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Ask HN: How do you keep notes while learning?
Hello HN,
While learning, watching online courses, reading books I would love to keep notes in a way that I can easily access later to recall and improve. When I don't take notes, it does get overwhelming after few hours of study.
I have tried Cornell notes method, writing down notes in a notebook and Evernote but with notebook writing, it can be hard especially if I'm reading or watching on my laptop.
In other words, what's your procedure for better learning and information retention?
- nickjj 8y agoI don't take notes, and my memory isn't very good. But when I take courses or try to learn something new, I'm often following along or applying it to a real project of my own. The act of doing makes me a million times better at retaining information than writing notes. Also I find that if you're at ground zero on a topic, then taking notes hurts you because it's extremely tedious and time consuming to take notes. I'd rather blaze through 3 books and get about 15% out of each book than meticulously take notes on 1 book. Chances are you're going to learn a lot more useful info in the same amount of time from the 3 book approach because when you're learning something new, getting to the 80% in the 80/20 rule is way more important than the fine details. Trying to learn that last 20% from any material is often futile too. Real world experience is going to be a much better teacher at that point.