People speak at roughly 130 words a minute. You write about 20 by hand and maybe 60 by keyboard. The arithmetic is not close, and no amount of hand speed fixes it.
Which means "take notes faster" is the wrong goal. Write less, and write the right less. Every technique below is a way of reducing what you have to record, not a way of recording it quicker.
1. Stop transcribing — it's slower and worse
Trying to keep up is the single biggest cause of slow, useless notes. It costs you everything: you can't listen while transcribing, so you end up with a bad copy of something you didn't understand.
The evidence points the same way. In Mueller and Oppenheimer's study, the more verbatim overlap a student's notes had with the lecture, the worse they performed on conceptual questions. (Replications since have been mixed, so hold the size of the effect loosely — but nobody has found that transcribing helps.)
Capture claims, not sentences. If a speaker takes ninety seconds to make one point, that's one line in your notes.
2. Build a symbol set and never think about it again
The fastest writers all use the same trick: a small, fixed vocabulary of marks that never varies.
| Mark | Means |
|---|---|
| → | leads to, causes |
| ∴ | therefore |
| ≠ | not, contrary to |
| ↑ ↓ | increases, decreases |
| Δ | change |
| eg / ie | for example / that is |
| ? | I didn't follow this — come back |
| ★ | this will be on the exam / this matters |
| [] | my own thought, not theirs |
Two rules make it work. Fixed — the same mark means the same thing every time, or you'll be decoding your own shorthand in April. And small — twelve symbols you use automatically beat forty you have to remember.
Drop vowels in long words you write often (mgmt, dvlpmt, bkgrnd), and abbreviate the terms specific to your subject. Most of your writing volume is a handful of repeated words.
3. Separate "my thought" from "their point"
The one bracket that saves the most time later. When you scribble an idea of your own, mark it — [], a different indent, a different colour. A week on, the notes that got you into trouble are the ones where you can't tell whose opinion you're reading.
It costs one character and preserves the most valuable content on the page, since your own reactions are the part nobody else's notes contain.
4. Use the fastest structure that still means something
Speed comes from not deciding. Pick the format before the session starts:
- Fast, unstructured, unpredictable speaker → the sentence method. One idea per line, numbered, no hierarchy. Nothing is faster.
- Clear topic shifts → the outline method or the boxing method.
- An argument being defended → Q/E/C: question, evidence, conclusion, and skip everything else.
- Comparable facts → the charting method. Draw the columns before it starts.
The wrong structure is what makes people slow. Trying to outline a speaker who jumps around means constantly re-deciding what indents under what.
5. Leave gaps deliberately
Blank space is speed. Skip a line where you fell behind, mark it ?, and keep moving with the speaker rather than stalling to reconstruct. Fill the gaps in the pass below — or ask, which takes ten seconds and beats guessing.
6. The two-pass method — where fast notes actually get made
This is the technique that does the most work, and the one people skip.
Pass one, live: capture badly on purpose. Fragments, symbols, gaps. Your only job is to not miss anything important.
Pass two, within a day: five to ten minutes tidying — fill the gaps, expand the abbreviations that no longer parse, write two lines at the top saying what the session was actually about.
Pass two is not busywork. Rewriting is retrieval, so it doubles as the first review, which is precisely what the forgetting curve says you need in the first 24 hours. Ten minutes here beats an hour of re-reading later — see how to review your notes.
7. Let the tools carry what they can
- Record the audio if the setting allows it, and write less because you can. Apps that sync audio to your notes let you jump straight to the moment you flagged — the reason Notability exists.
- Photograph the slide instead of copying it. Copying a slide is the purest waste of live note-taking time.
- Dictate when your hands are busy. Speech is the only capture method faster than speech.
- Search instead of filing. Deciding where a note goes, mid-session, costs more than it will ever save. Capture flat and organize lightly.
The honest test
Fast notes are only fast if they're still usable. The check is simple: open a set from last week. Can you reconstruct what the session was about in under two minutes?
If yes, keep writing less. If no, you didn't take notes too slowly — you skipped pass two. That's almost always where the failure is, and it's the cheapest thing on this page to fix.
More in how to take notes, and for the live-session specifics, how to take lecture notes.