You can be detailed if it is easy, quick and simple. I'll give you an example. I am sitting here and my mind is drifting and it is off into aversion. And it is as soon as I become aware and I see very clearly that it is aversion, I note aversion and I come back. Now maybe with all my different various aversions I have noticed something a little different, I have noticed my cousin aversion, my dog aversion, whatever else. So I have to get a bit more specific as to what type of aversion it is. When it comes back again, I realize it is my cousin aversion, I note easily "cousin aversion" and I come back. Now what if I am lost again and I look at it and think "I am not sure what this is? Is this an aversion, is it doubt, is it this, is it that?" We don't want to waste time doing this. We don't want to try to be specific about every single wandering thought we have, if we are not clear what it is. It's far better to just go, "thinking, thinking," and come back, "wandering, wandering" and come back. Being very broad when we are not sure. Because what can actually happen for a lot of people is that they start to look at their thought and think, "I wonder what this is, it could be this, it could be that." This actually creates doubt. We are stuck in doubt trying to figure something out, we have added a hindrance to the wandering thought that initially distracted us. So we want to guard against trying to be too detailed in our mental noting. We don't have to put a detailed note on every single thought that distracts us. It is quite ok to do the whole sitting period, standing or whatever and to just note "thinking, thinking" and come back, to note "wandering, wandering" and come back. We don't have to be detailed if we don't want to be.
Now, on another side it helps at times to be more specific when noting some hindrances, especially important hindrances, the stuff that comes again and again. Because noting hindrances and coming back is only one part of the practice, we can note all day long but if we come back all day long then we are not developing the practice. There are the Four Great Efforts, there is the effort to prevent, the effort to let go, the effort to develop and the effort to maintain. When we use the mental noting and just let go and come back to our meditation subject, that is fine, that is one of the Four Great Efforts. We are also developing the effort to develop in the sense of develop our meditation practice, or working on the effort to maintain our meditation practice, but we are not actually working on the effort to prevent. The mental noting in this way does not cover the effort to prevent. So how do we prevent for example thoughts of aversion. Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation is a way to prevent thoughts and aversion. But if we don't know that we have thoughts of aversion, then we may never use the Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation in particular for those kinds of thoughts. So this is where being more detailed in our mental noting helps a lot. If we really know we have aversion and maybe it is towards our cousin and so on, if we know clearly that this is a kind of thought that keeps coming and coming, then later in our Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation, it would be wonderful to bring up the thoughts of your cousin. Examine them a bit; use the D/D method with them, whatever, so that we can then work directly with the thoughts that were bothering us earlier. By doing this we are actually working to prevent those thoughts from coming again in the future. So by being more detailed in our mental noting, this can help us to know more specifically what we need to practice in order to prevent those sort of thought coming again in the future.