2. Paper Is Becoming Obsolete ...

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel said that if she turns up to a meeting and sees a paper notebook tucked under her colleague's arm, she's not impressed. Seriously not impressed. Samuel is a digital note-taking extremist. She believes electronic notes are vastly superior to their analog equivalents. She dismisses the argument that having laptops and tablets in meetings tempts distraction, saying it's the meeting leader's responsibility to keep his or her audience sufficiently hooked on their every word. Not everyone agrees with her.

3. ... But Not All Digital Note-Taking Is Superior

There's little research into the benefits of digital note-taking over handwritten notes. The bulk of studies focus on whether typing out notes or copying and pasting them-taking whole chunks of text from pre-prepared digital materials and pasting them into notes-is better. A team from Carnegie Mellon looked at best practices for designing note-taking technologies and found that typing out notes improves later recall, while copy and pasting text into notes is actually detrimental to learning because it encourages wordiness.

The US Air Force Academy teamed up with West Virginia University to work out the art of electronic note-taking. They were particularly curious to learn whether scaffolding notes horizontally across a row of cells, or down a column made a difference in terms of subjects' ability to recall the information. It didn't.

And if you're worried about the environment, Slate weighed the green implications of taking notes on an iPad. The bottom line is it's complicated, but using recycled paper is better for the world under most scenarios than buying a battery-powered gadget.

4. Be OCD About Your Notes

The more OCD you are about organizing your notes, the better. The Journal of Reading compared different note-taking methods and found that the most rigorously structured-those with hierarchal ordering and numbered subsections-were of the highest quality and accuracy. A two-column method came in a close second; these notes were arranged such that the left column contained the information from the given event (i.e. the meeting, lecture or talk) and the right column was used later to fill out follow-up points and highlight key themes. Although these notes were significantly more precise than freestyle note-taking, there was little difference in the ability of the note-taker to recall the material.

5. Draw Pictures!

The British Journal of Educational Technology found mind-mapping to be significantly more effective than just writing out notes. Mind-mapping brings visual structure to notes, usually involving writing one word in the center and drawing offshoots from it with related ideas and phrases. Researchers studying two groups of note-takers, those using the SmartWisdom method (a popular alternative mind-mapping system) and those writing traditional notes found that although there was no difference in the accuracy of the notes, the mind-mappers were able to present the information back with more clarity and coherence than their counterparts.