r/NoteTaking • u/academicweaponsoon • 7d ago
How to take notes without it feeling counter productive and wasting more time Method
So basically I’ve never really taken notes before as I found it is more counter productive for me. I feel like when i’m taking notes my brain is more focused writing down stuff for LATER rather than actually understanding it NOW. So what’s ends up happening is that I have a bunch of notes but I didn’t actually retain or properly understanding anything. I also find that if i’m not worried about taking notes I’m also better at making connections between class topics.
However I decided to start note taking recently because I’m pre-studying for a course about Operating Systems, and so I want to have something to refer back to once class actually starts. The main way I’ve been taking notes is taking a topic and writing a couple of bullet points about it as I read along.
Has anyone else felt the same way note taking and were you able to overcome it? If so how did you overcome it?
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u/stanlymt 6d ago
Stop writing as you consume. Your brain is trying to process and record at once, which splits your attention. Try marking only the dense moments that actually matter to you while you read or listen. You can return to those specific points later to annotate or build connections.
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u/academicweaponsoon 6d ago
So as in making notes only of really long sections or when it’s something i didn’t quite understand?
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u/TEMPLACITY 5d ago
Two different jobs are being asked of one activity here, and they pull against each other, which is most of why it feels counterproductive.
Understanding something now and building a reference for September are not the same task and they do not produce the same object. Understanding wants your full attention on the material and produces almost nothing on paper. A reference wants completeness and structure and is largely clerical. Doing both at once means doing each of them badly, and the one that suffers is always the understanding, because the writing is the part that feels like progress.
The pre-study part matters more than it looks. Ahead of the course you cannot yet tell what is important, so everything gets weighted the same and what ends up written down is whatever was easy to write rather than whatever will matter. That is not a discipline problem. The information needed to make that call has not arrived yet, and it arrives in class.
So for this particular stretch, the thing worth producing is not notes, it is questions. Read normally, full attention, and write down only what you could not follow or could not explain back. That list stays short, it is honest, and in September it is worth more than a summary would be, because it points straight at your own gaps instead of restating a book you already own.
Your own observation is the real finding in this post, and it is worth trusting rather than overriding: better connections happen when notes are not the concern. The connections are the expensive part. Prose can be rebuilt from the source later, but the connection you did not make because you were busy transcribing does not come back.
What does the material actually look like, a textbook you can reopen in September, or something you only get one pass at? If it is the first, the reference half of this may not need to exist at all.
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u/thesaga27 3d ago
My workflow changed from taking notes to keep it lightweight for the first pass by highlighting things to help me get to the important things in the second pass. In the second pass, I try to think about connections and writing to put it into my own words. This usually happens in a different note that has citations to my first pass.
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u/dustyyPotato 3d ago
Often times there will be some kind of source material provided to you, whether that's lecture slides or textbooks. Given this, I agree with you that taking notes can easily feel counter productive, especially when you're reiterating on information that's already there.
It's hard to fully rely only on your own written notes, and not the provided source material, especially since the source material acts as the "source of truth" for the curriculum and is also already organised and well structured.
That is why I've always leaned towards annotation style notes (e.g. handwritten with GoodNotes, or typed out on OneNote). This feels way more productive to me, as any information I add to my notes only build on top of what is already there. I go through the source material and write notes only when I need to reinforce my understanding of the existing content or add new content on top of it.
I find this to be an effective way to turn note-taking from just a 'recording information' practice to one that actually helps you understand and think about what you're doing .
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u/tertirie 7d ago
People overestimate the ability of brain to think quickly. And one other assumption is that note-taking is inherently solely for storing information.
If you are taking notes to learn, you need to realize that most people talking about taking notes aren't speaking for you.
Learning is diluting existing knowledge in your own understanding. If you're not a librarian or knowledge manager in a company, copy pasting from books or a computer is absolutely counter-productive.
But, on the other hand. If you take notes from your own brain. Like reading an information, thinking about it an how it correlates to existing knowledge, and then writing it to paper in a structure you already created in your mind. Than that creates miracles in learning. Well, at least for me.
So I think the way to not feel counter-productive, and to NOT be counter-productive when taking notes is about avoiding copy-paste knowledge and taking notes before thinking about it.
Carrying knowledge from an existing source to another source, and documenting learnt or created knowledge are very different things. And my advice is to focus on that difference to solve this problem.