# Note-taking **See Also:** [[Productivity]]. >[!summary] >Taking notes is essential to [[learning]], thinking, and recording information for future use. The human brain is terrible at that sort of thing, so finding a way to externalize our thinking is very valuable. - General Tips for taking notes (based on [Note Taking Hacks for Study Success - Karen Tui Boyes Speaker](https://karentuiboyes.com/2020/01/note-taking-hacks-for-study-success/)): - Write your notes **in your own words**. - Write with pen on paper, per [[MO14]] and [[Sak21]]. - Listen more, take notes later, but not much later. - If the instructor provides copies slides or lecture recordings, focus on listening intently during delivery, but set aside significant time soon after the lecture to review the slides/recordings and make careful notes. - Use diagrams, flow-charts, concept maps, and symbols. - Develop your own shorthand of symbols. - Review and clean up your notes **the same day you wrote them**. - Part of the review process must include *summarizing* your notes to help identify the most essential points. - Summarizing also helps embed information in long-term memory. - Don't just write what the instructor says. Add your own thoughts, comments, and questions. - It may be helpful to divide the page into columns, and keep your own notes separate from those taken from the instructor's presentation. See also the [Cornell Method](https://medium.goodnotes.com/study-with-ease-the-best-way-to-take-notes-2749a3e8297b). - Prefer more notes to less. - Don't worry about whether a particular point will be useful. Better safe than sorry. You can decide later, during your review, whether a particular point is worth keeping. - Never "delete" a note. - If you're confident a particular note is irrelevant, just run a single line through it, so that you can still read the note. You never know - you may be mistaken in thinking it's irrelevant. - Explain the topic to someone else, not in that course, and answer their questions. - The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. - Vendors of stationery products: - [[Vendors Pens & Paper]]. - [[Vendors Paper Notebooks]]. - [[Vendors Binders, Organizers, Planners]]. - Digital Note-making - [[A Tale of Three Note Apps]] compares Evernote, Notion, and Roam Research. %% Notes to absorb ```dataview list from [[]] and !"Templates" and !outgoing([[]]) sort file.name asc ``` %%