In my spirit of constant self-improvement, I’ve discovered yet another way of taking notes. As you remember, I’ve already started taking notes in a pocket notebook I always keep in the door compartment of my car. But I can’t take notes when I’m driving, and so I’ve optimized the process by switching to voice notes. Surprisingly, I find the voice recorder of my rather old mobile phone to be perfectly fit for the purpose.
Here are the main advantages of using your mobile phone for voice recording:
Taking notes as quickly as you can talk
This is probably the strongest advantage to using voice notes. Even when you speak relatively slow, you can easily fit 120-150 words in a 3-minute recording. Talk a little bit faster, and you can record even more information.
In many cases, your ideas and thoughts will have a rather vague form. It would be impossible to find time and write all of them down, while with voice recording you can do it quite easily.
Another extreme with taking notes is when your ideas are brief and short, and it can take you forever to find a pen and a piece of paper only to write down just a few words. With voice recordings it’s not a problem at all – just push the button and say it out loud.
The luxury of taking notes freely and easily
I’ve already mentioned that I use a paper pocket notebook to take notes when I’m in my car. I naturally can’t take notes when I’m driving, so while having notebook at hand somehow improves my chances of keeping all the good ideas noted, it is still limited to only the short windows of my parking stops. With voice recording I’ve finally got the freedom I was looking for: I push a button and talk. If I want to take another voice note, I repeat the same. Once I’m at home or at work, I can take all the time I need to process all the notes taken during my day.
Many phones support voice commands, which makes your voice notes taking even easier. Just push a button on your phone or your Bluetooth, say the voice command out loud, and your phone will be ready to take your notes. You will not believe how much difference voice notes will make!
Enjoy the quality of your notes going up
This is another great advantage you’ll automatically gain by using voice recording to take your notes: the quality of your notes will go up, simply because you won’t have to be in a hurry to jot something down before the street lights color changes and the traffic resumes. Instead, you’re going to get your ideas noted in full detail, so that there is no need to decypher something you scribbled in a hurry and can’t work out at all just a few minutes later.
Store your voice notes permanently
A 3-minute voice note will probably take around 300kb of memory, which means they’re perfect for long-term storage on your hard drive or CD. You can also send your voice notes over email, because the file size is pleasantly small.
I transfer my voice notes to my laptop. I do it twice a day, and initially give recordings names to match the date, like: 18-09-2006. If there are few notes taken in one day, I add some number to the file name.
Whenever I process my notes, I rename the files to also include a very short description of the note. I use the same line to describe the text note in my information manager software, so that I can easily match the voice and text notes if I ever need.
You can process your notes whenever you have time for them. Some of them are long-term or distant ideas and goals, and so you can just add the description at the time of your daily notes transfer to your PC, and listen to them to produce the text note at some later time.
Transfer voice notes to your PC in minutes
Most phones come with Bluetooth support these days, and so it will literally take you less than a minute to transfer all your recordings for the day to your PC. I don’t use anything fancy just yet – just the very standard File Transfer option of your Bluetooth will do. Once voice notes are copied into the folder on my PC, I can start processing them. Not sure about the full list of options for listening to your notes, but Apple’s QuickTime serves the purpose just fine.
That’s all I have for you today. Let me know if you find this way of taking notes useful, and be sure to let me know if you use an even better note taking solution!