Note-taking: The secret to being EFFECTIVE + FAST

you're in class furiously scribbling away as your teacher talks but when you get home to study your notes let's just say they're not that useful I've been there too but I figured out how to take good notes quickly this was a huge factor for how I was able to get straight a while maintaining 8 hours of sleep so how do you take effective and efficient notes to help you get that 4.0 I watched some other YouTube videos for note taking inspiration but guess what I didn't use most of these top one % student note taking tips actually it's a lot simpler a team it's Amy today we're going to look at my actual notes and see the note-taking techniques I use to Ace my classes if I can use these and get an A in every class including physics my hardest hardest subject then you for sure can succeed in any class with my tips let's go one ask for PowerPoint Pages or printed notes I Lov love L doing this especially for things like chemistry organic chemistry those are are hard subjects I proactively ask my teachers are these notes going to be in the portal can I download them later and this made it so convenient so much easier to actually pay attention and try to understand the concepts while in class itself that saves time from relearning things when you have to do your homework and as we'll get into in a later tip makes it easier to annotate two best does not equal pretty don't care about prettiness guys I know there are a lot of YouTube videos out there that are way way prettier than mine with all these little handwritings and colors but you know functionality does not mean pretty well if it works the only prettiness you should have is color coding for me I use blue to highlight my lesson titles I use orange to highlight important formulas and yellow to highlight key Concepts super critical things to not forget remaining colors like pink and green I adapted them to each different class for example in organic chemistry if there was a specific mechanism I had to remember then that would be green sometimes too many note- taking tips over complicate something such that now you're studying how to take notes which is for studying so keep it simple efficient easier to navigate three it is absolutely okay to blind copy I've done this plenty of times a lot of videos out there are like never blindly copy what the teacher says because you want to be learning while they're teaching and yeah it's great in theory I honestly wish I could do that but there were too many times when I showed up to Caltech physics on like 6 5 hours of sleep four maybe and I can't even keep my eyes open let alone pay attention to what the teacher says it's a miracle that I can even get my pencil out and write down things they're saying so as long as you're capturing everything you need to look back at later it's fine don't stress about it don't over complicate it and you know sometimes maybe the teacher is boring maybe I just want to daydream about BTS and that's my time that I'm going to daydream and I'm saving that time so I don't have to daydream about them later and after school I can use that time to study in a more effective efficient way with lectures online or other things other than my boring teacher sometimes if I simply can't keep up with my teacher or I'm tired something sometimes if I can't keep up with my teacher or I'm just too tired to copy it all I'll take a picture of the board and copy it over later but to make it easier to write everything down and have time to process it use tip four increase your writing speed I proud to say that I think my writing speed is higher than average you know what it's it's not the prettiest handwriting people say it's like doctor's handwriting which translates to very very ugly apparently sorry doctors but you know what that's a prime example doctors are still doing a good job and saving lives and their handwriting doesn't need to to be pretty it just needs to be fast efficient and legible to them most of the time actually maybe not the legible part to doctors but for you it definitely applies only you really need to understand your notes so maybe you have to convert your beautiful bubbly handwriting into one that gets the job done faster my note-taking handwriting is a little worse than my homework one but it's okay because I understand it also to be faster you can use abbreviations some of my common ones are here early on I train myself to learn how to write the Amper sand cuz any little efficiencies you can find by writing this instead of A and D will make you that much more efficient and that adds up over time even if you are fast tip five don't copy diagrams on the spot when you're teacher is drawing up this little diagram with circles and squigglies and blah blah blah don't copy it right then often times because it's this beautiful visual that comes to life piece by piece as they're explaining each piece it's more effective to Simply listen and absorb after you've transferred that picture into your mind and however you understand it you can take a picture of it and later go back in your notes to copy it down just make sure that you saved some space under that portion of your notes such that you can draw that diagram in speaking of saving space number six annotate typically the main text in my notes is simply copying down what the teacher wrote on the Whiteboard or what's in the PowerPoint slides but I will leave space in the margins and under each topic for annotations often your teacher might say these little nuggets of information about the test or about this concept also having this detail and that's not in the PowerPoint or on the Whiteboard so you need to capture that down they only stated it verbally so you need to prioritize annotating that put it as even higher priority than copying down what's on the board you can always catch up on the stuff on the board later but you need to jot down the things your teacher said verbally because you'll probably forget and your friend might not have captured them for me a lot of annotations are just writing in the margins a little tip and drawing a little line whoop connecting to that Concept in the main text that tip relates to number seven not enough fingers here which is to add don't redo it is my humble opinion that you should never ever need to rewrite your notes or redo them in any form simp simply add to them with annotations or other things that you learn from doing your homework your tests Etc adding to your current notes given that you've left enough space is more efficient than making new versions of the same notes it's better for the environment too save the trees my notes are a living breathing thing that continually get updated for example if I'm reading the textbook and I see this formula and some better explanation about something that was already in my notes I'll go into my not notes and I will add to the side that textbook page number maybe the formula number or chapter number similarly when I'm doing homework I'll get to a problem I'll realize what formula I need to use I'll find that formula in the textbook then in my homework I'll copy down that formula and write the textbook page number or formula number so then my homework is like an extension of my notes this is a trick guys that makes studying for tests a a lot easier that way I am making explicit links between my textbook homework and notes this whole thing relates to my bonus tip which is how to use your notes if you use all these tips especially the last one when it comes time to study your notes it'll be so much easier because when you're reading your notes or your homework you will already see what page that relates to because you made those links while you were studying and while you were doing that homework the first time around as I explained in my my efficient setting video 1 million views W jump right into your homework instead of studying your notes first when you get back home jump right into the problems and then reference your notes as you go along if you use tip two your notes should be visually organized so it's easier to find what concepts you might need for your homework just like rewriting the formulas from textbook pages in my homework I might write in my work this formula was from the lecture on January 2nd 2024 blah blah blah that's creating another link am then my advice for when it gets to studying for quizzes or tests is to study homework and anything bucketed first I call homework bucketed because it's only taking small Snippets of Concepts and it's easier to read than walls of text after reviewing that bulleted information then go into the notes and see what you might have missed my notes might still look like walls of words but highlighting breaks it down and it's easier to study because your mind had already formed these little buckets from r r from reviewing past problems nice a team now that you have good notes the next step is to leverage them but you can't do that if you keep procrastinating man so this video reveals my secrets that I use to beat procrastination see you next time peace [Music] something about you

Channel: Amy Wang

Views: 81,739

Keywords: study, study motivation, study tips, school, student, grades, gpa, ace, straight a's, study hacks, valedictorian, 4.0, wamy

Id: JIf1bETlpZA

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024