Note-taking has many benefits. Many are direct results of the activity of writing, but there are second-order effects at play too.
As a lifelong learner, taking notes while learning is truly essential to me. You will never see me without a way to take notes during a conference talk, a lesson, while watching an online course, or while reading a non-fiction book. I even take notes when I meet my therapist 😂.
Capturing thoughts, ideas, and knowledge is key to being able to connect the dots. If you follow a lesson but don't capture the essence of what was presented, it means that you're relying completely on your memory, on the course material, or on other people, all of which are risky. Your memory may fail you at any time, and you might not be able to remember everything you need. The course material might only provide a brief summary, and omit a lot of information that was shared "live". And relying on other people is very risky because they might not be organized, might not care, or might have taken notes that don't "work" for you or that are incomplete. I’ll share more ideas about the usefulness of taking and making notes in the 04. Learning part.
Note-taking is, in a sense, the inverse of lecture delivery — Ben Schneiderman — Sparks of Innovation in Human-computer Interaction
Assuming that you have an efficient and effective technique, taking notes will let you capture everything you need. In addition, taking notes will help you memorize at least a part of the information, simply because you need to focus twice while taking notes: once to listen and understand, and once more to express the ideas in your own words.
Armed with your notes, you will later be able to apply the Feynman Technique or similar approaches to make sure you understand the material, identify your knowledge gaps, dive deeper, and study (if you need to).
Note-taking helps to learn and memorize
Moreover, taking notes will help you capture important concepts, and make links between those (e.g., using concept maps). The act of taking notes will help you create better mental models. In turn, that deeper knowledge and those mental models will enable you to solve more complex problems.
As an added benefit, your notes will make it possible for you to share your knowledge with others. As such, note-taking can not only transform your own life but also improve other ones. How cool is that?!
If you keep your notes, then you'll always have a reference to come back to. Assuming you have solid notes, you will then be able to quickly remind yourself about ideas. Notes are persistent memories. They're records of ideas you've encountered and records of your own thinking.
Notes are always evolving. Revisiting those will help you dive deeper, and memorize the important parts (if you need to), for instance using spaced repetition. Also, when you revisit those, you will be able to update them to match your current thinking, make links with new ideas, etc.
If you want to be a real professional at work, you need to be organized, structured, and reliable. Note-taking can help you check all of those boxes.
I've written an article a few years ago discussing this topic. If you don't have time to read it now, then here's the gist of it: