Note-Taking versus Note-Making

are you a notetaker or a not maker many people associate note taking with school but it has actually played an important role throughout human history ancient Greeks used the word hypoa to describe what could be translated as a note a reminder or an anecdotal record before the development of digital devices people used marginalia and commonplace books to take notes today note taking plays an important role in work and education if you're a student you're probably encouraged by your teachers to take notes and if you're working you probably regularly take meeting notes and record other pieces of knowledge to share with your co-workers and collaborate together because not taking is so prevalent many different note taking systems have been devised over the years you have outlining one of the most commonly used methods which consists in quickly capturing the key points of a piece of content in the form of indented bullet points because of the hierarchy in outlining it makes it easy to distinguish between top level topics and subtopics which can help when you're trying to navigate the content you have the sentence method where you write every new fact or topic on a separate line numbering these lines as you progress this format makes it easy to scan and review your notes and then reference them later in other projects just by using the number on each line you also have guided notes where the educator whether it's in a class at school or in training at work will provide templates for you to take notes with an empty skeleton to be filled during the session the idea here with thise formatted template is to reduce your cognitive load so you don't have to waste time and effort in trying to structure the content so many different not taking methods the problem most of these methods can slightly increase your short-term recall but not your long-term understanding and memory most of the benefits that traditional notet takers experience come from reviewing their notes afterwards not from taking notes and in fact research suggests that when the goal is just short-term recall on a direct factual test like the ones we prend to get in school then you're better off just using the instructor's notes instead of taking your own so why even go through all of that effort should you even keep on capturing notes when you're trying to learn something well learning is more than short-term recall so you can do well on a test it's about acquiring long-term knowledge so a better question is is there a better way to capture understand and remember what we study yes there is in his 1962 book about study methods Edgar Wright makes the distinction between note taking and note making on one hand note taking often happens while listening the goal is to quickly capture content so we can refer back to it later on the other hand notem making is more common while reading it consists of deliberately crafting our own version so we can learn and create better note taking is fast uses the original author's language and generally feels easier the issue is that the content is often poorly assimilated and easily forgotten in contrast not making is slower more involved and uses your own language as a result the content is easier to understand and remember the reason why notem making works so well is something called The Generation effect it's the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it's actually created from your own mind rather than simply read in a passive way imagine memory as a vast network of interconnected notes with note taking you just dumping new information in there which means that it's more likely to just stay for a bit in your shortterm memory and then quickly forget it with not making you're not just adding a new node you're uring that this node has multiple ties to existing nodes in the network when you make notes using your own words you're inherently adding personal context associations or details from your existing knowledge base this act of linking the new with the known provides a richer context this strengthens the position of the new node in your brain Network making the information more memorable and making it easier to retrieve later BAS basically by making notes by investing the time and effort to rephrase the content you're consuming you're more likely to commit the information to your long-term memory so how can you go from passive note taking to active note making number one rephrase first rephrase the original idea don't use the authors or the teachers original language instead distill the ideas into your own words Beyond understanding and remembering the content better it has the additional advantage of avoiding unintentional plagarism number two relate then connect ideas together we rarely can form memories and isolation to help with understanding and recall make sure to create links between the ideas that you're studying link your notes together and draw mental maps of the problem space there are lots of tools allowing you to do this these days I personally use Rome which makes it very easy to link notes together and create a map of ideas but there are many Alternatives such as obsidian loxic and TNA even notion has a basic feature that lets you link your notes together together or if you're more of the old school type and you like paper you can also just pick a specific topic you want to understand better and draw a map connecting all of the ideas it contains together and try to connect these with ideas that are already in your mind number three revisit finally don't let your notes just sit there for you to forget all about them instead build upon the ideas your notes should be like a living document come back to them to review and revise them as you learn more about a topic add more examples more questions and more related ideas that's it at all stages of making notes the keyword is active engagement don't just enur at whatever you're studying proactively use your own language and create your own systems you know I keep recommending to treat your mind like a garden to Tender your thoughts with care so you can Harvest quality ideas to share with the world note making is an important part of Mind gardening you carefully PL some seeds of knowledge you nurture them so they can grow and once you start seeing some new ideas emerge you explore and connect all of those new branches of knowledge and if you do this consistently if you keep tending to your mind Garden after a while you'll have developed your own unique understanding of your area of study and that's worth investing a little bit of time and energy into switching from note taking to note making squishy squishy tell me more and Lord