No system for you just an anecdote for what it's worth. I've never been a note taker and typically taking notes distracts me from extracting the essence of the

No system for you just an anecdote for what it's worth. I've never been a note taker and typically taking notes distracts me from extracting the essence of the conversation. In my professional life, I will write down any action items that are assigned to me but will typically instantly go do them and thus rarely have to reference them. In an academic setting where you're being tested on both the book and what was said in class that may have been "extratextual", the don't-take-notes-so-i-can-listen didn't work as well because I couldn't remember every nuance that could've been tested. In this setting, I found what worked for me was to write down literally everything the professor said in shorthand but comprehensible sentences. This helped my recall immensely and then my studying involved reading the notes i had written (takes about 15-30 minutes total) and seeing if they answered the review questions at the end of chapters. This worked for most classes except for Discrete Structures and Automata which was such a novel and abstract concept for me at the time that I had to intently listen and scramble to draw the automata and write notes about my thought processes and "aha!" moments that happened on the fly. This is usually great for me still today when I want to remember the revelations that occur in my head as I'm pondering a concept or solution in real-time with a meeting.