Mastering the Tools: Software for Taking Notes 3.10.2022

    Last week I discussed professional-grade Biblical Studies software. You may recall from that discussion a familiar refrain; professionals use professional tools. This remains true throughout the process of preparing to preach and in every other area of ministry.  

    Every job has work product and deliverables. Work product is a largely invisible but indispensable part of the process. The deliverable, for us, is the public proclamation of the Word of God—the sermon. No one sees all the hard work that goes into preparing a sermon. No one sees your process for gathering, organizing, and gleaning the best fruit of study and reading—but it all flows into that final, deliverable—due on Sunday morning. 

    This week we will discuss the tools for taking notes. Again, you may choose to use analog tools or digital. I will address the latter, though the tools we have and how they are used, still reflect their origins in the “real world.” As you work in your study you need three kinds of note-taking tools to fulfill three interdependent but separate functions. 

• You need a tool for taking and organizing notes.

• You need a tool for filing cuttings, clippings, quotations, and data. 

• You need a tool for structuring and organizing your thoughts.

The first is analogous to a notebook. The second is analogous to a file cabinet. The third is like taking a fresh piece of paper and outlining your thoughts. Let us examine each of these in turn.

Taking Notes

    You should always carry a notebook or index stack of index cards with you for quick notes,  and learn to use the tools on your phone. Really you should do both. People who are interested in learning are always taking notes, clipping quotes, sharing data with their friends and associates, reading, re-reading, filing, cross-referencing, and finding uses for what they gather.

    In addition to the digital tools, I will recommend shortly, I always carry with me a Field Notes brand pocket memorandum book. The brand catchphrase encapsulates the need for note-taking. “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The key to good memory habits and the retention of information is making it stick now. So, today’s study, today's reading, today's work must be accounted for today, if it is to be of value tomorrow. 

    Let me briefly discuss a couple of digital tools. We will talk about Evernote again shortly. It has been a recommended tool for ministry professionals for many years. As a note-taking tool, I find it clumsy. I would recommend two tools that are better for quickly capturing bits and pieces of information. First, the native notes app on your phone (presuming you are on iPhone, sorry Android folk) is very capable. It syncs seamlessly with your Mac and or iPad. It can function both as a quick scratchpad and as a full-featured note-taking/keeping tool. Another valuable tool is Drafts, by Agile Tortoise. Every time you open this universal app it defaults to a fresh page. The program is specifically designed for quickly capturing textual information with the explicit understanding that it will be sorted, filed, and developed in other applications. If I write on my phone, it almost always starts in Drafts and then gets quickly transferred to a more robust program for additional development. 

    First, we take notes, then we organize them and deploy them in our ongoing work. That brings us to the next sort of tool. 

Filing

    I have boxes of old files in the basement of the Parsonage on the Hill. In my office, I have a nearly full filing cabinet and several plastic file organizers. This year's working files are in my desk filing drawer. Nearly every day I thank God that I no longer accumulate paper and physically organize it. I went fully Apple vertical in 2012. I have not taken paper to the pulpit since I got my first iPad. Every shred of work I have done since 2012 is available on my computer, iPad, and iPhone anywhere and at all times. The choice of tools makes this system not only feasible but functional. 

    There are different kinds of filing systems. People my age learned to use a card catalog for finding library books. Many older ministers had thousands of note cards of statistics, quotations, jokes, and other ephemera. And there is the long-term storage of our own personal notes. The boxes of files in storage remind us of the reality of our own work product. Now we only think about  it when we check our hard drive capacity, delete what is un-needed, and keep several current back-ups.

    There are several file-style programs. Evernote, Keep It, and (for you PC folk) OneNote allow us to replicate card or folder-based file systems on our computers. 

    I don’t type much into Evernote. I do, however, throw quotations, articles, weblinks, statistics, and other “might-need” stuff into it every day. Since Evernote has had some problems over the last couple of years I invested in Keep It, in the event it becomes necessary to move on from Evernote. As of this moment, I have 7646 items in Evernote. Articles. Webpages. Poetry. Stuff I might want to quote from in the future. Stories of all kinds, things which interest me, things that may be useful at some unforeseen time.  My general practice is to store things in Evernote, just like that old-fashioned file cabinet. When I use something from my "file", in a sermon, article, lesson, blog, or book, I time and date stamp it, record other significant details, then copy/paste it into my outliner for development. By dating it I know when it was used and can follow up on the information should it be something vulnerable to becoming outdated (such as statistics).

    You can do the same thing in OneNote. You can do the same thing in Apple Notes. There are dozens of other programs that do the same thing, I can just recommend what I have used and understand. You can even replicate this kind of functionality in Excel if you really want to.  If at all possible, you will want to use a tool that is available on all of your devices and which saves things in formats that can be readily exchanged or exported to other formats so that they do not become inaccessible in the future. You don’t want to lose anything. 

Outlining

    We preachers learn our outlining habits very early. I went through a period 25 years ago where I was using Mind Maps as a substitute. It just never took. I think in outlines. The first great age of outlining apps has passed but there are still several options. For those of you on the PC platform, sorry. Right now, I am using an outline processor called NoteTaker, by Aquaminds. It allows me to structure information into large outlines of outlines. My entire sermon calendar for 2022 is one big outline, each sermon has its own page with an outline section for the process of study and an outline section for the first draft of each message. 

    The other power-outliner is Omni Outliner. It is a program with a rich history that should last far into the future. I use Omni Outliner whenever I start a new writing project. It allows me to write without regard for final order and move things around. 

    I think it is essential to separate the process of gathering, curating, and organizing information from the process of writing and creating our end product. Each of these steps from taking notes, filing those notes, and beginning the process of bringing structure to what you have gathered helps you to constantly review what you are learning. You will develop less than you file. You will not file everything you note, clip, or save. This process of constantly winnowing through the information you gather is at the heart of critical inquiry. 

Conclusions

    My primary reason for moving to the Mac platform in 2012 was an application called (I kid you not) Circus Ponies Notebook. The company went under in 2016 and I went into a brief period of mourning. CP Notebook was what they call skeuomorphic—something in the digital world mimicking its analog counterpart. CP Notebook was designed like a three-ring binder…with sections, subsections, and pages for taking notes. It had excellent organizing and searching capabilities, so I was able to organize and file information like an old-fashioned file cabinet. And the whole thing was based upon outlines. Every notebook was an outline. The sections of the notebook were outlines. The pages—outlines. Oh, how I love outlines! And these outlines could scale. Every single document for a year's worth of preaching could be tucked into this one huge outline. The program organized my information, indexed it (including Greek and Hebrew words), and allowed me to move my notes from gathering and curating to sifting and incorporating in my own sermon prep cycles. And now, the company and the application are dead. The information I had accumulated is still accessible, but it takes more time to access. I use a sibling product that replicates 90% of the value of the CP Notebook. I’m effective with my system right now. I’m never fully content.  I’ve learned to always keep my options open. 

       This might seem way down in the weeds dull. And it is until you’ve been in ministry for 20 years and confront a filled filing cabinet while trying to find something you used at some forgotten time, In some forgotten place, somewhere in the past. Taking good notes and keeping them readily filed, using the best tools available makes planning and writing sermons much more satisfying and allows you to spend more time on the study and writing part of the job. We will talk about writing next week.