Learning and studying things without taking notes
I'm curious if there's anybody here who's like this. Either doing it without writing things down, or doing it minimally. I don't know why but I find it very difficult to do, and it stops me from actually learning/studying. I feel like it slows me down, significantly. It also feels like a chore. I feel like part of this may be because I'm in information security? Like, there's a lot of reading and researching going on, then immediate practicing and applying. Even when I have to take tests. I just read and listen or whatever else and that's it. Maybe in other fields, taking notes is a big thing, or maybe it's just me. I also have other interests, but yet still, I simply can't bring myself to write things down. I just prefer to absorb everything, in whatever pace I like, sometimes it's slow, sometimes it's fast. If I ever decide that I'm going to take notes while learning/studying, I'd stare at my notebook/software for a very long time. I'd sit with one chapter/slide for quite awhile. At the same time, I truly admire people who take notes and write stuff. I do wish I was like them sometimes. Is anybody out here the same? Even though I really want to hear from people who are similar, everyone else can join the discussion too. What do you do? How do you do it? What is your preference? Do you think there's a "better" way to do things? Could taking notes be "superior" to the opposite?
As someone who takes notes: It's less about remembering things in the moment, and more about being able to recall the knowledge later (months/years down the line). Otherwise I'll just forget. This is also why I take digital notes despite studies that show that handwritten notes are better for memory.
In college I would take notes, but found I'd rarely look at them later. My notebooks were pretty much write-only. It was something to do in lectures and it seemed to help me remember things.
Nowadays I read for mostly for pleasure and I'm not at all sure what I need to remember. And of course we have the Internet to look up most things.
I read something once from one of those Harvard Review books full of short articles, this one was about differences in high performing individuals. One article described different types of retaining information. They described reading, writing, and listening as being three sort of umbrellas for how people retain info. They outlined why it's important to know which one you are, and the negative experiences people have when trying to force themselves into another category. I am a writer, I take insane amounts of notes, and I do it quickly. It doesn't stop me from paying attention, it is almost a passive experience for me of just typing what I'm hearing. I almost never read them later, but the act of writing them down solidifies the information. I don't need to read them later. But if I try to pay attention through just listening, I absolutely an not do it. I space out. I can't listen to lectures without writing. I can't listen to a podcast even. I think if something works for you, stick with it. People are all different. I don't think there is a benefit to trying to methods that you already know don't feel right.
I would love to see that source if you could find it.
Went offline for a week, my bad! Let me know if this link doesn't work I took some photos so you can find it if you want. The book is "on high performance" from Harvard Business Review and the article is "managing oneself" by Peter F. Drucker.
https://imgur.com/a/EOTb8qb
All good thanks for the passage. Very informative
Note taking is less about actually writing things down and more about just trying to formulate the topic in your own words. This really depends on the area for me - it is pretty useless for some things but significantly contributes to my understanding of the topic in other areas
I realized a flaw in my writing after I hit post. But I won't mention it, perhaps to see if or how others would! :-)
I only occasionally use notes as a way to organize thoughts, like maybe a few times per year. I have a notebook I got years ago. It’s slowly getting filled up but at this rate it’ll last a few more decades.
In school I would take notes more often but I think the main benefit was the note taking kept me from dozing off. I’d rarely refer back to notes.
Back when I was in school, I never took notes or studied against forced to and I was generally a good student. I retained information from class very well on my own. Once I got to more challenging material in college though, I found it helpful to take handwritten notes in some classes. Note -- I did not ever successfully study these notes after the fact! But in classes where I struggled to pay attention or in which the material was more complex, just writing some stuff down while listening helped me retain it. Taking notes on a laptop didn't help in the same way -- probably in part because my laptop came chock-full of distractions. When I did my master's degree, the courses varied a lot and most of them were more practically-oriented anyway, so note-taking wasn't particularly needed.
That said, I think this is a very individual thing and differs a lot between people. I also have ADHD which almost definitely affects things (though it was not known or diagnosed back then).
A couple techniques you may be interested in:
Speed reading. I'm only familiar with Stanley Frank's book "The Evelyn Wood Seven-Day Speed Reading and Learning Program" but there are others. I'm skeptical of some of the book's claims about being able to read entire pages at a glace (the wikipedia page has more about this) but some of their simpler speed-up techniques are worthwhile.
Frank's book has a section on "recall patterns" (chapter 6) which are ways of organizing what you read to help you remember them. I've heard of the terms cognitive maps and mind maps which may be related. This also leads us to...
Mnemonics, the use of memorization techniques. People have been doing this for centuries, and you're probably familiar with some simple mnemonics already. But there are a variety of general-use techniques and even memorizing championships. The book I'm most familiar with is "How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week" by Dominic O'Brien.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on any of these things!
Personally, I never took notes in classes. When I tried, I had trouble concentrating in the content being presented. I had to choose between paying attention or writing something down. For me, to pay attention always yielded better results for later retention.
I don’t know if it is related, but I don’t highlight passages when I studied. I couldn’t imagine what to highlight, and afterwards I would reread the whole material regardless of if I highlighted something.
I'm the opposite, personally. I generally have to write things down to understand them properly. It helps me place them with my own words, and lets me engage with them actively somewhat which helps make them stick.
Interestingly, I rarely ever need to mull over my notes afterwards. I do use them as reference, but only on a per case basis.
I don't find that taking notes is particularly useful for learning new things and knowledge retention overall. The thing is, taking notes usually gets you engaged with the content, forcing you to actively interact with it. However, highlighting also puts you in a similar mental state and takes considerably less time.
For knowledge retention, I would say that the key is spaced repetition, inevitably. Active recalling and passive reviewing of the content are what will make it stay in your memory long term. A routine involving active recalling (via flashcards, quizes or similar tools) and content reading/highlighting will be superior to a routine of taking notes on a given topic, in my experience.
Of course, note-taking has the advantage of creating a physical (or digital!) copy of the content, made with your own bias on how that knowledge presents itself, adding a personal layer to that information that could help with recalling and learning, aside from being useful for future references. So I'm not saying that method is completely useless.
I think I've read a study (I don't have it right now, but I could find it if someone is interested) comparing the performance of groups where they just read a content and highlight, and one where they actively took notes on the content. The overall finding was that the second group felt as if they fixed the knowledge better, but by taking tests, the performance of both was not significantly different. And if I'm remembering right, long-term retention of the content for both groups was also identical. The overall conclusion I took from this was that, in general, given that the results of both are similar, reading and highlighting should have superior performance, given that it takes less time."
In school, I never took notes. Now, I only take notes about very specific or procedural things that I know I won't remember in detail. (E.g. modifications to a cooking recipe.)
I find it easier to mentally engage with content when I'm not taking notes. I retain knowledge by connecting it to things I already know about, a process that note-taking doesn't inherently enable.
Also in info security - and notes are life savers for me. No way am I going to remember all the particular commands and options that I found useful, for example. Everyone does things differently though. Some of my teammates handwrite their notes, I haven't handwritten them in ages.
Do whatever works for you, we're all different! That being said if we worked together and you were like "Hey, remember that thing we ran across a few months back, what was it again?" I'd definitely give you a hard time about why you don't have it in your notes, haha.
I personally never took notes throughout high school or college and always did relatively well! (if you count a 2.3 GPA in college good? C's get degrees especially in E/CE lol) I think my short term memory is pretty good so cramming wasn't too bad, and trying to understand things at a higher level for some other things. That being said I probably couldn't tell you anything that I learned in the 4 years of calculus I studied basically so I guess there's a tradeoff.
I'm like you, I am capable of paying attention without taking notes and did well through high school and university like that. I attribute it to my auditory memory. Most people I know have visual memory, requiring colors and stuff like that to remember later. Whenever I did take notes, they'd be just blue ink, no titles.
Btw, I'm also great at memorizing song lyrics and movie lines just by listening to them.
Taking notes stops me from thinking at speed about what is being said, and has been an active deficit to my learning every time I've tried. However, once studying on my own, outside of the presentation, writing down what I thought were the salient elements of the lecture helps tremendously in integrating what I was/am studying into long-term memory.