How to Take Great Notes (And Remember What You Read)

today I'm going to talk about how you can take great notes this method is especially useful for students who are trying to write great essays or study for exams but I think it could be used by anybody with a little bit of adaptation who just wants to get the most out of what they read the principle behind this note-taking method is pretty simple you are going to turn yourself into the teacher so instead of taking or making notes as if you are studying for something you are going to take or make notes as if you were going to teach it to someone who knew less than you when I would teach college students I would make these really thorough outlines in order to structure my lectures after I had been doing this for a while I realized that making these outlines was actually doing a very good job of teaching me the material too and that's when I realized that you could do this even if you're not going to teach a class the idea is that if you are able to teach a subject to someone who knows absolutely nothing about it then that is a sign that you truly understand it we're going to break this down into three steps annotating exporting and outlining the first step is pretty simple while I call this annotating you could all so just call it active reading I think of active reading as requiring three components first you need to be intentionally focused you are there for a reason the second is that you need to minimize distractions and set up your environment correctly and then you need to properly annotate the text what I mean here is that you need to be focused you need to be in the right environment and you need to be marking up your books in the right sort of way so I would suggest that you grab a pencil and you could follow along with this example this is Aristotle's nicomachine ethics which is my favorite work of philosophy when we're reading this text we are trying to read it as if we are going to explain it to a beginner so we are looking for a couple of things we want to look for jargon or vocabulary that might need to be explained we also want to look for the important passages or the key points that we want every reader to know about and then finally we want to look for those parts of the text that are unclear that we're going to need to break down and explain I like to underline the vocabulary that needs to be defined I like to put a star next to the important passages and a question mark next to those difficult parts I am not underlining every sentence that is a common beginner mistake I so often see people who when they're taking notes actually end up just underlining almost every sentence in a book that is useless it is not actually doing anything for you what I'm doing here is flagging parts of the text for my future self I'm going to use these annotations later on when I'm actually making my really high quality notes the study guide another thing I like to do is add a little book tab or a sticky note or something when I'm finished annotating a section not only does this let me know that I need to review a certain page when I'm making my notes but it also kind of acts as a bookmark that way you don't need a separate bookmark and you don't need to dog hear your pages if I were doing this on an iPad or a tablet my process would be basically the same The Only Exception is if I'm using a Kindle or an e-reader I like my Kindle a lot I'm increasingly using it to read almost every book that I read these days however I don't like any of the note-taking features of the Kindle I even try to Kindle scribe and it didn't really do it for me with Kindles I'm just heavily relying on the highlighting part understanding that I'm missing out on some of the annotation but if I'm still engaged in my reading I'm highlighting appropriately and maybe even making some separate remarks on a piece of paper or something you it can it can work it can work now the key to active reading is to be in the right frame of mind you need to be able to really focus and if you're struggling to focus or you would like to just clear your headspace a little bit you might want to check out Aura Health thank you Aura for sponsoring this video I've talked a bit before about my own struggles with anxiety and I've also struggled with just keeping focused on the things that matter to me one of the things that's helped me the most is taking time to be slow and quiet and undistracted whether that's meditation or breath work or just sitting in silence for a while when you set up Aura you get to pick what you want to focus on I chose things like avoiding burnout improving focus and becoming more mindful after you answer some basic questions Aura will curate options for you and suggest them on a daily basis or whenever you open up the app but you can also browse the catalog to find the content that's right for you I've really really been focusing on well Focus I want to be able to better focus on the things that matter to me but you could also use Aura to improve your sleep or to just relax with some ASMR content or even to practice cognitive behavioral therapy techniques all of this content is created by aura's therapists and coaches and you can select from a really wide variety of content so thanks once again to Aura for sponsoring this video if you're interested in Aura go check out my link down in the description and you'll get 25 off now that you have read your book or your article this isn't just for books you need to do something with what you've read and this is where you're going to make use of your annotations and you're going to put them somewhere else I like to call this the export phase your annotations and ideas will now come out of your book and we'll go onto a page or a screen somewhere else you could use a pen and paper for this you could also use a tool like obsidian or Rome I have dabbled with all three though there is some evidence that writing by hand does improve information retention so if you're doing this for the purpose of studying actually writing your notes by hand could be very useful when you are exporting you are going to be creating an outline of the section that you just read you should always write a sentence or two summary of the section that's just really helpful for reviewing and then your outline should really reflect not the structure of the text but actually how you would go about teaching this section to somebody else this is the beginning of your lesson plan or your study guide so here I wrote a short summary of this section of the Nico McKean ethics I also have a bullet point where I try to define the vocabulary that I had underlined before that means I won't have any important undefined terms left over I'll also create a bullet point for some of the major points that Aristotle makes the idea is that a beginner could read through my outline and have a pretty good understanding of what's going on in this section of Aristotle's work and I could use my outline to teach a class for beginners this is a first draft meaning you're going to want to do this several times and refine it and revise things and this is where actually digital tools like Rome or obsidian work better than paper with paper you might have to start from scratch and duplicate a lot of work in order to make revisions or you're going to need to use a really good eraser or a lot of white out with say Rome all you have to do is add more bullet points or strike through things or delete them and then type up something new so while writing by hand it does improve information retention creating a digital version of what I'm suggesting is actually very convenient and I admit that I would probably use roam or obsidian for this so now that you have exported your notes about Section 1 you are just going to repeat this process for future sections of the book go back to step one and do your active reading of another portion of the book and then start exporting and outlining all over it and then that brings us to step three which in a kind of grandiose terms I'm calling making the Omni outline what you have done so far is make essentially a bunch of small outlines or study guides but now we need to create a much bigger version about the entire book essentially this is your lesson plan to teach the entire book to a beginner you can do this in phases so let's look at the structure of Aristotle's book to see what I mean the nicotine ethics is made up of 10 major sections which we call books and those books have chapters I started this video by reading chapter one of book one what I would want to do is first create these little outlines of every chapter in book one and then I want to create a larger outline of all of book one I'm going to be taking content from my smaller outlines and and reusing it ideally after I've done that for book one I would do it for book two and for book three and so on so what we have actually is an outline of the entire nicomican ethics and sometimes we can take a very high level View and look at it and give a quick summary of each of the books and then sometimes we get really into the details talking about every single chapter of every single book to make this a little clearer let me show you how this would work in Rome so you can have a page which is just the nick of McKean ethics because Rome is essentially an outlining tool with some features built on top of it you can essentially embed your book and chapter outlines into your Omni outline and then you can expand or collapse different blocks depending on how detailed or granular you need to be all of the information is really on one page but there's a there's a nice way to be able to ignore the extra detail when you don't need it sometimes you need to go into those details but sometimes you just need that broad high level outline depending on who you're trying to teach or depending on what you're trying to review obviously this is an intense form of note-taking so I would encourage you to experiment a bit I've used it it's a great effect I've actually used this to study for job interviews to write book outlines for presentations or for papers that I'm writing this can be very powerful but it does take a lot of work I also encourage you to just adapt it to suit your needs if you need to make modifications that suit you well do it I'm not going to come and like criticize your particular note-taking method you can also adapt this not just for books or for articles but also to learn a new skill like a programming language things would be slightly different but the spirit of the method Remains the Same by pretending that we are going to teach someone else we actually end up being pretty good at teaching ourselves

Channel: Jared Henderson

Views: 229,894

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Id: LcYcj7oFglQ

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023