You need to read a lot more about ADD/ADHD. Fidgeting and doodling helps people with ADD concentrate because it narrows the field to just paying attention to two things (what you’re listening to, what you’re doing in front of you) and writing notes does the same thing too; I am fantastic at writing notes - mine get stolen at work because my boss wants to check what he said, and doesn’t mind the doodles. Without coping mechanisms, we try to pay attention to everything at once, no matter how inconsequential: what are they talking about over there? why do those people keep walking by? what’s that bird doing outside? why is this cap off the end of the foot to this desk, can I put it back on? etc. That’s what distractability is.
Like others have said, I found taking notes incredibly helpful in college. I didn’t try to transcribe the whole lecture (except for one or two classes where the professor said so much so fast that I basically had to). I generally tried to create an outline, note salient points, summarize helpful examples or anecdotes, and most importantly, I made note of any questions I had in the margins, and marked them with a great big question mark. This was extremely important to me, because if there was something I didn’t understand, or thought might be in conflict with something said earlier, my brain would get stuck on that point and I’d miss a good chunk of what was said immediately thereafter. Noting my questions - and also tangential thoughts, like “Seems to relate to X, look up later” - allowed me to let those thoughts go for the time being and continue concentrating on the lecture. Interestingly, I also doodled all the time. Any time I wasn’t writing something down, I’d doodle.
Work meetings are different, as they tend to be much more a discussion than a lecture. As someone else said, I generally only write down deliverables and technical notes. But sometimes a single item will require a good deal of notation, and I simply can’t write it all down and continue the discussion at the same time. I’ve learned it’s far better to say, “Hold on a second, let me get this down… do ABC… needs to follow example X… but will require same fix as Y… see Z if you have questions… …Okay! What’s next?” than to just write “Do ABC” and come back to the project manager five times with questions.
I’m not sure what you said that is supposed to contradict what I said.
I said it sounded like JoeyP is able to pay attention to several things at once.
You said people with ADD/ADHD pay attention to several things at once.
I’m sure I’d learn alot by reading about the disorder, but what’s the difference between what I said and what you said?
Is there some distinction to be made here between “attention” and “focus” that might help here?
And to go back to the “attention surplus” joke you made earlier. Without getting into why amphetamines work well for ADD, one of the reason a lot of ADDers will turn to pot is because it allows their brain to slow down for a little while. Gives them/us a chance to watch a movie, have a conversation, do something artistic, listen to music etc without their brain racing from one thing to the next to the next etc…
You need to be able to take speech cues (and for the most part there are no others) about what is a Big Idea just as it comes up. I’m ADD myself, so I miss lots of cues. I also have intrinsic difficulty with organizing abstract thoughts - until I “get it”, I’m nowhere. A lecture or discussion is just an unmediated blur of concepts, some of which may or may not be Big Ideas - or may look like Big Ideas but not go anywhere.
What helped me immensely in graduate school is tapping out notes on this here laptop. I find I have to restructure my notes frequently on the fly - put stuff with other stuff that relates to it better, arrange concepts in a new order other than chronological.
I like to arrange nested thoughts, which the laptop makes possible and easy.
Say the topic is video production. (Bolding helps call out those Big Ideas.)
- what sort of video do we want to shoot?
------ instructional, musical, animated, vlog, etc? - what sort of equipment shall we use?
------ camcorder, camphone, screen capture?
…etc.
(I use tabs in a word processing or text app - can’t do that here on the Dope, so I used dashes instead.)
If I had to do all this with pen and paper, I would be one sad-ass note-taker (and in fact I was once). I write only slowly, with constant hand cramps, and of course you can’t erase or rearrange nearly as easily, if at all.
There is a difference between taking notes, and translating.
If you are taking notes, yes it can be a distraction to learning.
If you are translating, you are taking their words, putting them in your own words which requires a deeper understanding.
I was never able to study from another person’s notes: they were always too verbose and for some reason we always seemed to have different notions of what “organized” means. As for teachers who gave us their notes beforehand, after a minute I’d be wondering “why the heck am I even in class?” and by the third minute I was daydreaming stories. That “distilling the information” which I do while I’m writing and others do later is where I really learn.
One time in first year Physics (another “see 12th grade” class), the teacher grabbed my notes… read through them… and said “not only does she draw and take notes at the same time, both the notes and the drawings are good! Nice!” and went back to explaining magnetic fields.
I’m also one of those people who like having several projects to juggle: when I get blocked in one, I simply move to another - by the time I go back to the first one, the block is gone.
I think that’s one of the things which can be hardest for teachers and managers to understand: some people are one-thing-at-a-time, some work better when we have five things in our hands.
Beware of Doug, a good way to make a post look like it has tabs is by making those dashes be color=white.
I wouldn’t learn anything if I didn’t take notes. Without it, I’ll remember I took the class, at best the topics discussed, but not any useful stuff a week from the class. I hate that. I always customize my notes to integrate the new knowledge to what I already know. I write questions on the margins, scribble mind maps, arrows and boxes, without ever thinking about the formatting. (My notes are mostly unintelligible to other people.) Oftentimes I read what the lecturer has put on the Powerpoint slide, then re-word it into a more concise, effective version on my notes. It only takes a second, and doesn’t distract from listening. It probably helps that I love writing.
Taking these kinds of notes really enhances learning and memory. The words of the lecturer and the fleeting thoughts they create in my head are recorded for further use. Contrary to most people in this thread, I always re-read my notes. Doing this once or twice etches the material into my brain long-term. It takes some effort, especially quickly hand-writing pages and pages of text, but it pays off big time. I keep even years-old notes, they are that valuable to me. Once in a while I’ll dig up one of them and read it through at bedtime, re-living the lectures and recalling the questions I had way back, often finding I now have some answers. Not uncommonly I find leads into further research I had forgotten I ever had. It’s exhilarating, and a positive feedback loop, learning-wise.
I’m a crap note-taker as well. I made an effort at university because That’s What You Did, but I can’t say I ever learnt much from the process. Part of the problem is that I’m just a sloooooow writer (and I have bad handwriting too) and it took a lot of braincells to do what people were talking about upthread - sorting through the info, getting in the Key Concepts and writing them down - and while I was writing down one Key Concept I simply couldn’t concentrate very well on what was being talked about at the front of the room, and could quite easily lose the thread and miss important information.
However, I also couldn’t remember much of what was said in a lecture without taking notes, since I’m a very visual learner. Frankly, the whole “lecture” concept was a bit of a bomb for me. I learnt nearly everything I ever learned from textbooks - the rest from tutorials or small study groups. In fact, if I were going back to study again I’d probably do what I didn’t have confidence to do when I was 19 … skip any formal non-discussion-focussed instruction and spend the time in the library with a syllabus and a big fat textbook instead.
I’m another one who benefits from taking notes because it makes me focus on the lecture, and it makes a HUGE difference to how well I’ll remember it. If I write something down - at least by hand, since most of my studying was before it was common to take laptops to class - I’m 99% guaranteed to remember it. Just listening reduces that to maybe 5%.
But that doesn’t mean I’ll write down every word that’s said, not usually anyway. I’d make bullet points, brainstorms, etc, and use different colour pens for different sections. On my undergrad degree, each class had a lecture plus at leas one seminar, which was about discussion, and there I did not take copious notes because it does somewhat get in the way of conversation.
Some of the other students, however, took so many notes that I noticed them even writing down what I was saying. Sure, I was quite good at the subject, but I was an undergrad student; my ramblings can’t have been worth studying later.
I always took notes during lectures, but they went through a pretty strong filter so the actual amount written down was a lot less than the words that were spoken by the lecturer. I never had any trouble listening while writing, but this is probably because I wrote down relatively little. I have to echo the others that said that writing stuff down helps you to remember; all through high school, college and gradschool I studied from my notes, usually just looking at half a sentence could trigeer the memory of the 10 minute story that was told around it. When studying for tests I also often wrote stuff down(especially if I needed to memorise lists) and this usually meant I would remember; I happened upon this when making cheatsheets to cheat on a test was the common mode of studying (when I was 12/13) and I found out that anything I had written down on the sheet was firmly set in my memory.