How to take great notes
We’ve been practicing our note taking and gif making, here’s some stuff we’ve learned.
Preparation = good, you need the right tools
The first step to taking great notes is using tools that suit you: maybe you love scribbling away with a biro and a small notebook, maybe you prefer bright colours and lots of blank paper, or maybe you want to sit with your laptop or tablet and type out your notes straight into an app. Try out different tools, and find the ones that make note-taking not just easy, but enjoyable. That way you’re far more likely to keep going.
Transcribing hurts, so keep it simple
Whether you’re sat watching a video, or in a lecture hall, it’s easy to just frantically try and scribble down everything the speaker is saying. The result is usually smudged, nonsensical notes and a sore hand. You end up focusing on transcribing instead of learning. Try and filter what the speaker is saying, listen for key points, or jot down things to research further. If you really do need to take down a lot of what they’re saying, try and use abbreviations and simplify sentences, it will help ensure you’re actually understanding what’s being said.
Highlighters are your friends
Once you’ve finished writing your notes don’t abandon them – now is the time to have a proper sift through. You might highlight the most important parts, or highlight the parts to research further, or highlight key people to remember – the choice is yours. If you find yourself accidentally highlighting entire paragraphs try setting yourself a limit: if you’ve taken 5 pages of notes limit yourself to highlighting 2 lines per page, that gives you 10 key things to remember.
Summaries are really useful
The process of turning notes into knowledge is a bit like distillation. You start out with raw material, you sift through it choosing the most important parts and finally you condense those parts into something usable. This last part is key, it’s here you have the chance to turn your notes into something uniquely useful to you. For instance you might summarise a set of notes in 6 notecards, writing one keyword to jog your memory about an important concept, formula or figure. But that keyword might be something that only you find amusing, or memorable, about the subject, or it might be something entirely random.
**BONUS TIPS FREE OF CHARGE***
Get organised – having great notes is useless if you can’t find them. Try and organise your notes in a system you can easily use, whether on the computer or in folders.
Play to your strengths – prefer learning by listening? Record yourself reading your notes. Prefer visual learning? Get artistic and draw out concepts and illustrations. There’s no one way to take good notes, it’s about what suits you.
Write down any questions – even if your questions are tangential you can use these to expand your knowledge, or to test yourself later.
If you want to put all this useful stuff into action, remember we have loads of courses to try!
