section I then create individual pages for each sub section within that module. At that point I use bulleted notes on the individual page for the sub topics. That sounds complicated but can be modified/adjust for the different types of studying as mentioned above with book chapters/topics, exam blueprints, days of instructor led training etc. As an example look at the screenshot below outlining the notebook/section group/section/page/bulleted notes hierarchy. (Note titles based off Cisco NetAcad course not my own)
I’m curious to your organization structure while note taking. I would also as mentioned enjoy a handwritten note taker to do a guest post. I know some like individual notebooks for every topic/course/book and some like to use those adhesive flags to separate sections in said notebook but would love to share those strategies as well but as I said…..I have Dr.s handwriting being a southpaw so I can’t read what I wrote down yesterday 🙂
