The advantages of using a digital note-taking app

In an organization with hybrid and remote teams, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page without the right tools and technology to enable collaboration. Note-taking, for example, can become a hassle if you can't share information with your team or access shared documents to get a clear idea of the questions your co-workers have. 

Taking effective and efficient notes during a meeting, presentation, or project discussion can help your people stay on task, articulate expectations, reduce confusion, and provide everyone with a clear path toward their goals. Handwritten and paper notes, however, are difficult to share and can be time-consuming to document. With the right content-sharing tool, you enable your teams with digital note-taking. This advancement empowers them to edit, review, and share files in one place to keep everyone on the same page. 

Why are digital notes better than physical notes?

If you're trying to determine what type of note-taking is most efficient for your hybrid and remote teams, consider the benefits of taking digital notes instead of handwritten notes.

Take notes anywhere

The most obvious benefit of digital note-taking is that your notes can go with you anywhere. While you can certainly carry paper notes back and forth with you to meetings, it's not as easy, convenient, or accessible as electronic notes. 

If you have remote team members, it would be impossible to show them your paper notes and collaborate without scanning the notes into a device and uploading them. Even then, you couldn’t make edits or additions to your notes. When you take digital notes, you can keep them on your laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone anywhere you go — even better, keep them in the cloud. 

You have to fly out for a business meeting and don’t want to pack a stack of notes. Electronic notes are available anywhere and anytime. Or you suddenly get a great idea for your upcoming project while at a coffee shop. You don't have to wait until you're back at your desk to jot it down. Pull out your phone or laptop and type it out.

Since most people already carry some type of electronic device with them at all times, digital note-taking apps make sense for anywhere-and-everywhere access to notes.

Collaborate in real time 

With paper notes, you can't collaboratively and simultaneously work on a document with co-workers and team members. Pulling up a document that your remote team members can't access or edit makes it difficult for them to contribute to a project and complete tasks on time. 

Digital note-taking makes it easy to send, share, edit, and collaborate on a document in the same application, allowing you to see who made the changes with convenient time stamps. With digital notes, you and your people can quickly access, organize, and manage content as well as assign tasks for seamless collaboration. When it comes to hybrid and remote teams, collaborative tools are key to maintaining a cohesive, aligned workforce. 

Save physical space and digital storage

Does your office space have shelves lined with notebooks, pads of paper, sticky notes, or planners? These stacks of notes can lead to clutter and disorganization — and take up too much space. 

Likewise, if you're keeping handwritten notes for a project with an extended timeline, you'll end up with many documents that easily become displaced or ruined by spills. Think of digital notes as space savers that allow you to expand or consolidate your content with the touch of a button, reducing the need to take up physical storage in your office or briefcase. 

Stay organized 

Taking notes can quickly become ineffective if you're disorganized. With handwritten notes, it's easy to become lost searching for different topics, meeting recaps, or details about your projects. Digital notes eliminate this burden. They let you categorize your notes with limitless folders that you can easily access, sort, and search for within your organization. 

A digital note-taking app allows you and your team to seamlessly move content from one folder to the next and even create subfolders to reduce clutter and speed up access. With a cloud platform, your notes will be securely and neatly organized however you see fit, providing you with endless customization.

Find what you need

Digital note-taking enhances your searchability. With paper notes, you have to manually sort through each document or folder until you can narrow down what you're looking for. That can be a hassle if you're trying to pull up important notes before a meeting or reference them during one. 

With digital note-taking, rather than flipping through dozens of documents to find a specific note, you can quickly search for your content by typing in keywords or subheadings to pull up what you need when you need it. A digital file structure is beneficial because you can find what you need without wracking your brain to remember the name of the file you stored it in. 

Share with everyone 

A key element of working with hybrid and remote teams is sharing content without having to copy and scan every single document before emailing it over. Your people can collaborate with digital notes, allowing anyone in your organization and beyond to quickly share and work on the same document. 

Instead of having to physically hand off a paper document like you would with handwritten notes, digital notes let you send content to your team members no matter their location. This convenience can boost workplace productivity and speed up your project deadlines. You'll also eliminate day-to-day obstacles of wondering how to ensure your entire team has what they need to complete their tasks. 

Add visuals 

Digital note-taking is the way to go if you want your notes to be interactive and incorporate more than just words. Perhaps you're preparing a presentation for your team but want to include visuals, links, or videos to help educate them and drive home your message.

With digital notes, you can create comprehensive concepts that include more resources than paper notes enable. Visuals can also help your team absorb information better. And because you can easily share your digital content, it gives people the opportunity to review it when needed.

Edit freely

Consider how difficult it is to edit paper notes. Using an eraser or simply scratching out a word to fix an error can make your documents look messy and unprofessional, which can be embarrassing to share with your team members. Scanning and uploading handwritten notes for your remote team may seem like a good solution. But if they contain illegible handwriting or mistakes, you'll likely get several emails asking to clarify your content. 

Taking digital notes enables you to make as many corrections as you need to your document without causing smudging or leaving eraser marks on the page. You can instantly delete a paragraph, fix a typo, or adjust the formatting of your content for better readability for your remote teams. 

Tips for taking digital notes

Now that you know the advantages of digital notes versus paper notes, it's time to learn how you and your team members can put them into practice. Here are the top ways to improve your digital note-taking methods. 

Get familiar with your note-taking tool 

The first step to taking efficient, helpful notes on your digital note-taking app is to play around with the features and learn how to use them. Most digital tools have a user-friendly interface and are easy to adapt to. Still, it doesn't hurt to take a few minutes to check out the different things you can do. 

Exploring the tool also gives you an opportunity to share what you've learned with your team members. Help ensure your hybrid and remote teams can keep up with their notes and feel comfortable using the application before diving into a presentation or project meeting.

Choose a note-taking method or style 

Everyone has their preferred method of taking notes and reviewing them. To keep your notes even more organized, choose a note-taking method or style that allows you to structure notes neatly and efficiently. Whether you like to make your notes using bullet points or a detailed outline of each meeting to review later, craft your note-taking style to help you retain information. 

For instance, the outlining method includes the main topic of the meeting or presentation followed by bullet points for each subtopic and key points. You may prefer the sentence method, where your notes include the main topic but have supporting points written in complete sentences. Play around with different note-taking styles and determine which one fits your needs best. 

Establish the information you want to document 

If you go into a meeting or presentation unsure about what you need to document, your notes can end up disorganized and confusing. When preparing for a meeting, take a moment to think about what type of information you want to collect. Do you want to focus on listening to the speaker and just jotting down key points, or do you want to create a detailed outline of everything that your team covered? 

To make your notes most effective and prevent unnecessary details, determine what is and isn't important information. Writing down irrelevant notes will only make it more difficult to review them later. For instance, you probably don’t need to write down every joke made in a meeting. Project updates, organizational goals, and changed policies or procedures are the items you'll want to record. 

Prepare notes before meetings

If you're the one hosting the meeting, it's just as important for you to prepare notes ahead of time as it is for your team members to take notes on your presentation. Having notes on hand that include the material you want to cover, action items, and project management updates maximizes efficiency and ensures a smooth meeting. 

Even a simple list of bullet points and discussion items can help you and your team have a more productive meeting, rather than shuffling through papers or tabs trying to find what you want to cover next. At the end of the day, you and everyone in your organization have busy schedules, so streamlining your meetings enables everyone to get back to their workday. 

Determine the purpose of your notes

Sometimes, it's easy to forget why we're taking notes in the first place. When it comes to meetings and presentations, it might be a habit to take out your laptop and start following your team member's points with an outline. However, the true point of taking notes is to help you organize your thoughts and have an accurate source you can refer to later. 

If you're working on a project, you'll want to take notes on the goals of the project, important deadlines, tasks, and any other key information that you can review. Simply transcribing the meeting is typically a waste of time (and something an automated tool could accomplish).

Before you start writing down a note, ask yourself whether the information is common knowledge, redundant, or has a purpose in your document. This strategy can prevent cluttered notes.  

Write down questions

Jotting down your questions and insights is another key component of comprehensive, efficient note-taking, particularly when using a content-sharing tool with others on your team. Since your entire organization can collaborate on shared documents and content, another team member might be able to answer your question in your shared notes. 

If not, your team can bring up your important question at the next meeting and start a conversation about your notes. If you're left with any questions, concerns, or ideas after the meeting ends, include them in your notes and see where your reflections lead. 

Edit your notes after taking them

Often, we take notes and then don't look back. When it's time to review, we might notice a jumbled thought process. If you're someone who likes to quickly jot down main points and notes as you go, try taking a few moments after you're finished to edit and consolidate your content. 

This method can keep you in the writing flow during the meeting or presentation and prevent you from getting distracted while writing. Editing your notes can also help you see where you started writing without concentrating or including details that have little relevance. To achieve clear, truly usable notes, go back and delete any unnecessary information and summarize where you can. 

Make your notes accessible to others

One of the most significant advantages of digital note-taking solutions is that you can instantly share your notes with anyone within your organization and beyond. Making your notes available from anywhere means it's easier for your hybrid and remote teams to stay on the same page and collaborate on content to ensure every project runs smoothly. 

You could designate one person to take notes during a meeting and share it with the entire team. Or, have all team members collaborate within one document. Either way, digital accessibility decreases the chance of miscommunication and confusion and effectively creates a trusted source of information for everyone involved. 

Discover the power of the Content Cloud

With a single secure platform for all your content, Box enables you to manage the entire content lifecycle: file creation, co-editing, sharing, e-signature, classification, retention, and so much more. We make it easy for you to collaborate on content with anyone, both inside and outside your organization. Frictionless, enterprise-grade security and compliance are built into our DNA, so you get total peace of mind that your content is protected. And with 1,500+ seamless integrations — as well as a range of native capabilities, like Box Sign — the Content Cloud provides a single content layer that ensures your teams can work the way they want.

The Content Cloud is a game changer for the entire organization, streamlining workflows and boosting productivity across every team. Contact us today, and explore what you can do with Box.

**While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blogpost is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.