Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say : NPR.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

“When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can,” Mueller tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”

Read more & full study.

This is a good “hack” you can try on yourself, take laptop notes and take notes by hand and see what works best. We’ve found that laptop notes are great for “confirmations” of what has happened as follow ups and next steps, where long hand written notes work best for listening and taking notes on subjects we’re learning (or trying to).