This is what works for me: - When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting

This is what works for me: - When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting or the organization - Then, in a separate step, structure and transcribe the notes into org-mode (or OneNote or Roam or Evernote or …) For me, having that two-pass system really does a lot to improve retention. I can type a lot more quickly than I can write by hand, so the actual time commitment for the transcription step isn't very high. But I've found that forcing myself to go over my notes (at least once) in order to get them into an organized and searchable format does a lot to improve how well I remember what I've taken notes on. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to be as messy and disorganized as I need to be in order to get the information down in the first step, because I know that what I'm writing down isn't the "final version", and I'll be going back over it again to edit.