Stephen Vantassel here wildlife control consultant giving another episode of The Wild Life for pest geek podcast. Thank you for listening. Hey today I want to talk a little about the importance of note taking and how you can organize your notes so that you have. a continuous resource that you can build and then refer back to. one of the things that. pest control operators and even some wildlife control operators have to do is they have to go through continuing training in order to maintain their license. Or they go to training just to improve their quality of their professionalism. One of the challenges of course is is you’re inundated with so much information. How are you able to process that information. And one of the things that I find troubling. as an educator and someone who is a you know travels around giving instruction is how often people are sitting in the audience and they’re learning and sometimes are attentive but they don’t take notes. It always strikes me as a little odd if I think about it for a while and that’s why are people taking notes. And we basically it’s because we believe that everything’s Google. We are. We think that every answer to life’s problems. can be answered by Google and Google is a very powerful search engine. We could be sure but the reality is. is that Google doesn’t give you gives you information but it doesn’t give you. Filtered information and by that I mean it doesn’t do a good job providing you. context. So if you need to know how many people are in the United States today. I mean Google’s a great place to go. It’s just sort of a brute fact. But if you’re trying to figure out whether you should use a particular pesticide. For someone in an allergic situation or a high risk situation. that becomes much more difficult for you to extract with a couple click click clicks on your computer or your cell phone. And what we’re missing is when we’re going to training a lot of times the contextual information. that we get from a quality training course that you’re going to. Needs to be captured so that you can refer back to it if you’re training a new colleague. If it’s an obscure issue that you don’t normally deal with that you have that information sourced somewhere. but there’s also another reason not just historical but some of the research seems to suggest that. taking the time to write. down notes. actually helps in bed that information deeper into your consciousness and into your memory. One research program project that I’ve heard about was as it tried to compare students that took handwritten notes and compared it with those who took a computer typed notes. If you go to colleges today they’re often filled with students who were typing up their notes and part of that is because typing is so much faster. than handwriting and what they are and what they found. If my entries remembering recollections because I didn’t read that particular article I was looking at a post from someone who looks at. learning is that they found that students that were hand writing down their notes actually had better comprehension and better retention than students who were typing things down and I know just anecdotally in my own life. That’s certainly been true. I when I’m typing something I don’t necessarily have that same engagement. It seems to be that there’s a relationship with the. neural networks of your hand moving across the page and the amount of effort involved to do that embeds information better into your system. So enough about that.