When my practice was very weak and I could barely find my feet or the breath, I noted strongly so as to try to yoke my mind to the present moment and those sensations.
When my practice improved, I was able to shift to more attention to those sensations themselves, and then to letting the notes largely happen on their own.
As things got faster, the notes had to be stripped down, finally to just little mental blips that would track close behind vibrations, and finally those were too fast and then the notes got dropped in favor of bare investigation in very strong A&P territory.
When the Dark NIght set in after the A&P, I suddenly found that even with noting, staying present in Dissolution was hard, and then to stay out of the content, notes such as "Fear", "Suffering", and the like became of value, while the complex vibrations were too wide and buzzy to note except generally.
In Equanimity, I found noting didn't matter much, and that staying with larger things, like awareness and space synchronizing, or attention and phenomena, or effort and reality, were more compelling, but for including things such as "expectation" and a few broad aspects like that, noting had some limited place at times.
In Review, I found it useful in some stages, but post stream-entry it wasn't as helpful most of the time except when starting a new path from scratch, and then only briefly with rare exceptions. As one teacher said, "Now you know that C A T spells cat, and so just read."
I don't use it now except in the rarest moments, but it got me a long way, and I am very grateful for it.
