This is good advice! Optimizing for speed / fluency of notetaking has been important for me, as well. Just like a lecture, I don’t have time to make links when I’m taking notes during a meeting. But I can make a quick task and come back to it later. I have a keyboard shortcut for making a task. I hit Alt-T, type the task, hit Enter, and keep taking notes.
Here’s how I think I’d do lecture notes now:
- Make a “Lecture Notes” template. Have it do as much work for you as you can.
- Have a keyboard shortcut for adding tasks, as mentioned above.
- At the end of the lecture, do a quick cleanup. Fix the note title, move it to the right course folder, but not much else.
- Make another file with a Tasks query. Have it look only in this semester’s lecture notes, and show you incomplete tasks, grouped by course folder. Then, at the end of the day/week/whenever, you can go look at that and see what tasks you left for yourself during the lectures.
- Don’t worry about adding links and other embellishments until you sit down to review the lecture notes.
More on how I work here. I think it’s easily transferable. Students can treat a course like I do a “matter” (project), and a lecture note like I treat a meeting note.
For what it’s worth, I barely use tags at all. They come in from the Web Clipper and my read-it-later setup, but that’s it. Don’t feel bad about not using tags.
Good luck!