How I take notes - Tips for efficient note taking that speeds up learning

Key Takeaways

uh note-taking there are so many ways of taking notes out there some are so aesthetic and pretty that they pretty much look like art pieces and others are just so brilliantly organized and detailed you can pretty much just publish and resell in my case though what i care about are just two things one is using note taking as a way to speed up my learning process and two is being efficient but still creating a way for future tina to easily re-access the information which is what i call creating a framework of references in this video i'll first talk about the stationary that i use then i'll go through my pre-note-taking techniques that prime the brain and help maximize information retention next i'll go through my simple note-taking system where instead of writing down every single thing i focus only on writing down high-level concepts full examples and making my own insights and connections finally i will explain how i do active recall which is a scientifically backed learning technique that involves retrieving information from your brain because the actual act of retrieving information strengthens the connections in your brain and accelerates your learning process i have to recall something i do before finishing up my note-taking session as you'll see in the video i actually build in several different efficient learning principles within the note-taking process itself to help accelerate my learning while taking notes at the same time two birds with one stone or as i like to say minimize effort and maximize outcome my favorite art that's good stationery what i use is a notebook a pencil and a brightly colored pen i write my notes by hand because it helps me retain the information much better and it's easier to draw diagrams some studies have shown that students who take notes by hand do better on exams and those that type their notes but there are other studies that also report not detecting a difference at all so i'm not going to sit here and proclaim that taking notes by hand is definitely superior but i personally do prefer it on a side note though i have been thinking about getting an ipad for a while since i would like to be able to take handwritten notes without having a bunch of physical notebooks but i haven't been able to justify the price to myself yet so for now we're still sticking with handwritten on paper when it comes to notebooks i'm not particularly picky it just has to be lined or gridded where else i start writing like this i also prefer binded notebooks where else i'll lose all the pages and i just not really organized enough to consistently put the notes in a binder and finally i prefer notebooks with either small spirals or non-spiral because i'm left-handed if you're left-handed you know what i mean by that for writing utensils i prefer writing with pencils so i can easily erase and avoid having to use white out or cross outfits i also use a brightly colored pen for emphasis so that i can easily distinguish sections when i need to reference my notes in the future i'm not too picky about what kind of pencil and pen i use as long as they work well pre-note-taking if i'm not starting a brand new topic i usually start with doing a quick review of my earlier notes to refresh myself on the topic i then do a learning technique called priming priming is a learning technique where you expose yourself to the material that you're going to be covering before actually learning it there's been research that shows that priming yourself helps with better retention of information after you learn it the way i do this is really simple i just quickly skim through the next segment i'll be taking notes on and taking a mental note of the major topics that will be covered note-taking i think it's important to have a consistent system for two reasons the first one is so that future you can easily reference the notes when you need to review your notes the second reason is so that you don't waste a lot of cognitive energy just trying to decide on how to structure your notes every single time i have a very simple system where i write the title and underline with the color pen to make it stand out then for each subtopic i made a dashed line with the colored pen before writing the subtopic i also always leave one side of the notes blank which i use for scratch paper and a place to write down more stuff if i ever want to come back in the future and expand on a topic for the actual note taking itself i don't try to write down every single thing because that would just take way too long and doesn't actually help you retain information well instead i focus on high level concepts making my own insights and connections and using full examples let me explain each in detail focusing on high level concepts i focus on understanding what is being presented and only take notes on the high level concepts of the material instead of writing down every single thing when i think there's a lot of details in a section that might be useful in the future i make references to where the material can be found like the page number of a book or maybe the title and timestamp of a video lecture this is so that in case futuretina wants to come back and revisit the details she'll know where to find it this is what i call a framework of references and it's quite efficient while still allowing myself to easily access additional information if i ever need it let me give you a real example from my notes these are my notes for market structure since i'm learning training right now from rainier too here i have notes about the four different market structures and three different types of trends with just a couple phrases and slash word diagrams for each i also make a note of the video title and timestamp in case i want to come back and reference it later focus on making my own insights and connections i try to write down my own insights and connections while taking notes instead of passively consuming information and just writing down whatever the teacher or textbook says this is a learning technique that's about learning information from different perspectives and making parallels and analogies doing this deepens your understanding of the knowledge and helps with not forgetting since it makes you actively think about the information and incorporate it into your existing repertoire of knowledge which in turn strengthens the neural connections that encodes information in your brain i honestly forgot where i came across this first and i kind of forgot what it's called too but it is a technique that's covered in the course called learning how to learn by barbara oakley if you want to check that out let me show you how i do this in my notes continue on the topic of the four different market structures and three different types of trends although the teacher here didn't explicitly explain this i noticed that the way that the market structures flow into each other usually isn't sudden you can often see that a trending or declining market gradually becomes accumulation and distribution by having each pullback becoming larger and larger so i made a quick note about this i hope that makes sense to you even if you don't know anything about this particular topic or the jargon that i'm using here it's basically just making my own insights and connections from the information that's being presented full examples i like to use full examples when i can because it allows all the pieces of information that's being learned to all kind of come together in a concrete way this is especially great if you're taking notes about something that has a lot of moving parts or involves calculations let me give you a couple examples different from my trading example earlier and since i was a pharmacology major in college let's give an example about drugs drugs generally have pretty complex pathways after entering the body where it often goes through some sort of transformation the drug binds to specific molecules in your body these molecules then go and cause complex downstream effects like for example you have this drug and it binds to protein a for example and that activates protein a and that causes it to produce say like product x and then product x will go and activate protein b and protein c and then protein b will go and bind to protein d and then protein c will bind back to protein a so you see it can get really really complex lots of moving parts having the full example of the drug pathway helps me piece together the information in my brain instead of just trying to memorize what happens to protein a and what that binds to and then going and trying to memorize what happens to protein b and what that binds to having a full example of these interactions helped me a lot in both absorbing the information and understanding the concept as a whole another example is say you're taking notes about physics say like kinematics or something i would take notes of a full example solution of a relatively complex kinematic problem maybe like this one where you have to convert the units and then use a couple different kinematic formulas to solve i'm actually going to go and solve the problem because that's kind of that's not really the point but basically if you do a full example that involves multiple steps it not only helps you understand how the information interacts with each other but also in the future when you need to yourself do the calculations like for an exam or something you would have had practice approaching more complex questions from start to finish not to mention if you ever need to come back and reference your notes in the future having this full example here will help you quickly refresh your memory instead of having to kind of like sit there and try to piece together all the destroyed pieces of information so there you have it when i take notes i focus on high level concepts making my own insights and connections and using full examples by the way if you're the kind of person that tends to feel a lot of fomo and thinks everything is important and try to write everything down here's a tip listen to video lectures at somewhere between 1.5 to 3 times the speed and don't pause too often so you're forced to only write down to important stuff or if you're studying from a text set a time limit for how much time you spend taking notes or a page limit for how much you would write down for each section post note ticket so after i finish a section i leave some room for when i do the learning technique of active recall which is what i do when i'm done taking notes for the day i do active recall by saying everything that i covered in my notes for each section in my own words while trying to not peek in my notes i then jot down a few summary points at the end of each section there are so many studies that show the effectiveness of active recall so i highly encourage you to dig around some more if you're interested in learning more i think it's pretty cool that the active recall session also doubles the recap or summary at the end which is also super helpful for when i'm looking through my notes again i can just look at the summary and see if it's information that i'm interested in pretty quickly without having to read through all the notes in that section two words with one stone again all right that's it for this video i hope you found the video helpful and don't forget to give the video a thumbs up if you did i'll see you guys in the next video where live stream