A recent post suggested that taking notes might be a bad idea. Now here's another story suggesting that taking notes - or more particularly doodling in those notes - might help:

Good news, doodlers: What your colleagues consider a distracting, time-wasting habit may actually give you a leg up on them by helping you pay attention.

Asked to remember names they’d heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn’t. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander.

- Source: A Sketchy Brain Booster: Doodling