Do you regularly take notes at home, school, or work?
If so, do you always write down, or type out, the current day, month, and year?
Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always?
In this post, you’ll find a couple of compelling reasons as to why you should always take a few moments to write down the current date on your handwritten and/or electronic notes.
It helps you to focus in the present moment.
While jotting down a random combination of numbers might not seem like much, it is a highly mindful activity.
Sure, the process only take a couple of seconds, but for those brief moments, you either have to think about what day it is, or check the date on a nearby calendar.
You’re wholly, and completely present in the moment.
Set up a routine, or habit, such as this, and you may find yourself more focused and alert when attending a meeting, lecture, or just sitting down to brainstorm ideas.
It allows you to better organize information.
Dating your notes allows you to easily organize information in a chronologic fashion.
There’s literally no guesswork involved.
You just go through your notes, and start to assemble everything by month, day, and year.
This makes it easy to not only to look through your notes, but to easily store them in a file, notebook, or portfolio.
What’s more, having time gaps, or holes in your notes, can help you better organize your thoughts, as in, “Was there even a meeting on that date?,” or “Did I skip that drawing session?”
Time gaps can also be a great incentive to intensify your search for lost or missing items.
It gives you a reference point for your work and personal life.
Keeping records is as old as the hills.
Understanding and interpreting records, however, can be extremely useful if you are looking to figure out exactly where you are in your life, at this very moment.
Where have you been…and where are you going? Let the date be your guide.
Look over any notes you’ve taken at work, this could be a memo pad of ideas for that big client product launch six months ago, or a personal journal entry you jotted down one year ago.
What has changed since then? How have you grown, evolved, or improved yourself?
This can be quite an eye-opening activity, to say the least!
How about you? Do you jot down the current date when taking notes? Why or why not? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!
This is really a great point. When we first launched GTDNext we did not have this feature. We soon learned (from user feedback) that recording the date of a note or task was made was super important. So we now make sure we automatically record both the date the task was created and the date is was completed.
I like to take this one step further, so when I make any sort of notes in my tasks I always add the date as well.
Great site by the way!
James
Thanks, James. Hmm, what an interesting observation! Do your users also like keeping track of time? I’m a fan of time stamps in apps; they add just one more level of information that can be super helpful months down the road. Thanks for your comment and for stopping by the site!