That was my reaction, too.
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I didn’t. In the mid 70’s we were still scribbling notes on mainframe reports printed on 14 7/8’’ x 11 greenbar paper. Meeting notes were usually taken by one person and given to someone else to type and distribute. Hand written “While you were out” notes greeted us when we returned from lunch or an offsite meeting.
My notes lived in folders in my briefcase or desk. I assume our Vice President’s was in a file cabinet in his secretary’s office. He frequent retrieved data using voice commands, “Get me this quarter’s sales figures”. Things didn’t start changing until the IBM PC arrived in the early 80’s.
At some point I upgraded to a Franklin Planner, i.e. a paper version of Contacts, Calendars, Notes, and Reminders 
. As I recall I was still using it in the late 1990’s.
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Oh I’m sure his secretary/assistant had a filing system. Secretarial colleges taught shorthand, filing systems, etc.
Sure, big men in positions of authority could ignore these things and let others do it. Today that’s arguably still true, but you have to go higher up the food chain, as it were, to find people who no longer handle their own records and correspondence. But a lot of people were thinking about it.
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My father, a tenured Professor, clergyman, and enthusiastic genealogist, took notes on small notebook pages and lots of 3 x 5 cards. For sermons he took notes as he read on small notepads organized by topics in notebooks, then outlined sermons on cards, then typed them.
For genealogy, he mostly used carefully labeled and dated cards, which have made it easier for me to pick up where he left off.
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Many years ago after a messy divorce I ended up buying an old 18th century cottage which was 15 foot 6 inches square on two floors. The upper floor was effectively the eaves of the roof converted into a bedroom.
What I learned very quickly was unless something served a definite purpose or was used/needed regularly there was simply no space for it. I became ruthless but far happier and I learned to love my little space which was mine.
The same can be applied to a lot of things, information, notes, tasks, possessions in fact almost everything. It’s not a problem with notes apps or computers or anything else it’ s a human condition we need to look at.
I still live in a reasonably small apartment, but this time through choice. I made a conscious decision to give up chasing the corporate rat race dream I was being sold and decided to work for myself some 20+ years ago. I have the freedom to live where I choose (within reason) currently about 100 yards from the sea front in a warm country. I may not be as well off as some, I certainly have less notes than most but I have something far more valuable and something I do use and value.
A fair degree of personal freedom.
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I think I could write a whole book on this topic (I suspect a lot of us here could, and all the books would be different!), but I like what @cornchip has identified as the key points:
I do write my own notes too, but at its most basic my PKM is just a digital manifestation of my “personal library” (in fact that’s even what I call it in DT). I want to be able to retrieve stuff I’ve read, at the moment I need it. My only regret is that I didn’t set this up far earlier in my life, not that it’s full of stuff I don’t need. Sidenote: I did a clean install of my Mac yesterday, and there are loads of little shortcuts and things I had set up on my old version of my Mac that I didn’t document, that current me wishes I had as now I can’t recreate it without significant time resource, which I probably won’t invest. Keeping stuff just in case is fine! When resource is so cheap (compared to days of yore), I wonder if there is such a thing as “too much” note-keeping. Past me probably figured I’d set up a shortcut once and move on with my life, but if I’d documented it and then never used it again, would it have mattered? Life is full of things like this.
A lot of this isn’t new to humanity, it’s just that the tools have changed and we can “hoard” far more than we used to before. E.g. Beethoven wrote notes in notebooks (or what passed for notebooks in his day) which he rarely referred to. He said writing the stuff down and knowing it was there was enough. (I can’t tell you what he actually said verbatim, because it’s in DT and I’m not near my Mac 
The act of putting it in there was enough to remember the message…)
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I don’t think so. Or rather, the average person then and now probably didn’t contemplate this stuff too much, but we (in this thread) are a smaller group of “power users” who do think about this stuff a lot, and we have peers throughout the centuries who were likewise acting at the edges of individual knowledge management and spending lots of time on it.
Several of your country’s most famous thinkers spent huge amounts of time curating their own collections of notes - e.g. Emerson spent countless hours indexing and re-writing notes across his notebooks, and eventually then making indexes of his indexes. Many of his peers did the same (and he inspired others in turn, e.g. Thoreau). They were invested in not just capturing notes, but also maintaining their usability. It’s no different to us fiddling about with our digital notes, moving them about, tagging, linking, etc.
And he of course wasn’t the only one - he didn’t invent this, he’s just the best American example I can think of this morning. Over in Europe many of our great thinkers were working on similar projects. Coleridge is a favourite example of mine for this - he was an extensive note taker, and he constantly battled against himself for what he thought was the “right way” to store notes, but inevitably ended up reverting back to his natural inclination (writing things in no order and just hoping his indexes were enough). So his notebooks are littered with admonishments to e.g. always keep notebooks on a theme, file alphabetically, etc., before he’d give up and then work on his indexing again. It’s no different to one of us here trying to force ourselves to use some kind of atomic note system, before giving up and reverting to our natural inclination. And doesn’t it make us feel better to know people who “achieved greatness” had these same problems
I’ve only used examples of individual thinkers here, because I think there is a distinction between individuals doing this for their own use, and groups of people doing this collaboratively for a collective goal, but as groups humans have dedicated huge amounts of time to storing, sorting and retrieving knowledge. Entire lives have been spent in service of libraries, and this happened repeatedly in societies around the world that favoured the written word, which I think shows it’s some kind of universal human inclination. In fact even in societies that favour verbal memory-keeping, a lot of time was/is still spent actually maintaining that knowledge. It looks different but the motive is the same. A lot of human history is basically just us figuring stuff out and then trying not to forget it.
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Bmosbacker
I wonder how much time your average professional spent contemplating the process and “tools” of note-taking in the 50s and earlier when the method was primarily restricted to a legal pad or a journal?
Not in the 50s, but pre-PCs, one of my first paid jobs was keeping the documents and notes on-site for a fairly large scale construction project. There was a vast amount of thought about the process and tools that would ensure that ultimately people would attempt to build what they were meant to build and do so correctly. I spent at least two hours every morning archiving old plans and documents and replacing them with updated ones that arrived in the mail or otherwise, and I spent at least an hour a day going through civil engineer and surveyor field notebooks and capturing key points in a running log book for the site that had to be available instantly to any of the site management. Most of the rest of my working day was about pulling documents on request from a complex set of shelving and pigeonholes and making sure they were correctly returned.
It’s true that expectations expand as technology makes it quicker and easier to do more and do better (look at any typewritten document pre-word processing: tolerance for visible corrections and the abysmal layout and legibility would never be acceptable today) but professionals have always needed to handle more information than they can do without thought, and there have always been systems to capture and handle it. I’m just old enough to remember banks being filled with rooms full of ledger clerks noting transactions with fountain pens.
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Not much more I can add to this thread that hasn’t been said already. I’ll just say it more succinctly, writing is thinking. Writing down your thoughts forces you to grapple with something you just read or a video you just watched. Trying to categorize and file a note forces you to think about it more and relate it to other notes you’ve taken in the past. All of this is essential to learning and developing your base of knowledge over time. Even if you never revisit a particular note in the future, creating that note was still useful for your process of learning.
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I believe this could be applied beyond linked thought to basically everything we store in our digital vaults: all types of receipts, PDFs, images, documents… The dream of throwing anything to an app and be confident that you could retrieve it later no matter what was Evernote’s main value proposition (not so sure these days, but that’s another topic)
But at the end of the day my digital vault goes back to 30 years and has basically become a memorabilia landfill and a never ending source of amusing party tricks with family and collagues (“Do you remember that meeting with a client when we had to put the mic on mute because we couldn’t resist laughing? Listen to it again”)
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Upon reflection, I think you’re right. I stand corrected.
Perhaps the difference is not in thinking about note-taking and striving to manage and maximize notes; maybe the difference is in the incessant talking about note-taking.
My professional life began in the '80s. I don’t recall discussions about taking and managing one’s notes. The closest thing I can remember of a formal conversation related to taking notes (I probably should have taken better notes on this! 
) was a GTD conference I attended with David Allen. Taking notes per se was not discussed but doing a “mind dump” was skirting the edges of the topic.
I suspect, as already pointed out, the issue is more prevalent due to the sheer volume of information we must manage. Another contributing factor may be the emergence of forums like this one, which were only beginning to develop in the 80s (I remember CompuServe, AOL, etc.). Forums and social media facilitate discussions around topics like this, which would have been more difficult, or at least more limited, in the past.
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If you have those notes, you should digitize them; great memories!
Very good point!
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Well, 50s and later in my experience. A lot of information processing, organization, and retrieval was offloaded to the kind of support staff and corporate-mandated systems that started to disappear once technology made it possible to push all that work back on to managerial desks. Work really was different then. I was there for the transition from mostly analogue to entirely digital, and it was amazing.
When I started my corporate career in the mid 80s:
No one had a computer on their desk. Documents were prepared by hand and given to a secretary at a dumb terminal connected to a monster Wang word processor in some sub-basement somewhere. Cutting and pasting were literal, not icons.
Management ranks were stuffed full of (usually) men who couldn’t or wouldn’t type and might, if pressed, scrawl a note, but would never handwrite a memo. If they were lucky enough to have a secretary who knew shorthand, they would dictate it to (always) her in person. If not, they dictated it into a machine and handed the tape to a typist.
Clerks entered accounting journal entries on paper forms and handed them off to the IT department for another clerk to manually enter into an IBM mainframe in the same sub-basement. It wasn’t unusual to get financial data at the end of the month when the books closed and not a moment before.
(When I was getting my MBA an alumnus in banking came to one of the schools job fairs and told us that what he was looking for was—and I kid you not—“someone who can break up the knife fights in my computer room.”)
Hardly anyone knew what a spreadsheet was. You calculated things like internal rate of return or bond duration using an HP 12C and wrote the results down on paper. Green thirteen column analysis pads weren’t just for accountants.
Most departments had mandated systems for categorizing, numbering / labelling, logging, and filing documents. You might have a few “working files” on your desk or in one of your two file drawers, but everything else was in a more or less central repository filled with files, binders, and reference texts that you could ask someone to fetch for you based on a pre-defined filing system.
Oh, and as we were constantly reminded by Legal, “It’s the Corporate Records Retention and Destruction Policy.” When you sent something to Records Retention you indicated where and how it was to be archived and when it was to be shredded. If you needed something from the archive you consulted a log, wrote a retrieval request on a paper form, got an authorized signature, and sent someone down to get it.
You got things delivered to your inbox for processing and taken out of your outbox for distribution. “Distribution” = make a properly formatted document if need be, mail it, circulate with a buck slip, deliver it via interoffice mail, or file it. Once it left your desk, it was out of your hands. TRAF (“toss, refer, act, or file” was the time management system du jour.)
There was no email, voicemail, or digital calendaring systems. If you didn’t answer your phone, a secretary did and left a pink “While you were out” slip on your desk. Your secretary kept your calendar and told you where you had to be and when, usually in coordination with everyone else’s secretary and especially, your bosses. Contact lists were rolodexes; there were special ones that could hold business cards. The fax machines lived in the corporate communications department. If you got a fax, a clerk on the eighth floor would dial your number, yell “Wire Room! Fax Pages!” and hang up. Someone would dutifully trot down to the eighth floor and retrieve them. My department was extra-fancy because we worked closely with our overseas affiliates: we had a telex machine that only authorized people could use.
A secretary came to meetings, took notes, typed them up, and distributed them to whoever needed them.
There was no online information of any kind. Information was print. (Unless you were on a trading floor, which was a whole different thing with lots of shouting … but I digress.) Photocopying was laborious: your department’s one photocopier likely didn’t have a sheet feeder and there was a long line to use it. You wrote down the information you needed from reports, manuals, books of tables, and reference volumes.
Lordy. Reports. Lots of them. On paper, in a prescribed format prepared and delivered on a prescribed schedule. If they came from an overseas affiliate, they came in the “Corporate Pouch” dispatched at regular intervals via airmail.
You might have a company paid subscription to the FT or the WSJ or a discipline specific specialty publication. The latter were expensive as heck, so you had to share, which meant copying down the information you needed before you passed it on.
We relied on memory for a lot of things. For instance, we might write down specific bits of information like the relevant section of the tax code or the FASB standard number or the date a filing was due. Some of us used sectioned notebooks; since I came from academia, I was partial to index cards. (I still have a few with useful financial formulas on them.) But we’d try to lodge the general idea in memory; if we needed chapter and verse, we’d go to the manual and look it up. When you were senior enough, you could rely on your subordinates’ memories.
Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and eventually, Outlook and SAS changed my professional life.
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Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? … Actually I was helping to send those days to the dustbin of history by teaching classes to Control Data execs how to use the VisiCalc spreadsheet on Apple II machines.
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I think one thing that’s changed with the advent of cheap and powerful digital tools is the expectation that “trying not to forget it” can and perhaps should be an individual effort and not something managed collectively by trusted experts—not just librarians, but people like pre-PC @chrisecurtis.
And plenty of that stuff can stay in the dustbin as far as I’m concerned. One of the things worth keeping though are collective, trusted information collection, organization, and retrieval systems.
Boy am I blessed. I have an EA who proofs and edits my presentations, takes meeting minutes, manages my calendar, coordinates all of my travel, and serves as a meeting and phone call gatekeeper. I sometimes forget how much of a blessing this is. Perhaps I should give her a bigger raise!
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I think that’s probably a good idea.
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The earliest attested extant examples of writing, in the Near East and in Asia, are accounting records; how much rice, barley, bread, beer and salt, tracking laborers’ pay.
Next are prayers and curses, which always seem to accompany every information revolution.
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