Transcription
I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years. I've coached over 25,000 learners worldwide on learning to learn, and a big part of that is note-taking. I found that the difference between a beginner and an experienced note-taker comes down to these 16 rules. So here's 13 years of no BS advice on note-taking.
Number one: Write less, think more. These are the notes that I wrote back when I was trying to enter into medical school all those years ago, and I spent hours every single day writing these notes. Most of it was a waste of time. I now spend probably a 20th of the time that I used to writing notes, and I've never been more confident in my learning. Here's the belief that needs to evaporate from your brain: writing notes does not mean you're learning. Writing notes is just an activity. There are ways of writing notes that help your brain think about the material in a certain way that helps with the learning, but there are also ways of writing notes that absolutely do not help your brain, or like you can have your brain completely turned off, and you can be writing notes for hours. But what matters is what your brain is doing and thinking and how it's processing that information while you are writing the notes. It's an active, effortful thing. If you are writing notes and you don't feel like your brain is actually actively engaged in evaluating and thinking about and processing that information, you are not learning. There isn't some secret process happening in the background that's making it all work. And so if we sort of think about the time you spend writing notes as one circle, and then you've got the time you spend on learning in another circle, there is an overlap in those Venn diagrams, but for a lot of people, and for how it used to be for me, that overlap is really, really small. Becoming a better note-taker is about making that overlap as close to just becoming a single circle as possible. So if you're writing notes and you recognize that your brain is essentially switched off, you have to realize you're wasting your time. The ideal situation you want to end up at is that you are spending most of your time thinking, processing, evaluating, organizing that information, and then you're writing your notes to help you track that thought process and to make that thinking easier. So if you're in this camp where you write a lot of notes, here's what you should do: aim to progressively write less and less. Start by just getting into the habit of reducing sentences, not writing full sentences, using more keywords, summarizing things a little bit more tightly. Start developing shorthand, use symbols, just get less time spent finger moving on the page and more time spent thinking what to even put on the page.
Number two: Use AI to save time. I remember in uni they didn't record the lectures for us, so at the beginning of every lecture all the students would go down and put their voice recorders, like lecture recorders, on the table. Well, doing that and recording it is a lot better than writing lots of notes to try to keep up. When I tell people to write less notes, one of the big problems that people have is that they're afraid they're going to miss stuff; they're afraid they're going to miss detail. You don't want to be in a position where you're using your note-taking because you need to just document everything. The only situation where you would do that is if there's a lot of information that you won't be able to review again later, like there's no other access to it, there's no recording that you can review, you're not allowed to record it yourself. Like if that is the case and you've got like one opportunity to get this information, then sure, you might want to type things up, you know, leave much more notes than you normally would. But if that's not the position you're in, don't spend your time and effort and energy writing notes just for documentation purposes. Record it, get the recording, and then chuck that recording through AI to generate you a summary. A great tip is to take a recording and then to use AI to pull out just the main ideas and generate like a single paragraph summary at the simple level, and then that gives you this really simple layman's understanding of the topic, and it's so much easier to now make sense of the more complicated technical stuff when you go through it in more detail.
Number three: Ditch the highlighter. I have a highlighter here, and and this highlighter that sits on my desk, I've been using this highlighter for like 7 years. But if you are going and buying a new highlighter like every couple months, you're definitely doing it wrong. When you highlight something, you're basically deciding that you're going to forget something important. You've made the decision that the thing you have highlighted is important enough to learn, but you are not willing to do something that allows you to learn it. Instead of spending an hour reading through stuff and highlighting all the things that you think is important to learn, just spend the time while you're reading it; take an extra 20, 30 minutes, make that hour go to an hour and a half, but actually just learn it right there on the spot. When you're studying and you see something that you feel like you would want to highlight, instead of highlighting it, just think about that process; it write some extra notes, do some extra reading, do things that help that information connect with the bigger picture, do things that give it meaning in relation to something else, form a network using that—that's what creates good memory, that's what helps you to develop a strong understanding. And you can still highlight it if you want, but the problem with the way that a lot of people use a highlighter is that it creates this illusion, like because I've highlighted a bunch of these notes, it means that okay, therefore I've kind of studied it. But again, like the Venn diagram of highlighting things versus actual learning happening in the brain, there's almost no overlap between them. I've done years of undergraduate and postgraduate study for high volumes of content, high levels of detail to remember, high levels of mastery, performed extremely well in my assessments without ever using a highlighter.
Number four: Don't copy-paste. When I say copy-paste, I'm talking about uh having someone else's notes, having something else and like something you find online, copying that and then pasting it into your notes, or even a diagram, like copying a diagram and then putting it into notes. Try to avoid doing that. Copy-pasting is like going to a gym, watching someone else work out, and then assuming that you're going to get stronger. Remember, learning is something that has to happen in the brain as a byproduct of you thinking about and organizing that information in a way; it's a very active process. When we copy-paste something, we're saying, hey, this piece of information is valuable, like this is useful to know, I want that, and so we put that into our notes. But just because it's in our notes doesn't mean that it's in our knowledge. We haven't done the workout, we haven't done the exercise, we haven't done any of the heavy lifting or thinking about it in our brain. And so again, it creates this illusion that like now my notes are getting longer, bigger, there's more info in here, we feel more safe and secure in our studying, even though our knowledge has not grown. When you see something that you feel like this is valuable enough for me to copy and paste, take a little bit longer to extract your own meaning from it, summarize it, paraphrase it, connect it with something else that you have learned, turn it into something that is truly your own that you have really evaluated. And when you do this, not only does it help you to learn that actual valuable thing and then create notes that are more personalized, that are more meaningful to you, you that immediately improve your memory and understanding, but it also ripples out through to everything else that you're learning about because every valuable piece of information that you would normally highlight or copy and paste is an opportunity to connect that to the bigger picture, so everything that you've been learning so far gets sort of reviewed every time you're thinking about how it might connect together. This younger student that I coached years ago, I remember she was so proud of her note-taking; she had a lot of attachment to writing really nice-looking notes, and she would spend like literally four or five hours a day just writing these notes. And I asked her, okay, so after these four or five hours, let's say that you set an exam, how well do you think you would do? And then she said, oh no, like I haven't really started learning it yet, like I've just written the notes. And so you never want to get to that position where you've actually spent hours doing this thing that hasn't helped your learning; there's no point. Okay, well, what about diagrams? Like surely it's okay to copy-paste a flowchart or a diagram into your notes. Even though it can be more time-consuming and you may not be bothered to try to do it, actually creating the diagram yourself is a more valuable learning opportunity than just copy-pasting it. In the act of seeing a diagram, trying to understand what you're seeing, putting it together, making sense of it to the point where you can remember it and actually almost test yourself and your ability to recreate it into your notes and then check whether it was right or wrong, that is a much more valuable learning activity than copy-pasting and just like annotating things on top. It's using a different type of learning; one is trying to create active recall opportunities and the other is creating a recognition opportunity. Recognition is basically you just look at something and ask yourself, okay, is this right or not? Like do I recognize this piece of information? Our ability to recognize is going to be sky-high; it's going to be much higher than our ability to actually recall it. And unless you're being tested purely through recognition, which probably not, you're going to need that recall ability. And so if you need to get that recall ability at some point, you you may as well just do it right now when you're first learning it and writing your notes.
Number five: Stop color-coding. When I was in medical school, I used to have this very specific color-coding system that I used where anything that was an investigation, like an x-ray or a CT scan or taking some blood test, that in my notes would always be blue, and then anything that was a treatment would always be green, and anything that was like a serious consequence or a massive risk that would be red, like you know, it all kind of makes sense, right, in a way. And if you have tried color-coding your notes before, one thing that you'll probably realize is that it's actually very difficult to remember colors. What you probably remember is that something was probably this color because you have a color-coding system that you use, so you know that because this is a treatment it probably would have been green. But when you try to actually remember, we don't really have a great memory of colors in themselves. So most of the benefit of color-coding actually comes from the fact that when we learn it and write the notes in the first place, we're forced to make a decision about what kind of information this is, and therefore we choose to color it. It's the decision-making part that provides most of the value, not the fact that it was colored. And so when I say stop color-coding, I really mean stop only color-coding or relying on color-coding. By all means, use a color-coding system in your notes; it makes it nicer to look at, it's a more organized experience, it's, you know, visually looks nicer, that's all good, like keep doing that, but don't think that the color-coding is a thing that really enhances the memory. Realize instead that it's the decision-making process that goes into categorizing and trying to put that information in the context of the the big picture that provides the benefit. And if we realize that, we can do more than just color-coding. So if you've ever had this experience where you've sat an exam and you know the answer to this, you know, you have studied it, you know it's in your notes, and when you think about it you can even remember where on the page this information is, but you just can't remember what the information actually is, this is an example of our spatial memory coming into play, and so this is actually even more powerful than color-coding. And so don't just make decisions about what color to make the notes, also make decisions about where on your page you're going to put put this information. So, for example, if you've got three different concepts that are related to each other, you can make the decision to put those three concepts in a similar area of the page, even if they might have been, you know, three, four pages apart on a textbook. You can see how making an active decision about where on my notes should I put this information is actually forcing us to evaluate a single piece of information against that bigger picture; it helps us make these connections, it helps us fit it somewhere that it really belongs and form a network. And so the benefit is we're we're improving our memory and our understanding through that thought process alone, and we're also gaining the advantage of a spatial memory, so we've got now multiple memory cues to help us remember this. And then you can also color-code on top. Another quick one is thickness of lines and size of text. You could decide that this concept or this group of concepts is more important than this other one, and so you distinctly make this larger and the other one smaller, or you might say this thing is related to here, so you put an arrow going through it, but you might decide that this other relationship with another group of concepts is more important, and so that arrow becomes much bigger, much thicker, and so so you're now creating many more visual cues for your memory while also putting yourself in a position where you're forced to make these value judgments and decisions, which promotes deeper thinking, better processing, and therefore better memory, better performance.
Number six: Use nonlinear notes. If you're following the advice so far, you can see that writing notes, like typing them out, makes a lot of these strategies more difficult or a lot more time-consuming, and that's because knowledge fundamentally exists in networks; that's how our memory is organized. Something stays in our memory because it fits into the network or schema, as sometimes it's called in the research. And when knowledge does not exist in the network or in a schema, then our brain finds it irrelevant and will prune that information; it will prune it very efficiently, sometimes within minutes. That's why you can read an entire page, get to the bottom of the page, maybe have even written notes for it, but literally like 5 minutes later you just forgot what you spent, you know, 20 minutes reading through on that page. That's because our brain is very, very good at pruning irrelevant information, and in fact it's that ability that helps keep our brain alive; otherwise there'll be this extreme energy-consuming organ just trying to hold on to every single piece of information that it's hit with every single day. Like it's an important function of the brain, and you're not going to be able to fight that; like it's biologically programmed in. So when we use nonlinear notes, we're actually leaning into a biological tendency instead of fighting against it. We're saying, hey, you want to like, hey brain, you want to organize this information in a network, you want to create a schema out of it; that's how it's going to make sense to you. I'm going to help you to do that by representing that and thinking in networks as well through my note-taking, as opposed to thinking about things linearly and then getting your brain to somehow like almost subconsciously piece things together. And some people can uh subconsciously piece things together pretty well, and and those people are usually the ones that are like just more naturally intelligent, uh but you can also just train your ability to do that as well, and you can make it a more active process. Using nonlinear notes is also the key to reducing how volume-heavy the notes are, and I'll give you just a really, really quick example. Let's say I write some notes that look like this: [Diagram omitted]. So when you look at this, it looks fairly simple, but if you were to try to express what's happening here in sentences and through linear notes, then it would sound something like A leads to B when C and D combine to create E, and then E influences A. So if you look at that like as a series of words and then you compare that to this, you can see that this image is actually much faster and easier to process what's going on, even though it's actually the same information being communicated, and it scales too. Like, for example, if we start introducing uh a few more concepts, S T S here, and now it looks like this: [Diagram omitted]. Okay, it's getting a little bit more complicated, but it's still much more intuitive to follow than adding on like an additional thing, like however, once E influences A, A then goes back to reinforce E, but only in the presence of F, which is interchangeable with G. You know, you can see like, and then when you review the notes, reading through that and then like mentally trying to process that, it just takes so much longer and so much more effort. In fact, studies say that it takes about 40,000 times longer to process than looking at something that's more visual; that's just because our brain is much better at uh processing visual information than um just just written words. And really, when you read it, what you're trying to do mentally is actually pretty much reconstruct this in your brain. So you can see if you just skip the part where it's linear to begin with and you just construct it to look like this from the first place, then when you review your notes, when you think about it, when you test yourself, it's all just very aligned; it's just making a lot easier for your brain to hold on to and understand that information. So if you are a heavy linear note-taker and you want to transition to being able to do more nonlinear note-taking, then I recommend doing it in steps. So you would go from writing just less words, more shorthand, reducing your sentences, more bullet points, then start adding a few arrows in things, connecting ideas in your linear notes. So okay, maybe this bullet point is connected to this bullet point; you're just creating tiny little flows. And then compress that down even more, just start working with keywords, just main ideas, and create little mini-maps within your notes. Once you get more comfortable with that, expand that out, try to just get more and more of that information through a nonlinear note-taking method, and then naturally at some point you just feel like you don't really need the linear notes anymore, cuz you realize it's just not providing you any value. By the way, if you are getting value from these tips and you're enjoying these, then you may also want to check out my free weekly newsletter. Every week I send you more tips and advice and techniques on studying and note-taking and productivity to give you even more support. The emails only take a few minutes to read each, but they aim to save you tens of hours through becoming a better learner. The newsletter is completely free to sign up to, so if you're interested, I'll leave a link in the description for you. Now on to the next note-taking tip.
Number seven: Try the Cornell method. The Cornell note-taking method is this quite popular note-taking method that came out of Cornell University, uh and for for good reason, uh the idea is that you just take a single page and you divide it up into these different sections. On one side you have something called cues, on the bottom you have a summary, and then on the right column you've got your sort of main body of notes. And the idea is that you write your normal sets of notes, and then in the cues you actually leave yourself like interesting prompts and questions about what you're writing notes on, and then at the bottom you summarize the stuff above it, so you you create a synthesize summary of it. And I'm actually a fan of this method; I don't think it's a good end goal for writing notes, but I think it's a phenomenal transitionary step that helps you to go from being a more passive note-taker, writing lots of notes, and putting you a little bit more in the driver's seat, forcing you to engage your brain more critically and really think about and process that information. You can also combine this with what I was saying before in terms of transitioning from a linear to
A nonlinear style: You can start adding certain nonlinear aspects within your notes, or you can even make your summaries at the bottom of the page into little mini mind maps as well. Now again, this is not the end goal. You do want to get to a point where just doing it the nonlinear way is effective enough for you, because the main benefit of the cor now note-taking method is not in this part, which is writing your notes; it is in being curious, exploring the information, connecting things together, and being able to actually produce the summary. Like, that's actually where the value of the method comes in. So the less of this stuff you can get away with, and the more of thinking, summarizing, synthesizing, and exploring the cues—thinking of these questions—the more of that you can spend your time doing, the closer that Venn diagram gets in terms of the time you spend on note-taking versus the time you spend on learning.
Number eight: Use digital free-form note-taking apps. I want you to imagine trying to rearrange a warehouse—like a warehouse full of packages. Let's say you've got a package that needs to be sent over to Berlin over here, but then you've got another one that needs to be sent to Australia over here, and you're thinking, okay, well, I'd like to move all the stuff that's being sent to Australia in the pile with all the other Australian packages, and I want to move this Berlin one, you know, over here alongside the other European countries. Like, let's say that you want to organize your warehouse this way, but imagine that every time you want to reorganize the packages in your warehouse, you have to demolish the warehouse and then build it again from scratch and then fill in all the packages again. This is what it's like trying to learn effectively while you're note-taking in a fixed linear set of notes. When you normally write notes in a fixed way, especially if it's linear, you create this structure of ideas that connect together in a certain way. And so if you decide, hey, actually, I think this idea connects more with this thing, and I'd rather place it over here, and I connect it through this thing, and I actually think this part here that I wrote before is incorrect and I want to revise that or add even more detail into it, you have to actually pretty much like write the notes again, which is fine if you've got plenty of time, but if you are running short on time, that in itself is not only a huge time waste, but just the thought that you need to do that and like rebuild it again can be enough to make you feel like you just can't be bothered, and then you're missing this valuable, incredibly important learning opportunity. But when you use a digital app for this, you just write the notes, and then you realize you want to move it around; you can delete it, or you can just like lasso it—like literally move it somewhere else and like connect it again. And it is a small thing, but if you can afford to get yourself a tablet with a writing stylus, then it is legitimately a valuable investment. And there are many things that are in the learning space that I would say that if you just put money into it, it just immediately provides you value, but using a digital note-taking app that is free-form with infinite canvas that lets you really move the ideas around is very valuable. A lot of note-taking apps on tablet are like—it's it's basically the same as paper but just digital—like it's you've still got an A4 size, you've still got these lines on the page; the only difference is that like it's infinite scrolling, for example—useless. Don't use that. I don't have any of them installed. Even if those are the apps that you use, it probably means that there's something else in terms of the advice I've given about note-taking that you're not following. And the good thing is that if you do end up getting an iPad, and this is not a plug for Apple by the way, but uh, Apple does actually have native to it an app called Freeform, and Freeform is an infinite canvas nonlinear note-taking app, and I've played around with it enough to tell you that it is legitimately a very good option, especially given that it just comes bundled with your tablet to begin with. In fact, I even had the privilege of being invited in by Apple uh as one of the early users to give my feedback on the app and how useful I think it is.
Number nine: Zoom out often. Let me draw something for you. [Music] So I used to be like kind of a little bit into my art, and as you can see, my skills have not exactly improved by much uh over the last several years, but one thing that I noticed is that when I drew these faces, I would get really detailed, and I'd like zoom into things a lot, and I'd like add a bunch of this detail. Like, for example, let's say we go down to the nose, and I'd create like what I think is like a nice-looking like nostril, and then I'd create like what I think is this, you know, like a nice-looking sort of smile, and I'd create like what what I think would be a nice-looking eye, and then I'd zoom out, and I'd realize it just looks terrible—like the proportions are out of whack—like this, what is this eye even doing? And the reason I'm showing you this terrible drawing is to show you that there are a lot of things that you can't detect when you're zoomed in too close, and this is especially true when it comes to learning. Because when you think about learning something, especially if it's detailed, dense, uh, difficult conceptual information, a lot of your effort is spent on really trying to understand what it's talking about, and often an easier way of understanding it is to actually find the things related to it that you already understand that you can connect it to. And so when I say zoom out often, it means that yes, spend time going into the details, spend time understanding it and wrapping your head around it—do that fine—but every now and again, zoom out and just connect what you've been working on with the bigger picture. Is there somewhere else that this should fit? Is this similar to anything else? Does it connect or influence or is influenced by some other concept? And surprisingly often, very important connections and influences and ways of understanding it that would have made it so much easier for you and would help you to hold on to and retain this information are not taught to you outright; it's not mentioned in the textbook; the lecturer never said that. But when you zoom out, you give yourself the opportunity to look for these additional connections, and it means that by the time you finish the study session, you actually end up with a set of knowledge that you feel really comfortable with—like you see how it's all organized, you see how it fits together, you feel confident, and you just feel like it's locked into your memory—as opposed to getting to the end of a study session and feeling, man, I covered so much stuff; it's overwhelming; I hope I don't forget this, but you know, you are already starting to forget it.
Number 10: Emphasize the important points. Before I talked about how you shouldn't copy-paste diagrams into your notes, and one of the reasons that you really don't need to is because diagrams that you draw into your notes don't actually have to be textbook accurate. The reason is because your brain doesn't remember things with perfect accuracy anyway. So let me give you an example. So let's say that this is a diagram, okay? This is a diagram of a very poorly drawn diagram of—not an egg—uh, is actually meant to be a cell. So if this is a diagram that you draw, and this is, you know, let's just say it looks like this in your textbook, when you remember this and you recall it, you may redraw it and recall something that looks like this, okay? And you might look at this, and this is what you recall. So if we compare what we have been able to remember and recall from the diagram with the actual original diagram, you can see that there are some subtle differences. For example, I've missed this one, I've missed this, I've missed this, and actually, did you notice that there are these tiny little bumps on this? So you can see that these are very small subtle details, but because our brain is not remembering things like perfectly like a robot, it means that the things that are more likely to be forgotten should be more exaggerated. And so we can know that it's not in reality like this, but we can use it as a memory aid by exaggerating the diagram. So an exaggerated version of this diagram where I am focusing on these high-risk areas that I might forget might look like this. So now you can see that it's completely not factually accurate. I mean, I've turned those bumps into little houses that sit on grass; I've turned those tiny little things up here into like angry caterpillars, and I turn that small little hole up here into like a like a vortex. So you can see I've actually made the decision that these things are important enough to remember and high-risk of forgetting, so I've overcompensated by making them less factually accurate but more memorable. And so as long as I remember that it's not literally a house or an angry caterpillar or a vortex, it's a memory cue for helping remember the thing that is actually accurate. And we can even do this when we write like nonlinear mind maps as well; we can actually use that spatial memory and that visual coding to enhance our ability to remember something. So for example, let's say we've got A coming here leading to B, and then off of A there are three points. So I could write those three points like this. Alternatively, I could represent those three points—let's just do that again—I could represent those three points like this. There's no real big difference; one of them is bullet points underneath the A, the other one is like arrows coming from underneath the A; they seem roughly the same. But let's start adding a few more points. So let's say coming off from B there are two points. So now we've got B with two points. Now I want you to think about being able to remember this structure that we've created right here versus really emphasizing that A has three versus B having two, and instead of using numbers, we're using spatial arrangement to represent that. So that might look something like this. So if you look at this one, the shape itself becomes more distinctive, and it means that we might remember this top one and the the bottom one, but then we just—we know there's something here; we know there's a third one because the shape is like that; we remember there was something there, and then that can help us to review it and recall it and eventually perform with that knowledge, whereas if we had the former one, you'd be forgiven if you remember two of these and then you just kind of forgot that there's a third one because it just all looks the same.
Number 11: Write questions. I remember my first few lectures in university and thinking the volume of information being thrown at me in this one-hour lecture is like what would normally have taken me like two to three weeks during high school. And the reason I'm telling you this is because there is a strategy for dealing with high volumes of dense information. There are basically two decisions that you can make when you're in that position. Decision number one: I'm going to try to get all of it down; write my notes on it; like just collect as much of that information. That decision is saying I'm foregoing trying to learn it now in favor of setting up myself later to learn it. And again, sometimes you have to do that because you don't have access to the material later, and so like this is your one and only shot. But the other part that you can take is that you can try to engage in this process of like fitting it into the big picture and evaluating and thinking about how it all connects together and like making sense of the overarching topic as a network and realize that it's too fast for you to finish those thoughts and explore those things right now. So you start exploring them, and then you write questions for yourself to prompt your studying later. So I might be sitting there in a lecture, and I'm listening to a bunch of stuff, and I have this feeling like this thing and this thing could be connected, but I don't have time right now to think about it too much or to really explore that. So that becomes a question: Is this and this connected, and if so, how? And then I'd write that down separately. So now after this lecture, I would have a dedicated study session where I'm starting off with the questions that I've created, and then answering those questions is what helps me to figure out how it all connects together, and then I can build my network and build my schema. Now if you are going to write questions, I want you to remember that not all questions are equal. Some questions are less valuable than others, and often the less valuable questions are the ones that ask on just a single isolated fact. Like creating the question, what's the definition of this word? That's a very isolated specific question. That question is not going to do much for you because how does that help you to form a network and build a relationship? Because you could ask the question of how does this relate to this other concept, and in trying to answer that, you'd figure out the definition anyway. So you can see we're getting the benefit of the specific definition, but also how that word fits in with something else. The definition has meaning; it has relevance; it has importance; that creates much more structure in our memory.
Number 12: Avoid flow charts. A lot of the time when people start writing nonlinear notes, they actually start writing flowcharts instead of mind maps, and there's actually a really big difference between them. Let's say I create a flow of knowledge that looks like this. So here, this is a flowchart. Now it's nonlinear; it's connected to each other. What's the problem? The problem is that it creates a very high dependency. It's kind of like that drawer-on-your-back party game. You get a bunch of people in a line, and the person at the very front of the line uh is shown a picture of something, and so that person will turn around, and then on the back of the person that's next in line they'll draw the picture. And so this person has to like figure out what's being drawn based on their sensation of their own back, and then they will then draw on the back of the next person, and then you figure out what picture you end up with at the very end. And usually after like five people just drawing on backs, the person at the very end like ends up drawing like a muffin, and then the initial picture was like a spaceship. And this is basically what we are doing with our memory if we do flowcharts. If the only reason you remember E is because it's led to by D, which is led to by C, which is led to by B, which starts from A, it means that any point of failure along this line means that you also diminish the memory of what comes after that. So you want to avoid this by looking for more lateral connections and then grouping these ideas together, so there's less of a chain. So for example, this thing, I could say A and B are kind of doing the same thing, and then C and D are sort of doing the same thing—like a similar purpose. So I might call this Alpha and Beta for this example, and I'd say Alpha leads to Beta, which leads to E, and Alpha is composed of A and B, and then Beta is composed of C and D. So you can see that just by grouping the information and looking for these similarities, it reduces how much dependency there is on this chain, and we might also decide that, hey, actually, you know, Alpha is influenced by something else and you know somewhere else on the map, and then we can start creating even more of these kind of lateral connections between other ideas, and so it goes from a linear flowchart to a real network and a web of knowledge.
Number 13: Apply the 24-hour rule. The 24-hour rule says that you should review the notes that you have written within 24 hours of first writing them. This is mostly for when the first time you wrote the notes is also the first time you properly try to learn it. The reason this works is because memory has a very fast decay curve. This means that something that you learn is forgotten relatively quickly in a pretty short period of time, and if you're able to consolidate and re-encode that information before it decays, it's strengthened, and it decays more slowly afterwards. So let's say that you spent one hour learning something on a Monday, but you don't review it again until the next Monday. Well, there's been a week gap, and if you've forgotten let's say 50 to 70% of it, then you now need to spend let's say another hour—hour or 45 minutes—relearning and re-encoding the stuff that you already forgot. So now for that one-hour material, you'll spent almost two hours to study it, whereas if you use the 24-hour rule, you might spend one hour learning it on the Monday, and then on the Tuesday you review it again. Now because you've only forgotten 10% of it since then, you only need 5–10 minutes to plug those gaps. So now when it comes to next Monday, instead of having forgotten 50 to 70% of it, you might have only forgotten 20% of it. But obviously this cumulates, so you're not just learning one hour on a Monday; you're learning like three hours on Monday and then three hours on Tuesday and then three hours on Wednesday. So if the future version of you always needs to spend another one or two hours to relearn the things that you always forgot, you're just going to get progressively further and further behind and more and more overwhelmed. Now one thing I will say is that the value of the 24-hour rule and how much it helps with your memory and how much time it saves you in the long run strongly depends on the way that you learned it in the first place. If you learned it really terribly, you didn't follow any of the other tips that I've given, and all you do is the 24-hour rule, after a week you will still have forgotten 50 to 70% of it. If that's the situation, the problem is not how often you're reviewing it; the problem is how you're actually trying to put it into your memory in the first place.
Number 14: Write notes by topics, not by lectures. Imagine you're building a house, but you can only build it one section at a time. Like you start with the master bedroom, and then you just build it—like completely—the walls, you do the paint—like it's completed, but like the entire rest of the house isn't there. And then you go and build the kitchen; you complete that. And then after each of these segments is completed, then you try to like bring them together and like close them together, and maybe you realize like you built the kitchen in the wrong place; you got to like relocate the entire kitchen, and then everything breaks and cheddars, and you know, it's a complete mess. There's a reason we don't build houses that way, and it's the same reason why you shouldn't learn that way. As someone who has lectured, when we think about a lecture, the number one thing that we start with is the time constraint: How much time do I have to cover this topic? So it's not that the topic is innately divided into these one-hour conceptual blocks; the topic is actually all connected together—that's why it's called topic and not like two or three different topics. And there are meaningful, valuable connections between the different lectures; the only issue is that there isn't enough time in a single lecture to go over all of them. And so if you start writing your notes based on lectures rather than based on topics, and so you've got a set of notes for lecture one and then a set of notes for lecture two and then a set of notes for lecture three, then you're creating an artificial division between parts of the topic. And the reason you don't want to do that is because there could be something that you learn in lecture three that allows you to understand something from lecture one in such a way that it makes more sense and it has more of a place to fit. You don't want to forego that connection opportunity.
Because the notes for lecture 3 existed on a separate page to lecture one, so how do you bring it all together into a single set of notes when you are actually taught it segment by segment? Well, that's advice number 15: create a template, AKA do some pre-study. Think back to the house analogy. In what kind of situation do you think you would end up building a house room by room without really thinking about how it all connects together and then later being forced to just somehow make it work? Well, one scenario is that you built the house and you started building it without a blueprint.
Pre-study or priming is one way that you can give yourself that blueprint. So that even if you don't know exactly in detail everything that you're going to learn and how it all connects together, you at least have more of an idea about what types of things to expect in the entire topic, and you can at least make guesses and hypotheses about how one concept might relate to something else that you haven't learned yet. So what this looks like is: before a week of lectures, you just spend 20 minutes going through the most important things in all of the lectures at a very superficial level. You just map out how you think the most important ideas might be connected together, and you give yourself this frame, a skeleton--this is the template. And now that you have this template, you can go into that first lecture and elaborate on, you can build on that same set of notes. And because as you're filling information in, you have an awareness of the other stuff that you haven't covered yet, you can start thinking, "Okay, maybe this thing will fit into somewhere over here; maybe it could connect over here." And that's what makes it easier to create these topic-wide connections even if you're learning at one lecture at a time.
Number 16: Turn your weak points into flashcards. If you follow all the pieces of advice that I've given you so far, then you will be able to create a set of nonlinear, connected notes. And the beauty of doing this is that it becomes a visual representation of how it's organized in your mind, which means you can look at your notes and look for areas that seem less connected. There could be a stray piece of information over in the corner somewhere that's only got one random sort of tenuous connection going to it. That is going to become a weak point in your memory, cuz there's less memory cues, there's less areas that's relevant; it doesn't fit into the big picture as strongly. If your brain's going to prune something, is it going to prune the central idea that six other things are connected to and it's a prerequisite for this other major concept, or is it going to prune that random little detail that's just barely connected to this other concept way in the periphery? Those pieces of information are more high-risk. And if it's important enough for you to know, put those into flashcards. And this is also the way of using flashcards that helps you to be confident that you're not going to miss anything. All the little details that you feel like, "Oh, I'm not sure if I'm going to remember that," that's fine; that's what goes into your flashcards. But by doing all the other stuff and writing notes in a more targeted way, with more of the time spent writing notes creates learning, it means that you're not in that position where everything you learn is something you think you're going to forget. And as with any skill, all of this stuff you will get better as you keep practicing more.
So that's it. This has been your Nobs note-taking advice. And if you liked this longer style of video, then you may also like this one where I share 13 years of even more studying and productivity advice. Check it out, and thanks for watching.