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I do something similar. My method is always to try and fit everything I need for an exam on a single A5 sheet of paper, as if I could take it into the exam with me. The first 5 or so drafts I'd never be able to fit enough on, so with each iteration I make the writing smaller, or work out a pictorial code, or condense my explanation of a method to squeeze on as much as I could. By the time I've finally managed to fit it all on one side of paper, I've thought about how to compact the information in so many different ways that I could recite everything on the paper without it. Repeat that process over the course of 3 or 4 days with plenty of sleep, and it's stuck.

I've got all of the final renditions of each sheet I've ever done filed away. It's always quite entertaining showing people my notes, because they're a completely indecipherable mess of words, numbers, cryptograms, symbols, scribbles and colours. Imagine a sort of Chthonian cult literature. It makes me look insane - but I can still go back to ones from years ago and know what it all means.

I relate to your comment the most in any discussion about notes. Although I don't follow your method always, since I know I will throw out my notes and never see them again, sometimes when I was bored I would do my notes intentionally cyphered and illegible. I wrote over every sheet fully two or three times, in the nooks and crannies and in the spaces between words. Somehow the learning outcome was better because my boredom was lifted.

I used that same method throughout college. I think I might have read about it somewhere.

This was my study mode throughout HS & (somewhat) through college. It really does work, even though I had no idea why I started that way. And my final editions were just as indecipherable to the outside world.

I started when one of my teachers allowed us to take said A5 sheet of paper into my A-Level mock exams. All the class did well, as we had this lifeline. Next exam we were given the same instruction but this time, unbeknownst to us until we walked in, our paper was taken away from us at the door. We were absolutely furious; until the teacher later showed us that not only were our marks all but identical to that of the exam where we had the paper, they were significantly higher than the exams we had before the whole cheat sheet debacle. Basically he tricked us into revising effectively. It's a technique that's stayed with me to this day.

Devious and effective. I approve of this. :-)

I did something a bit different- at the end of the term, I would rewrite my notes. A v2.0 of them. In the process I was going over all of my previous notes, but by that point I had a much greater understanding of how all the things fit together, which details were important, etc... and my new set of notes, which were also not written under duress of trying to keep up with the teacher, were much better written.

The second set was always much cleaner, much better organized, and much more deeply ingrained in my brain.

As an aside, when I went to college, my first semester Computer Science teacher was vehemently anti-notetaking in class. He would chastise people who were taking notes either on their laptops, or in notebooks, saying "The slides will be online!" I really struggled that first semester, and found it hard to pay attention, hard to retain the information, hard to even understand what he was talking about, and it took me awhile to realize just how powerful the act of taking notes was.

Oh, this is a brilliant idea that seems so obvious as I’m here reading it, but had never occurred to me before. Yes! I’ve always felt that my biggest problem in learning is that I never do anything to really verify I have a truly solid grasp of the material. I read, take notes, convince myself I have some level of understanding, and pat myself on the back for achieving that much. But I’ve got a feeling that if I’d overcome my laziness enough to read, take notes, reflect on my notes, then write a more polished version 2.0 of them as you mentioned, I would definitely take my conceptual understanding to a much deeper level. Thank you for this!

+1 on the v2.0 note creation - I did the same thing consistently throughout my CS program and it worked very well for me.

I used the new notes as a kind of optimized cheat sheet during test preparation - rapidly reviewing theory in my head and cross checking. I would do this for some strategically chosen homework assignments as well - and explore slight modifications to these assignments to see how answers might change.

Many years later - I sometimes refer to the notes to refresh my mind on theory I feel I'm rusty on.

Instead of throwing out my notes, I tend to "refactor" them multiple times, condensing them down to the bare minimum. By the time I get them to that point, I no longer need them. I also tend to utilize multiple mediums: first note taking is writte; then I condense them to a digital format; I print that off and highlight, work in the margins, etc.;I will sometimes rewrite them a final time, depending on difficulty of the material.

I had a workflow similar to this. I took all notes by hand (pretty sure laptop wasn't a viable option in 1993, anyway) and then typed them out later. During the course of studying, I'd condense things to a single sheet whenever possible. It worked very, very well.

See for me it was always sort of the opposite.

My recall of things I got wrong on the tests is almost visceral, like it was traumatic that I was wrong. I figured this out pretty young and my studying habit was very similar to the methods employed for learning foreign language vocabulary or typing; progressively focus on the things the person still gets wrong.

So I'd read my notes and highlight or copy out only the facts that I found myself being surprised or flummoxed by. I'd go over those a few times, do one more scan of my entire notes, and sit before the test just going over the hard ones again until the instructor started handing out the test.

I throw all my notes out as soon as I finish writing them.

This is essentially what I always did, but instead of "as soon as I finish" replace "at some long-overdue future time". But the notion of write-only notes was largely identical, with very rare exceptions.

Hilariously, I only kept my notes so long out of poorly surfaced guilt that I was "doing it wrong", compared to some students who seemed to come out of lecture with fancy notes practically ready for prepress...

It was fun for my wife and I to go through all our college notes and laugh at everything we had to go through! Some good classes and some bad classes.

In high school we had a nice big bonfire and burned our notes at the end of the year. Making smores was probably the best use of old notes!

I can subscribe to this. Whenever I needed to learn or revise something, I would just write it down again, usually paraphrasing the original material.

While I wouldn't use that material directly ever again, I noticed that I would often paraphrase a paraphrase, so to speak, because I would remember some of the material.

Tangentially, this thread shows that people prefer different ways of taking (or not taking notes) usually due to a habit itselfc as opposed to superiority of one method over the other. It reminds me of Dvorak vs qwerty, while technically superior for typing in English, the cost of switching is not worth it for most people out there.

Although I must admit that most classmates find it horrific ("you're throwing away all the notes?!") so there must he some personal differences, I can honestly say I have never seen anyone learn from laid back magazine reading so many students do, that glazed over look while they try to mechanically reach the last page. Same goes for listening or watching or any other passive reception of material.

Learning is a function of production or reproduction of knowledge, not consumption. I stand by this regardless of "learning style".

Discussing with classmates, solving problems, reciting out loud, and taking notes are how you learn.

Absolutely - at the end of the day, it's "whatever works for you" in the context of personal learning/accreditation.

Do you feel that had you taken notes on an eReader / iPad with a pen input you would have similar effectiveness? I used to take notes for work in a small pad and found I didn't reference them often. I've recently tried moving to digital notes and there seems to be little friction to the switch with the exception of additional distraction (ie all those other apps).

Not OP, but I ditched taking notes on paper for the most part. I write stuff down on the iPad Pro (Notes and/or Notability) instead nowadays. It is easier to find and extract things and I can just archive them to the cloud when they are not needed anymore.

The only time I use paper is when I don't have the iPad on me and for personal journaling (for which I have a dedicated notebook anyway).

Same here. I've found the new iPad Pro + paper like screen protector to be a very near real experience with very little noticeable input lag for notes. Now, it is a very pricey alternative but agreed on all points.

I did consider the Boyue Likebook Muses [0], but figured for longevity the iPad may be the better buy. I did try the reMarkable and was very disappointed in it's price to performance/usability, at least for me. Little things like no backlight at that price point was hard to get over.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/product/boyue-likebook-muses-st...

I prefer the digital pen for sketching and doodling. I exclusively sketch on my Surface now. I also prefer digital reading because I don't have to carry a book around and I can ctrl-f. It's been years since I've bought a physical book.

However for taking notes I still prefer paper. It's really small aesthetic things like the texture of the paper and the no-latency ink. For some reason although taking notes with the digital pen results in better notes the experience of taking the notes is less pleasing to me.

Like I said I optimize for the best note-taking rather than taking the best notes. Once or twice when I was bored, I intentionally created illegible notes by writing in scribbles, or writing over a full sheet as if it was a new sheet.

Even creating illegible notes produced a learning outcome, and in some cases I felt the information stuck more because those notes were different and stimulating.

I'm inclined to agree about reproducing knowledge, however I've spent the last few years learning languages and learning languages is the exact opposite, where the majority of learning is done through simply inputting language.

For example see Krashen's ideas on language acquisition https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

Now this makes me feel like I hold a contradiction because the way I think about learning a language and learning math are opposite in this way.

Do you or others have any thoughts on this matter? Is it because we evolved some tailored machinery for acquiring language naturally as children, or because they are learnt the same "way", it's just that language is generally just a tremendous amount of associating stuff that it requires 100x more consumption. I guess one could naturally acquire the times tables over time if all combinations of a*b up to 10 come up in conversation enough times, but a general procedure for doing multiplication wouldn't be acquired magically.

Do you mean just being immersed in the language here rather than practicing/using it?

In some sense though, I imagine that when you hear something in a foreign language, you are actively making links to sounds or words that you think it may relate to (so in some sense, taking a mental note).

Growing up, I found that listening attentively in class and asking questions had me retain the most. Overly focusing on note-taking actually distracted me and those would usually be my worse day. I still took notes, however, most of the learning happened in the classroom and my notebook was the "textbook" that acted as my reference later.

> I throw all my notes out as soon as I finish writing them.

I do the exact same thing, and haven't met anyone else that did it. I thought I was a weirdo all this time! My learning process is (as theorized by me):

1. Hear/see instructor say something

2. Mentally digest and understand it

3. Write down the product of understanding it

I think #2 is the most important step, and the big purpose of step #3 is validating that I actually performed step #2.

Indeed, I tend to skip #3 during lectures so as to have more time on #2. I will generally work through problem sets (and/or essays/readings depending on the discipline) to consolidate this learning.

You are surely not alone: there are dozens of us!

I've done the exact same thing for the last 25 years, it took me 10 years of frustration before I found out that I learn & memorize best while writing things down.

Somehow the slowness of writing works 10x better for memorizing then typing.

My method of learning and recall has changed over the decades so I hesitate to offer any advice as universal.

Children often have a 'photographic memory' until around puberty but in my case it lasted well into my late teens. I recall on a number of tests knowing that I had written the answer down, and even where on the page of notes the answer was. Several times I managed to wrestle the answer out of my brain by finishing the rest of the test and then running the clock down trying to picture the page of notes.

But today I am pretty close to functionally aphantasic. My dominant mental model is that I 'think in shapes'. I don't see the shapes, its more like I feel them. And that suffices for many things like getting replacement parts at the hardware store, or reassembling something I've taken apart. It's only with some difficulty that I can 'picture' an item. It's like I have a mind castle but wear a blindfold.

Anyway, in college I discovered that my recall of things I wrote down was starting to fail. If I wrote down something and lost the notes I was screwed. Todo lists were the first thing I cut out. My odds of remembering to do something by willing myself to remember were far better than having notes getting covered by a book.

Now I have electronic notes and some reminders, but if I lost my phone and my backups, my life would unravel.

wow, I'm not the only one!!

incidentally, it drove me nuts using so much paper that only gets used once. I recently got a rocketbook and its prolly saved a couple of trees by now. Its the paper experience and I can wipe it clean with a damp cloth.

rocketbook is an amazing tool.

I had a high school teacher who described what he called a failsafe study method: (1) Take copious notes during lectures, save them in a binder. (2) Every weekday (5 days/week) during the term, read through all class notes from beginning to end. (3) Assuming you've done the above, you won't have to study for a test. But this would only work for memorization-heavy material where all the content is presented during lectures and you're able to write down the contents.

On the other hand, I once had a physics professor in college who spent each lecture rigorously proving the theorems and formulas we'd be using in the homework/tests. Only about 5 minutes (at the beginning) were dedicated to solving problems like what we'd be tested on, and then only in response to specific questions from students. We were pretty much on our own, since most were commuter students (this was Cal Poly Pomona) and couldn't easily come to office hours.

>I had a high school teacher who described what he called a failsafe study method:...

At this point you should just use spaced repetition. It's what I did, it has the same effects for a lot less work.

you used SR in high school?

I had converged on a similar workflow. Mostly due to the fact that my handwriting is terrible and I couldn't even read my own writing sometimes. So I used to rewrite them quite often to make them more clear. The fact of rewriting served as a spaced repetition and re-summarization which helped me remember concepts better.

When I was in college laptops were becoming popular and after trying to takes notes on them I found I didn't remember things as well, was getting distracted by chat and emails, and simply couldn't draw quick diagrams (and I usually do a lot of diagrams).

This is nuts. How would you be able to refer to anything meaningful in the future? That's one of the benefits of notes. I was relatively at the top of my classes and I never did this.

Throwing notes away, that's a nice luxury. I had professors who would lift questions word-for-word from their lecture, throwing away my notes would've been throwing away points.

I've been burned a few times by tidbits of information that were mentioned in the lecture once and no where else.

I still think digging through the notes is a waste of time. Mastery of the source material trumps all and has gotten me great grades.

Is it more common for the lecturer to mention something critical that's not in the textbook, or just pass over something more important in the textbook? I think the latter is more common.

I may have well thrown away my notes! I often times had inaccuracies as I fell behind instructors (seriously how fast can they write on blackboards!?) and lost important context which made sense at the time but not later.

But you are correct, writing things down helps commit things to memory, plus there were always some funny doodles to look back on. Too bad I can't doodle anymore in work meetings, it isn't too professional :(

Looking back, the purpose of the lectures was to give a general overview of the themes and boundaries of the course. You note that down. Then go read the textbooks and do exercises to actually learn the material. As you say, in a fast paced technical class you cannot rely on learning the material in lectures.

I purposely don't take notes in classes because I find it more productive to spend my energy listening (and thinking). And I find it hard to concentrate when I'm writing. I also then go back to primary source material when revising.

I think this is actually a pretty similar strategy to yours, and definitely one that I've found to be effective.

I'm the same way and definitely always did paper notes.

My completely unresearched theory as to why it's better: since your hands map to so much of your brain and it's function. I think the texture of the paper and the dexterity required to write stimulates your brain more allowing for deeper memories.

Sounds familiar. Never really worked for in school, work is different so. There I usually fill one college block every two months or so. Not that I ever read the notes again. But it kind of seems to get harder with age. Especially the "once written not forgotten" part...

It’s not inefficient. You are exactly describing the grammar phase of learning, i.e. brute memorization which is absolutely critical before the dialectic phase. (The trivium is complete when you understand the topic well enough to teach and engage using rhetoric).

Ditto. Liberal arts grad (Political Science) and work in InfoSec now. This is how I went through uni and taught myself classes I didn't attend. It has also workd in infosec and getting some entry level certs.

Exactly what I did. I tried to write notes in a way that was different than just copying as well, I tried to make them make sense to me.

I take great satisfaction in filling a notebook from cover to cover though. I do look back at old notes, although it is quite rare.

I use the same exact method.

I did that but not deliberately. I just almost never looked at the notes.

definitely this