Taking Notes in ADHD: Not Being Able to Listen While Writing

The speaker builds a sentence. I understand that the sentence is important and start writing. By the time I get to the end of the sentence, the talk has moved two sentences ahead. While I try to catch them, the sentence I was writing is left unfinished.

In the end I have a page made of half sentences. And in my head, what is left is less of what was said than the rush I felt while trying to keep up.

For a long time I thought this was a lack of skill. How did other people manage to listen and write at the same time? Then I read how much note taking actually asks of the mind.

How many tasks note taking is

Note taking looks like a single movement but inside it there are at least three tasks: understanding what you hear, choosing what is worth writing, and putting it into writing. All three happen at the same time and at the speaker's pace.

The review by Piolat and colleagues brings together studies that measure the cognitive effort of note taking. The comparative data show that note taking requires more effort than reading or learning; the review treats this activity through the limits of working memory (Piolat et al., 2005).

So it is a heavy task for everyone. In ADHD, the buffer that holds this task overflows more easily anyway. I described the everyday form of working memory in the article on working memory and forgetfulness; here I am looking only at its face at the note-taking desk.

Listening while writing is like trying to understand two people at once in a room where both are talking.

Are the notes of students with ADHD really worse

There is a study that surprised me. Vekaria and Peverly compared 22 university students who reported having ADHD with 50 peers. The students listened to a lecture and took notes, reviewed their notes and took a written recall test. The ADHD group scored lower on written recall and on handwriting speed. But the two groups did not differ in the quality of their notes, in sustained attention, in verbal working memory or in comprehension of what they listened to (Vekaria and Peverly, 2018).

The sample is small and ADHD rests on self-report; so I read the results with caution. But it made me think of this: perhaps an important part of the difficulty is not in the note itself, but in the hand keeping up with the speed of the talk and in the stage of going back from the note to the information. This moves the solution from the paper to the process.

By hand or with a keyboard

It is common advice that taking notes by hand settles better in memory. From the ADHD point of view, this advice may not suit everyone.

In a classroom study in a university course, students chose their own note-taking method: by hand, with a laptop or with a tablet. Two days later they took a short quiz. As inattention symptoms increased, what students who took notes by hand learned from the lesson went down, while that of students who took notes on a computer or tablet went up (Shimko et al., 2025). Students were not randomly assigned to the methods, so it is too early to draw cause and effect. Still, it is a sufficient sign not to say "write by hand, you will learn better" as a universal rule.

The computer also has a cost. Participants who did other things on their laptops during the lecture scored lower on a test about the lecture; moreover, the scores of participants who could see someone multitasking in their field of view also dropped (Sana et al., 2013). So the computer helps only if it is open solely for notes.

Gap notes: taking part of the load in advance

Guided notes are note sheets that give the skeleton of the lesson and leave the important places blank. A meta-analysis collecting studies in this area found that guided notes improved note accuracy and academic performance; the group in which the effect was clearest was school-age students (Konrad et al., 2009). The evidence for adults is more limited.

As an adult, no one prepares this for me. But I can prepare it myself: if the presentation file or the reading list has been shared in advance, writing the headings on a page and leaving space under them. Then the job I have to do during the talk drops from choosing and writing to filling in the gaps. At school there is an official counterpart of this too: note-taking support.

Does note taking scatter attention or hold it

There are two sides here, and I experience both.

On one side, note taking competes with listening; the half sentences I described above are the result of this competition. On the other side, in a talk where I am not taking notes, when my hands are left empty my mind goes elsewhere much faster. Writing works as a handle for attention. In the glossary there is a concept close to this: the attention anchor.

To resolve this contradiction I try to split note taking into two separate jobs. The first is capturing: during the talk only marks, words, arrows. This part keeps my hand busy but does not tire listening much. The second is building: afterwards, making sentences, connections and a summary out of those marks. When I try to do both jobs at once both fall apart; when I separate them both become doable.

There is also the matter of doodling. Boxes, arrows and shapes drawn in the margin look like inattention from outside. For me they are often a way of being able to stay in my seat, of staying in the talk. I have no study that this works for everyone; so I am writing it only as my own experience.

What I do with the notes afterwards

Taking notes is half the work. In Vekaria and Peverly's study, the quality of the notes of students with ADHD did not differ from their peers', but they recalled less from those notes. This makes me think that what I do with the note afterwards is as decisive as the note itself.

Instead of rereading my notes, I try to turn them into questions. Writing questions like "Why is this so?" or "What is the difference between these?" in the margin, and then closing the paper and answering them. Why recalling information from memory works I described in the article on memorization and spaced repetition.

There is also the number of notebooks. When I open a separate notebook, a separate app, a separate file for every topic, I forget what I wrote where. A single place with dated pages in it has been more useful for me than several beautiful notebooks.

The note-taking setup I found worth trying

A mark instead of a sentence. The moment I try to write a full sentence, I miss things. A keyword, an arrow, a question mark. I build the sentence later.

Dividing the page in two. On the left side what I hear, on the right side the questions and connections that come to mind. When my mind wanders, I write what comes to mind on the right and go back to the left. That way even distraction is recorded somewhere.

A timestamp if there is a recording. In a lesson that will have a recording, instead of writing everything I note the minute of the important moment. Then I go back to that minute. I described my setup for online classes in the article on online classes in ADHD.

Ten minutes at the end. Because Vekaria and Peverly's finding makes me think that going back from the note is the hard part, I try to complete the notes while memory is fresh. If I do not finish the half sentences in those ten minutes, the next day I cannot decipher most of them.

The "I missed it" mark. When you notice that you missed something, do not try to go back and catch it; draw a short line on the page and keep listening. The line shows whom to ask in the end or which part of the recording to look at. You do not lose everything else for one sentence you missed.

Staying simple with color and symbols. Making the note layout beautiful quickly turns into a separate pursuit for me: color codes, different pens, carefully drawn headings. A page that looks beautiful is sometimes the price of missing what was said. So I use at most two marks: a star for an important place, a question mark for a place I did not understand. The rest I leave for later.

Summing up out loud. When the talk ends, without looking at the notes I try to say the three most important points out loud to myself. If I cannot, I go back to the notes; if I can, the notes are only a support. This small step shows immediately whether the note stayed on paper.

I use these habits in meetings today too. Because of my work I sit in long meetings that talk about a brand's data, channels and content, and the same half-sentence problem is there too.

There is also a permission I give myself: sometimes choosing not to take notes. Giving all my attention to listening in order to understand a topic and getting the notes afterwards from the recording, the presentation or someone else. Sometimes a person ends up doing both halfway while trying to do two things at once. When I have to choose between listening and writing, listening most of the time turns out to be more valuable.