“Today I thought I’d share an interesting insight from the most recent book I just finished reading. The book is called Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. It’s is broken down into 8 sections and while I really enjoyed the Motivation, Focus and Goal Setting sections, it was the last section on Absorbing Data that really struck me.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 139
How about you. How do you take notes?
Join the conversation below and share your experience!
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I thought I’d share an interesting insight from the most recent book I just finished reading. The book is called Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. It’s is broken down into 8 sections and while I really enjoyed the Motivation, Focus and Goal Setting sections, it was the last section on Absorbing Data that really struck me. Here’s a short excerpt. “In theory, the ongoing explosion in information should make the right answers more obvious. In practice, though, being surrounded by data often makes it harder to decide. This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called ‘information blindness.’ Just as snow blindness refers to people losing the capacity to distinguish trees from hills under a blanket of powder, so information blindness refers to our mind’s tendency to stop absorbing data when there’s too much to take in.”
The most actionable piece for me in this section comes from a 2014 study from Princeton and UCLA that looked at the difference between handwriting note takers and laptop note takers. Even though the laptop note takers took twice as many notes, the hand writers scored twice as well on exams. The researchers thought this might be because the hand writers were just spending more time studying their notes, so they ran the same experiment and immediately took away the notes right after the lesson. A week later they were tested and the hand writers still scored significantly better. No matter what they did, those that took notes by hand always scored better.
So now I’m experimenting on myself, and perhaps you’ll be interested in trying this out with me. While I typically take notes by hand in a face to face meeting, the majority of my meetings these days are web meetings and I typically take notes straight into Evernote. Based on these new insights I’m now taking notes by hand even in my web meetings. I can still take a picture of those notes and load them into Evernote, but I’m already starting to notice a difference. I think it’s allowing me to be a bit more engaged and a bit more present as well.
Ironically in my most recent interview for next week’s Sales Success Stories episode my guest said she was an old school note taker. It’s tough to argue with someone who’s been producing at roughly 200% of her plan for the last 16 years.
How about you. How do you take notes? You can join the conversation and also find a link to Smarter Faster Better if you click over to DailySales.Tips/139
Then come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!