Why take notes?

A colleague and I recently had a meeting about plans for a project. While I dutifully took notes in my trusty portfolio, Debbie did not. I thought to myself, "Wow, she must have a terrific memory if she doesn’t have to write anything down."

When we finished, from my notes I efficiently enumerated what we had decided for what she would do and what I would do. "Does that capture what we said?" I asked. "Oh yes, that's great," replied Debbie. "Now I'm going to take a picture of your notes," she added, and just as efficiently snapped a picture with her cell phone. "Thanks for doing all the work."

A few days later I was gathered with several other colleagues discussing a different initiative. The group's facilitator was at the white board diagramming concepts as fast as we mentioned them, even using several colors of markers plus arrows and boxes to illustrate relationships. As always, I jotted down notes for my own memory jogging later. At the end of the discussion, facilitator Dave snapped several pictures with his cell phone and said, "I’ll email these pictures to Trish and Bill who couldn't be here today and I'll also include them as part of my progress report."

Last week I attended an out-of-town conference involving several keynote as well as breakout session speakers. The format of choice for these speakers was PowerPoint slides and, over the course of three days, I had seen hundreds of slides on the screen, many of which contained complex charts, graphs, and mapped-out results. As the slides advanced, all around me I saw many phones and cameras held high to snap pictures of the slide images.

I looked down at the notes I had been taking and thought to myself, "Great idea to snap pictures in order to replicate the full images, but I just can't give up note-taking. That's just not right." I looked at the pen in my hand and noticed it advertised a funeral home. How ironic. Is this a reminder that pens are on the demise?

Since I happen to love pens and have many of them — a few nice ones but mostly freebies I get from conventions and the like — to me, pens are friends in my world. I'm going to keep it that way and keep giving them a workout for all kinds of writing purposes, including taking notes.

[Sr. Nancy Linenkugel is a Sylvania Franciscan sister and chair of the department of Health Services Administration at Xavier University, Cincinnati Ohio.]