In college I tended to annotate some existing document/book rather than writing notes from scratch. That tended to save time and energy, and meant I had to writ

In college I tended to annotate some existing document/book rather than writing notes from scratch. That tended to save time and energy, and meant I had to write a lot less than if I was starting from a blank sheet (since the textbook provided all the context for my annotation). The goal would be to make my textbooks/articles the single source of study-material when midterms/finals came around. Rather than sift through stacks of notes, I'd just have to re-read the textbook including my annotations, and I'd usually be fine.