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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things, group them, etc using simple keyboard commands.

My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.

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During college lectures my retention was highest when I didn’t notes at all. I found that if I took notes, most of my brain power went towards capturing the content instead of actively engaging with it.

Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture

A middle ground is just to jot down a few words when something is unclear, just enough to let you know what you need to go back and review.

Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.

What about those key insights you pick up on, and say "Aha!"

Reminds me of the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.

He had the idea of a "trusted system" for capturing things.

Instead of anxiously carrying something important in your head, jot it down and get it off your mind.

Maybe not full notes, but maybe get ready to capture insights.

I am 100% the same.

People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.

That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.

But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.

I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.

> People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.

> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer

That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.

No, I'm saying when I missed the last three sentences, now I don't even understand the lecture anymore. There's a variable written on the board and I don't know what it represents.

And then by the time I figure it out, I haven't understood a bunch of previous points that depended on knowing what the variable was.

That's exactly the second kind of quick note taking I was talking about.

OK, but you can't do both at the same time. That's my point.

And the "quick" version is not what people claim provides any benefits of understanding.

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