The important thing is only to record what I actually understand - if there was a lot of stuff that went over my head, it's a sign that I need to revisit the source material later after I have a better grasp of the fundamentals.ĭuring a weekly review session, I read through all of the journal entries and index them by subject in a physical card file. This is usually about 2/3 recording things that were presented and 1/3 random connections that came to mind. Shortly afterwards, I record my thoughts and observations in a journal as unstructured prose. I start with giving the learning material my undivided attention, whether it's a book, lecture, video, or museum. Information gets processed in several distinct stages. My system is constantly evolving as I discover what works for me and not, but it's in a pretty good place right now. In the case of notes, that's generally a future version of yourself knowing how you plan to use the notes in the future will inform their structure now. In many ways, it comes down to the standard writing adage of "know your audience". Best of all, you can actually study with cues and content in a many-to-many relationship, linking dense info like a ternary diagram to many different prompts.
Charts and non-linear content can be presented smoothly. And then you can rearrange the content for retention, not lecture-compatibility.
You can take notes fluidly, aiming at low-distraction completeness. Even if you get past all that, there's a fundamental problem with trying to organize your study material before you know what's on the next slide, and trying to organize questions after writing down the answers.Īnki or any other after-the-fact study format lets you cut past all that. Trying to force the lecture into the note format distracts from comprehension, and produces notes that are good for retention but not for learning content you didn't understand. And much lecture content is not linear, especially in the sciences, so you get diagrams that don't naturally break into "read cue, reveal content". Most lectures are not perfectly clear and sequential - they have mistakes, backtracking, and questions. In practice, the combination seems both difficult and ineffective. Obviously, the hope is to combine the two and automatically create a study tool, but I think that's usually a mistake. It seems like most things taught as note-taking methods are actually study methods. But for practical notetaking, I think their best use is after the lecture, as a way to convert "get the content down" notes into a study-friendly format. And I imagine they might probably be good for memorizing completely synthetic content like the rules of an unfamiliar game, where there's not much thought to apply. Structured systems like Cornell notes work well enough in a slow, perfectly sequential lecture, but everything works there.
If I miss something, or the professor makes a mistake, or someone asks an important question clarifying that bit 10 lines ago, or the structure of the information isn't linear, I want to be able to bounce around my notes connecting and fixing things in a way that I'll understand later.
My focus is redirected to writing everything down and ensuring I'm using the appropriate format like a stenographer, so badly that when the professor asks "Any questions? Does everyone understand this?" I don't know whether I understand - I haven't engaged my brain yet.Įven worse, I have to start wrestling with the format as soon as anything unusual happens. I've had this problem with every form of structured note-taking I've ever tried.
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