As an inveterate note taker, I was quite interested by a recent Lifehacker article about Thomas Edison’s note taking system. I was particularly struck by one passage from the article:
Edison had an amazing memory. … Much of this is due to his system of notes. By writing everything down that he thought was worth writing, he was able to free himself of the burden of having to remember it
Well, I wish I could say that about myself: I don’t actually forget things, I just free myself of the burden of having to remember them. In truth, my memory is somewhat short of amazing, but I manage to more than compensate for this by keeping notes. You don’t need Edison’s ingenuity or a librarian’s discipline — just a few good habits and one amazing piece of software:
1. Google Desktop. I used to experiment with various systems for keeping track of my notes. Then along came Google Desktop, and all other notekeeping systems became unnecessary. It really does “free myself of the burden” of having to remember things. It indexes all my documents (text, Word, Excel, PDF), my Outlook mail (but, oddly, not Gmail), Web pages that I’ve looked at recently (using my browser cache). It even indexes documents that I’ve since deleted, often giving my enough information about the document that I don’t have to feel like a complete putz for having deleted it in the first place. I’ve tried some of the other desktop search engines, but I haven’t found any that cover as much ground and run as quickly as Google Desktop.
2. Don’t just take notes, index them. A lot of people bring notepads to meetings, some even use them, but I’m surprised at few people make good use of them. They’ll scrawl a few notes, flip the page, and generally forget that the notes exist before they’ve even forgotten the information that they made note of. Although it’s difficult to find the time during a busy day, I make a habit of typing my notes into some kind of Googleable document — the sooner the better, before I forget the details behind the words on my notepad. I generally put them in an e-mail: I’ll either send the e-mail to some of the other participants in the meeting or, if I don’t want to appear pushy, just e-mail it to myself.
3. Don’t say it, type it. I’m somewhat infamous around the office for having a strong preference to e-mail over the phone or even face-to-face conversation. I’ll often e-mail even the people who sit just outside my office rather than walking a few feet to their desks. It’s not that I hate talking to people (well, not everyone), but I love the fact that e-mail gives me a permanent record of both sides of the “conversation” without having to take notes. E-mail has other advantages too: you’ll generally get (and give) more complete and well-reasoned answers through e-mail, and it allows the other person to respond when their schedule allows rather than interrupt whatever they are doing to answer the phone.
4. Don’t touch that delete key. Assuming you have a nice, large hard drive, don’t be so quick to delete documents and e-mails once you’ve dealt with them. Problems and questions tend to come around again and again, especially if the people you work with don’t keep notes. It’s a great time-saver to be able to answer a question the second time around by forwarding an e-mail with the original answer. And, yeah, being a smarty-pants is kind of fun too.
5. Learn to use your IDE’s indexing capabilities. While Google Desktop does a fantastic job with most of my documents, it casts too wide a net to be of much use with my code. Fortunately, most current IDEs do a pretty good job of indexing the code in a project, going well beyond the basic “Find” tool that IDEs in the 90s offered. I rely pretty heavily on Visual Studio’s “Find All References” feature to locate a particular line of code — as long as I know a variable that it uses or a method that it calls, Find All References will turn it up. Regular expressions are a very powerful search tool that many programmers don’t think of using. If you can remember (or guess) some fragments of the code that you’re looking for, a regular expression will help you to go directly to the lines that contain all of the fragments.
I’ve always felt a little embarrassed at relying so heavily on note taking rather than a sharp memory, so I was delighted to learn that Edison owed much of his success to a similar discipline. According to the Lifehacker article, Edison organized his notes using a “combination of chronological and subject matter based systems”, but “often spent considerable time searching through these records looking for the key item”. By developing a few good habits and learning to use a desktop search tool, you can easily put together a system that Edison could only dream about.
