I have just recently started taking good notes. Mostly I play SNGs but dabble in 6max and FR. Way back when my notes were mainly : donk, fish, ass, douche, ect.
. Now I have a little shorthand system for taking notes as I'm sure most good regs do.
When I first load up my tables I get to work. I take the player to the left of me and click on their notes. Then I type the following:
G:
PF:
F:
T:
R:
These stand for in order: General, pre-flop, flop, turn, river. I then type kind of game under general. For example: G: 6-M 10nl. Then I right click, highlight and copy.
After this it all depend how froggy I feel as to how much notes I take. Sometimes I look up every player while I'm on waiting list and see how many tables they are at. If it is more than four I make a note under my "general" section. For example if he is playing 16 tables the my notes read: G: 6-M 10nl, 16T. The reason I do this is because usually micro stakes multi tablers are super tight and I like to steal their blinds and fold to resistance.
I'm not going into my whole shorthand or anything but I will give an example of what some of my notes look like:
G: 6M,
PF:3B QTs BB, PAI A9s UTG
F:CAI TPNK 90BBd
T:
R:
OK at first glance you are like WTF? But it's ez for me to decode and you should make it easy for yourself to also. When I move my cursor over this player I will know that preflop he 3bet queen ten suited from the big blind and he pushed all in with ace nine suited under the gun. On the flop he has called an all in 90 big blinds deep(effective stack) with top pair no kicker.
3bet is one of my favorite notes. Whenever someone 3bets whether or not you are in the hand you should pay close attention. If it gets to showdown make a note of the cards and position. A few showdowns can help you pin point 3betting range with or without thousands of PT hands.
This is just the basics. Usually I will only make a note if the play is out of the ordinary or something I can exploit. Sometimes I get carried away. You want good notes but also in a quick ez to read from. Plus you don't want to take all day making one note. So I guess the jist of this is if you are going to be serious about note taking you should use some form of shorthand and don't take meaningless notes like "donk" ect.....