cornell notes template microsoft word 2003

I numbered the To-Do items in the order they should be done.

I put a circle next to a question that I delegated to Betty to call about.

I put a question mark next to questions about the platforms that I had.

I marked important software facts about the proposal with Asterisks.

In the picture above you can see an example of my notes from a software proposal session. To make this work in this document, I use numbers for To-Do items and a regular circle for delegated items.

? A question mark goes next to items to research or ask about.

( ) A circle indicates a task to be assigned to someone else.

A square checkbox denotes a to-do item.

Adding a special notation character followed by a specific action lets me take these notes back to my office and act on them in an organized fashion. To add this notation to the template, I added a markup column to the left side of the document followed by an action column. This markup language was created by Leadership expert, Michael Hyatt, the former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and popularized by this article on note taking at Lifehacker. The Hmn was the key… as I discovered Hyatt Markup Notation, a set of special characters designed to make action points out of esoteric notes.

While this mass of scribbles was sometimes useful, it was easy to forget how things tied together and the document usually wound up being an exercise in futility.īut one day I went Hmn… What can I do with these notes to make them more useful? This is where my note taking used to end. Once the meeting is over, I now have a collection of notes, pictures, and notations. The white space gives me room to add diagrams, simple pictures, and even flowcharts. I usually start at the top and work my way down the document.

As I follow along in the meeting or lecture, I make notes about major points as they are presented. On the right side of the document, there is a generous white space for taking free-form notes. To make note taking even more effective, I’ve done some research into note taking systems and developed a note taking template that helps me organize my resulting chicken scratches into something useful.

I am a kinesthetic learner by nature and I find that if I take notes during a meeting, the hands-on activity of note taking helps me retain more of what I have learned.

Cornell notes template microsoft word 2003