Day 4 – Keep a journal or notes on what you are learning

If you’re still hanging in there with me, we’re on day 4 of 21 days to becoming a better domainer. Today’s focus is to start tracking and organizing what you learn by keeping a journal or notes.

We’ve been visiting blogs, posting comments, reading forum threads and engaging in conversation with other domainers all in just a few days time. That’s a lot to take in. Now’s the time to capture and organize this information. There are many ways to do that. I have a friend who never had to take notes or study in college. He just remembered everything he heard and saw with no effort, even after a night out drinking. I, unfortunately, am like most people and can’t rely on my brain to accurately hold and recall most information. I may even be a little worse than most people when it comes to remembering things. My wife tells me that I’m so forgetful that I could plan my own surprise party.

I highly encourage you to keep notes on the nuggets you are picking up along the way. There is too much valuable info out there to trust to your memory. Keep a list of tools you come across, names you learn, people you meet, business and their focuses, sales prices that interest you. These are all just random piece of information you’ll need to find at some point in the future. There are dozens of ways to capture the information and even more ways to organize that information. How you do it is up to you. I’ll spare you my method for now, but may share it at some point in the future. For now, just do what works for you. You have several options.

Analog:
Grab a pen and a spiral notebook
The ever popular Bullet Journal method
Use index cards
Post-it notes on your wall

Digital:
Capture it all in a Word doc
Use Evernote
MS OneNote
Notes on your phone

The method you choose to capture your learnings doesn’t matter. The action of doing it and reviewing it is what matters. I promise you, you will never contact me and tell me that you regret that you took notes on what you have been learning. Never ever. It may sound like a waste of time and effort but I promise you it is not. It doesn’t hurt to come up with some type of indexing system as well, just to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

There is plenty of free information on note taking and indexing methods out there. Here are just a few. Remember to follow what works best for you.