As we've discussed before, your mind can only handle so great of a cognitive load—people can only hold so many items in their working memory before they start to fall out. Active listening—that is, attending to the speaker and jotting down the things that catch your attention—lets us invest our working memory in paying attention
Great, brief article. I've found this to be the case myself, and try to make it a point to bring one of my trusty Field Notes journals to every meeting and event that I attend.
What I've always done is rely largely on the Field Note montra of "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now." Howeve, this article points me to the next step for me, which is to develop a system to go back through my notes and highlight the key points. Something like this:
every week or so I go back with a different color pen and circle the key sentences; I then transfer these ideas to Evernote files on my computer; and finally, I blog/tweet/publish/email out the crispest, most important ideas or quotes.
I'd love to develop a system like this.