The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, once said that “creative thinkers are avid note takers”.

The common trait among the world’s most successful people is the art of effective note taking. There are several reasons why taking written notes is important:

For Students:

In-Class Benefits

Keeps you alert: Notetaking keeps your body active and involved and helps you avoid feelings of drowsiness or distraction.

Engages your mind: Listening carefully and deciding what to include in notes keeps your mind actively involved with what you hear.

Emphasizes and organizes information: Organized notes makes it easier for you to link classroom learning to textbook readings.

Creates a condensed record for study: A set of concise, well-organized notes from each class session gives you what you need for study, learning, and review after class.

Post-Class Benefits

Boosts your understanding: By making notes, you force yourself to construct a conceptual mental representation of the ideas you are grappling with. It’s the process of writing notes, and not the notes themselves, that helps you gain command of new concepts.

Aids your memory: You don’t necessarily need to re-read an entire book or re-watch a whole lecture to remember ideas over the long-term. Instead, you can revisit your notes to refresh the ideas that you’ve encountered.

Repository of your thinking: Even if you don’t make the effort to commit everything to your long term memory, your notes are still useful as your personal reference library, an external memory aid.

Generic Benefits

Note taking relieves stress and helps keep your schedule intact: When your mind’s swarming with loose ends to tie, writing them down helps you reduce your cluttered thoughts, which reduces stress. It helps you focus on the task at hand.

Note taking improves the quality of everything you do: Whether you’re putting together a report for work or tweaking a recipe for your next social gathering, taking notes helps you improve every project, every hobby, and every event you participate in. It’s a detail-oriented way to process your learning experience, which eventually leads to expert status at work or satisfied guests at home.

Note taking for the win: Taking notes is a subtle action that reveals much about a person’s character: patience, determination, and attention to detail. It also shows you’re efficient and don’t allow what’s important to fall through the cracks.

The more high-quality notes you have, the more creative you can be because you’ll have many ideas and concepts that you understand and are able to work with.