Zettelkasten along with writing a lot. Just write.

If you write code, you know the experience of just cranking out some shit and then refactoring a lot as you figure out how to phrase what you’re trying to do. Writing prose is the same.

The bits that crystallize are small and reusable, so those are your atoms. Atoms bounce around and combine into larger lines of thought. Some go somewhere, some don’t.

For taking notes on already synthesized material, I find it useful to rip through it as fast as possible the first time to establish anchors and important vocabulary. This is a good time to figure out if you have questions, determine if the material is actually useful or should be supplemented with something else, and roughly outline what information the material intends to transmit.

From there, you do a close read. Depending on the density of the material and how long you have, this can be as little as a page a day (even less for very dense texts). Don’t try to understand how everything fits together, just extract things that seem important. Is there a term that comes up over and over? Is there a theme or technique that’s referenced or applied in many places? Whenever possible, capture these in your own words with as much detail as you need to keep the idea self-contained. Do not copy from the text. Engage your brain. Synthesize information.

Now you have a soup of your own ideas, bootstrapped by the hard-won knowledge of somebody else but no longer bound up in the text. You are now free to connect these ideas, mix them in ways the text doesn’t allow because it’s just dead thoughts already packaged.

I’ll underline the important thing again: just write! You get better at writing by writing, and useful note taking is just a particular form of writing. Don’t worry about the audience, because the audience is you and your brain. If you need to package it for consumption before you’ve even begun, you’ll hamstring your process. When you’ve built the bones of an idea for yourself, you can later turn those into an essay or what have you for others with all the extra context and references necessary.

I don’t, it takes more mental energy than it’s worth, personally. I need to focus on what I’m reading or hearing or I’ll learn nothing and reading my notes won’t help. it’s an ADHD coping strategy though so I don’t recommend it for anyone else. if you’re in the group of people who need to ignore that advice, you already know that and don’t need my permission.

Write note down in notebook.

Walk away and forget about where i left the notebook.

Try to figure out where notebook is.

Can’t find it.

Several months pass.

Find book, forget i wrote anything in it.

Put notebook into cabinet.

Forget about it again.

Rinse and repeat.

The note taking I do is for party meetings sometimes and it’d trying to keep up with the conversation while noting down who said what and pairing it down to brief and succinct bulletpoints.

It basically boils down to using the meeting agenda sheet as a skeleton then bulletpointing what’s said by who under the sections as quickly as I can and as clearly as possible to both keep up with the conversation while maintaining records accuracy. After the meeting I reread and review my notes immediately to type them up into a more professional document that conveys what the meeting was about at a glance.

I do that because I was told that taking notes then reviewing and taking notes based off your notes helps you go over what you were studying as you were learning it to further cement it in your mind and took that to apply it to other things. So far it seems like it’s working for me.

In the first viewing of a material, I generally write down basically everything that is said/rewrite the slides. You might have trouble keeping up and write sloppily or in shorthand, but as long as you can decipher it, perfect. I would then have a second notebook where I would write down important or harder to understand things in a more organized manner to be study material. I did this all on pen and paper personally, I don’t think specific note-taking apps are going to be the key.

I’m not an education expert but I believe writing down everything primarily does 2 things:

• it forces you to be an active listener
• by writing everything important at least twice, you’re forming neural connections that you would not otherwise form if you were simply listening/reading material. I do believe this is forming connections that are different, if not superior, to typing on a keyboard.

I’ve been trying to get into Zettelkasten for a long time and it just hasn’t really clicked. Until yesterday, hopeful it sticks. I’ve downloaded almost all the note apps and tried different strategies, but Evergreen Notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes makes sense to my brain. There’s two things that click for me.

1. Notes are like APIs https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_note_titles_are_like_APIs
2. Notes should be complete phrases https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zLhoRUyjKU665EY16u4XXJy

It’s especially point two. I write in phrases and linking doesn’t become this daunting task. Usually I would try to understand information by summarizing, but those links help a ton and really allow me to see how it connects to other ideas. Map of contents can help to eventually go back and put into larger concepts. Also I use Obsidian and have been for a while.

Write down as close to everything as you can. I rarely actually look at these notes, just writing everything down is usually sufficient.

If you forget stuff afterwards, go back to the notes and transfer the stuff you forgot to a shorter list. Again just making the list is often enough.

If you really need to know it, find a way to use the information, even if it’s a bullshit use (alphabetize it, make a timeline, make a list of other concepts that depend on this concept, whatever). But if that fails and you really do need to memorize a big list of raw information, like the periodic table or something, then use flash cards.

Bullet points of the topics covered in sequence so I can recreate the lecture or whatever in my memory. I sprinkle on salient points as I go along.

I’m ADHD and never got the hang of ‘proper’ outline form, but it got me though my degrees. Gotta make your own system that works for your brain.

On my phone I use markor. For Pc I use joplin.

pen & paper, my books are generally digital so my notes are physical, & i always include the page number, sometimes even the paragraph or quote related to the thought. when the book is real it can be harder ergonomically i find

the difficult thing is finding the motivation to do it when your grade is not relying on you keeping good notes. i’m in a bad habit of not doing it since i’m not in a class, even though it would be very beneficial

I am finishing my master’s degree this summer and one way I approached it was annotating everything I read. I used hypothes.is to annotate all of my online college readings; anything else, I’d highlight, note, and export into Notion. Hypothes.is also exports as markdown, and has tagging. I’ve tried to keep some order to my tags. As I progressed, it became less about annotating specific lines or words, and instead writing Page Notes, that summarized the reading.

i literally never took notes throughout the entirety of my formal education process so whilst you probably shouldn’t do what i did it’s pretty possible to have postgrad qualifications without being a ‘good’ student. idk, i just couldn’t be bothered to write shit that seemed pretty self-evident from inference personally.