From the course: Note-Taking for Business Professionals

Avoiding excessive highlighting and too many notes

From the course: Note-Taking for Business Professionals

Avoiding excessive highlighting and too many notes

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- In this video, we're going to discuss note-taking while reading, and the potential dangers of excessive highlighting and too many notes. Have you ever bought a used college textbook, and noticed ridiculous amounts of highlighting? How does this happen? Here's how. Someone's reading the chapter and maybe they need to know it very well for a test that's coming up. They read a sentence and realize that's really important so they highlight it. Then they read the next sentence and realize that's also kind of important, and they highlight that as well. Then they read the third sentence, and now they realize this sentence is way more important than the previous two, maybe they'll use a different color this time around. You already see where this is going. Have you ever heard the phrase, "When you get caught "up in details, you lose sight of the big picture."? This is one of the biggest issues when it comes to note-taking. People get caught up in details. A better way to handle this would be to finish reading the paragraph and then decide what you want to highlight or take notes on. And keep in mind, you don't have to write out full sentences. You could highlight just a word or short phrase, and that would remind you what the section was about. For example, when I say the word "Katrina", what's the first thing that pops into your mind? For many people, the word "Katrina" might remind them of a hurricane. Rather than highlighting an entire sentence that discusses Hurricane Katrina and its effects on the city of New Orleans, you might instead highlight or take note of the word "Katrina" and that would be enough to remind you of the details. If you focus on noting just a word or short phrase, you'll be much more effective with your note-taking. So again, make sure you finish a paragraph at the very least before taking your notes. If you still feel like you're spending too much time taking notes, you may even want to finish reading a section of text before taking notes. Note-taking is without a doubt helpful, but if you spend too much time with your notes, it could make you less effective. If you're wondering how much time should be spent on notes, follow the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your time should be spent reading, while no more than 20% should be spent taking notes. So if you're reading for 60 minutes, this would translate into 12 minutes of notes and 48 minutes of reading. It doesn't have to be exact, but if you're spending more than 12 minutes of every hour on notes, you're probably spending too much time. So try to follow these guidelines, and you'll improve your note-taking abilities while reading.

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