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's 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 1% student note-taking tips. Actually, it's a lot simpler. Hey 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 loved, loved, loved doing this, especially for things like chemistry, organic chemistry. Those are hard subjects. I proactively asked 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 overcomplicate 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 six, five hours of sleep, or 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 or 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 4 Increase your writing speed.
I'm proud to say that I think my writing speed is higher than average You know what? It's not the prettiest handwriting People say it's like doctors 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 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 trained myself to learn how to write the ampersand because 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 your teacher is drawing up this little diagram with circles and squigglies and blah blah blah, don't copy it right then. Oftentimes because it's this beautiful visual that comes to life piece by piece as they're explaining each other. 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 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.
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 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 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 efficient studying video, one million views, 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.
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 rum-ru-ruing.
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