I don’t take notes during meetings at work. I’ve taken some flack for this in the past, as usually I am the ONLY person in the room not taking notes. I also never really took notes during school classes. Not even in university. I’ll jot down REALLY important items (phone numbers, deadline dates, really critical items) but, by and large, when you look over at me during a meeting, I’m not going to be writing anything down.

I’ve always thought of myself as a mental note taker.

But this post over at Penelope Trunk’s blog has got me questioning this practice. According to Penelope, mental note taking is bad practice.

I tell Ryan Paugh that mental notes is a joke. No one takes a mental note taker seriously. It looks like they don’t care. “Even if you’re a genius,” I tell him, “you have to take notes to show you are engaged.”

It used to be that note taking was for secretaries. When hotshots didn’t type, hotshots didn’t take notes. But now we know that people actually learn more when they write as they listen, and people learn more when they translate what they are hearing into their own idea nuggets, so it makes sense that writing notes is a hot-shot job now. Everyone takes notes.

As much as I hate to admit it, this does make sense. My rationale for not taking notes has always been that, even when I do take notes, I never end up looking at them again anyway. I have no organizational system for my notes. I have no organizational systems in general.

I just assume I’ll be able to remember it all. And, up until now, that hasn’t really been a problem. But I guess the question I need to ask myself is this: will that ALWAYS be the case?

I tend to tout the virtues of Gen Y a lot, but I think, in this case, I’ve come across something that truly is a flaw. While it IS possible to be TOO organized — and I’d definitely argue that a lot of ‘traditional’ paper-based organizational systems are a waste of time (and space!) — Gen Y’s hubris when it comes to things like “mental note taking” is a real flaw.

Tags: generation y, note taking, organization, penelope trunk