Comeback Notes #

The majority of notes are written to be reviewed later on, to highlight some important concepts that we are currently learning about and annotated to differentiate between the different actions that we might want to take like lists for outlines, todos for action required, an idea we had while learning new information, highlight important information for context and so on.

We take this process very seriously for external information but it seems that more often than not we ignore the information we produce, maybe because we don’t think it is important or we are over reliant on our memory. Both cases seem to be thought of crazy if we were to behave the same when listening to new information or doing research.

It is even crazier when we think about this in our day to day jobs at which we get interrupted, way more than we would like to admit, and the amount of time it takes to come back. Some interruptions are short and we can work back from memory to where we were before but other interruptions take much longer, like a question that ends up in a discussion or an already scheduled meeting that slices a big chunk of time into two slices in which case we should take a comeback note for our future self.

Comeback notes are a few short sentences or a bullet list of the things we were doing, why we were doing them and what should be done next. Take this notes on any kind of medium be it on paper, an app, a post-it or whatever, that will be there when we come back to continue to do our work. I usually do this by writing comments in my Code Editor by writing code comments that I delete later on. these notes are short lived and will be thrown away at the first chance so don’t spend too much time making them prettier but focus on making them useful.

Beside reducing the amount of time and effort required to remember what you were doing before getting interrupted, it also improves our focus to thing that is interrupting you because you don’t have to constantly avoid forgetting something important while also thinking about what the current conversation is all about.