# Issues with old-school note-taking Schools have failed us. Old-school note-taking is weak, and very limiting. Yet, most people keep using those, and miss huge opportunities to grow personally and professionally. One of the major reasons schools have failed us is that they push us to write long and linear documents. In addition, they mostly care about memorization, which forces us to only create such documents while studying, with the sole purpose of preparing for exams. After we are done, the notes become useless. Because of this, most adults I observe seem to take single-use notes that get thrown away as soon as their work is done. I recently attended a workshop about burn-out, and noticed that most people barely took notes. They wrote down a few sentences here and there. By now, they probably all forgot about, or threw those away. They rely solely on their memory to remember what was discussed. A week from now, they'll have forgotten almost everything. Worse, they're not doing the actual work of reviewing and thinking more deeply about the topic. Isn't that sad? Next time you take some notes, consider those as long-term assets you can use to think. Do something useful with those. Transition those to digital, add them to your knowledge base, and review the ideas from time to time. You'll make much more progress that way. And that's true whether you take notes during a course, while watching a video, or while reading an article online. [[Writing is thinking]]. Once you understand that the notes you take can be much more valuable, you will start understanding that [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]] can help you grow. A second-order effect of old-school notes is that they don't enable or facilitate the emergence of new ideas. Your notes may be structured, but as long as they remain analog and disconnected from the rest of your ideas, you can't leverage those. Moreover, if you still write long documents, then you are missing opportunities to link ideas together. Long documents may be structured, but they're not ideal when it comes to [[Connecting ideas]]. They're graveyards for ideas. When you create a link to a long document, that link is not specific, it is vague, meaningless. On the other hand, a link to or from an [[Atomic notes|Atomic note]], is *very* specific, and is thus much more meaningful. TL;DR: - Start taking more notes - Create short notes rather than long documents - Do something useful with those notes: connect, review, and think about those - Profit!