This is Steve Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Note taking.

I just love note taking.

I get to use a Pentel G-Tex C.28-millimeter pen or a pilot G207 pen with blue black ink

and carefully take notes in a molyskine, large notebook.

It's heaven.

Now, kids today, and by kids, I mean anyone who owns an electronic device, like to take notes

on laptops and smartphones and tablets.

The worst ones, and I'm sure you don't fall into this category, don't take notes.

They just sit there,

vaguely motionless as if they're memorizing. Then they forget 90% of what happened and they

need to be walked through it later. Oh, those wacky kids. What they don't know, however,

will hurt them. Taking notes electronically is dramatically worse than taking notes by hand. For years, I thought

that I was just being a fuddy-duddy because my brain felt happier with manual note-taking.

But no, I'm vindicated at last because recent research into memory and note-taking backs me up

100%. Experimenters divided students into two groups, half took notes longhand and half took notes on laptops.

The students were then tested on the material that they had taken notes for, and the results?

Both groups remembered the facts, but when it came to ideas, the students who took long-hand

notes had learned the material better than the students

who typed their notes. What's weird is that students who were typing their notes took much

more complete notes than the students who were taking notes by hand. So objectively, the

...