What's the Best Way to Write Notes? @KoiAcademy

so today's topic I wanted to really focus in on note-taking it's we've been getting a lot of questions about that and overall I think especially my YouTube scene note-taking seems to be like a very popular Trend right now school starting up again and everything so to start off I'd like to know if you could kind of walk through how you would approach learning a new subject or a new class particularly in regards to taking notes like what are the different stages of learning that you go through and then how does your note-taking differ at each

stage if that makes any sense the reason this question is a little difficult to answer is because note taking is um it's not really like a like a boom like here's the technique and you just sort of use it it's not like a hammer that that you you know like when you play games and like every time you construct something it's like the same like animation like every every single time and like it but the thing you build is different like note taking is not like that the skill is really about how you're thinking about

the information and then how you're aligning what you're putting down on paper with your thought process it's a visual representation of your thought process and I'm going to speak a little bit abstractly and I know that people don't like it when I do this but it's just really hard to explain without going into this first is that when we think about it we we really want to be thinking about what the function of note taking is so when you do good note taking it should achieve a couple of objectives number one is obviously to have

information documented so that you can refer to later in in your study arguably more important than that it's about facilitating the right cognitive processes and thought processes and what facilitating and cognitive processes really mean is that it needs to be making it easier and taking away unnecessary Parts like your brain is a vehicle with a fixed capacity there's only so much it can handle note taking should offset some of that unnecessary load so that it can really focus on doing the heavy lifting that's important for creating good learning for example like if you go through

an entire lecture without taking any notes at all that's going to be really difficult to think very deeply about because a lot of your cognitive resources are spent on just trying to hold on to everything that's being said so therefore note taking allows you to sort of offset that and so that you can track what's being said and then you can look at the paper and then therefore you can then have more thoughts coming to it that you previously just didn't have the mental capacity for and this is just like this and saying genius you

know so then the next thing is well what are those deeper processes that we really should be engaging the problem is that most people are in that very um very sort of in and out mentality in terms of note-taking the information is coming in straight away just putting it down and they're focusing so much on offloading it they're freeing up mental resources but those mental resources are not doing anything right it's just sitting there wasted so that's also not effective like both cases are completely ineffective not writing notes at all is not very effective arguably

writing too many notes without actually thinking about it deeply is actually even less effective it's actually less effective because number one because you're not trying to hold it all into in your mind your brain is not doing any of the heavy lifting at all if you're just writing everything you know completely down without thinking about it so now we're just bypassing learning completely that's like the worst case scenario and then like the second stab in the back is that now you have so many notes to go through that's actually adding time for you later to

do that processing and it sort of creates a sort of negative spiral so when we have those additional resources freed up what we really should be doing is trying to engage in that thing called higher order thinking right and higher order learning so this is about looking for if I were to just really really simplify this and coincidentally I've got a tedx talk in three days about this very topic comparing ideas against each other looking for the similarities and differences between the concepts and thinking about how we can group and categorize and relate the information

in a network and create a map of it that is as clean and as simple and as intuitive as possible and I'm going on a bit of a monologue here but I really need to Define what the word intuitive means so let me go through some examples of what intuitive means I don't think I've actually ever made a video about this like in this specific details when we're grouping different pieces of information together there are some ways of grouping it that are very very logical often the way the textbook will give it to you is

very logical the way lecturers teach it will be very logical but doesn't make it intuitive so let me give you an example here right pericardium versus what do you think I'll say next heart so myocardium could be right so at that point it's kind of like okay well first of all if I didn't already have really good domain knowledge about that will I be able to figure that out probably not and especially if that's new information you're learning then that's going to be additional cognitive resources for you to try to remember that grouping so now

you have to not only remember like what pericardium or myocardium means but now you have to then remember that's the way that you grouped it right whereas if I were to say for example outer versus what do you think the next one's going to be enter it just makes sense right and you don't have to even exert any effort to think about if I say up versus down if I say lift versus right um if I say before versus after we could add a during in there if we wanted to this is intuitive you know

um cause versus effect and you can utilize domain knowledge but it has to be domain knowledge that's really it we want to get it to the point where it is like obvious it's just drop dead obvious so so different things are obvious for different levels of expertise if you are an expert at something then if I say pericardia versus mild cotton that's like boom like you don't have to think about that at all but that's not the same level that everyone's going to be at we always want to find ways of grouping information in a

way that makes it as intuitive as possible as well as it being logical so there are ways of grouping things that are logical but are not intuitive but then there are ways of grouping things that are sometimes in Twitter but it's not necessarily logical as well for example I could say everything in the alphabet before the letter G versus and then intuitively you'll be like everything after the Liturgy but is that actually meaningful or logical relative to the context I mean unless you're studying the alphabet probably not so in that case it it would be

intuitive but it's not necessarily logical so there's this balance it has to make sense conceptually in the context of what you're studying but at the same time it has to be intuitive enough that you're not exerting effort and trying to remember the way that you've grouped and categorized information and figuring out how to do that for what you're learning is a complicated skill there's a lot of back and forth thinking there's a lot of confusion and at times it feels overwhelming I just want to say that that is all normal that's actually a very normal

part of the process that's your brain really trying to figure it out that's your brain at the gym you know pumping the weights feeling tired exerting that energy and that's producing higher quality learning and that's a very simplified version of it and there's lots of other things to talk about that's kind of the big picture so I kind of didn't talk about exactly how to write the notes but the thing is that as long as what you're writing is helping with that process and reflects what you were thinking about it's all good generally speaking it's

all good one just blanket caveat is that if you're writing notes linearly left to right down the page sequentially that's not going to work because knowledge is inherently not linear and therefore any form of linear note-taking is inherently Limited that makes sense right um on that note I I realize that you keep saying writing your notes and that um the next question I want to ask is do you always write your notes what are your thoughts on handwritten versus typed notes versus writing on an iPad or something like that I'll just preface by saying that

this is an area that there's been a lot of research on and I think it's a little overwhelming to go through all of that research and to be totally Frank and I've got some of the pertinent findings written in my report on learning but to be totally honest it's a little purposeless to go through that for for most students it's not really practical to think about all the different variations because like I said note taking reflects the thinking process and so there are so many variables that affect whether the note-taking is more or less effective

so for example if I'm typing my notes but the way I'm typing it is helping me with that thought process that's going to be much more effective than someone that's handwriting their notes but is not engaging with that process and it's very difficult to measure that as well so so research struggles to really get ground on it the latest research starts looking at how note taking has a relationship with your cognitive load and that's becoming a lot more promising because it's just more transferable across all these other variables generally speaking if I had to just

give like tips I would say try not to type notes because of the fact that typing is at the moment with the limitations of technology in most cases linear and sequential and it's very difficult to do non-linear notes now there are apps that allow you to create relationships relational note-taking apps that are built around something like zerocaster notion's a great example of a tabulated way of creating relational nodes but that's not really good either because yes you created the relationship but it isn't really you that created the relationship the relationship was actually created for you

by the software and it doesn't allow you to have the higher level which is to really discriminate and prioritize relationships you don't actually want every single thing that's related to everything else to actually be represented because then that's overwhelming because again knowledge is non-linear and it's relational inherently so everything will end up being related to everything and then it becomes purposeless the key is actually thinking about the relationships and then creating a critical decision about how important that relationship is and whether you want to represent it and how you want to represent it in the

context of everything else so if you think about like the very simple example A B and C on a page with arrows going from A to B and an arrow going from A and B to C together right so create some sort of like a triangle if I put the C underneath A and B versus if I put the C way below A and B versus if I put the C above A and B versus if I put it to the right of A and B you can see how that in a way almost makes

it feel like even where you place things on a page how thick you make a certain Arrow whether you choose to have an arrow there and the direction that the arrow goes in these are all things that actually force you to think about that relationship to a deeper level because there's a very big difference between knowing A and B are related and then that leads to C and knowing exactly how important that is the context and the purpose that it has so as a result freehand tends to be better at demonstrating that and it's much

faster than trying to get that level of discrimination through software at least for all the software that I know and I've looked at a lot of software the other thing is that freehand is slower than typed notes and that's actually a good thing because it means that it forces you to write less there are quite a few studies that have been that have shown that higher word count is associated with lower performance and the theory here is that if you're typing something verbatim you're processing it in your head less so slower actual ability to get

information on page with freehand ends up being advantageous because it forces you to be stricter with what you're actually choosing to write down which probably means that you think about a little bit more but again there's a lot of caveats there because the way you think about it you know there's so many different things that affect it but as a rule of thumb I would say freehand if possible with a stylus something digital because you can get infinite canvas and again because of the nature of knowledge like knowledge does not exist mentally in A4 pages

right so you know structuring something and spacing something in a certain way because that's how it fits on the page is going to be not a good reason to limit your learning quality so Infinite Canvas where it can really truly reflect your mind and then being able to move things around as you're restructuring the there's a lot of convenience with that obviously it's just a raising thing so I personally my go-to is I'm always using Infinite Canvas I've personally got an iPad but you could use any any device that has got a Pen stylus that

you can use for it but again the focus is really on what am I thinking about and how aligned is that what I'm writing I go into this in a little bit more depth in my video on why most mind maps uneffective as well okay um yeah I use an app called Concepts yeah same yeah that's the app that I use yeah yeah I've probably infinite cameras yeah I've given them probably like 10 000 new customers because like I'm constantly telling people to use it's just a good app I mean it's a pretty over it's

good yeah yeah it's an overfeatured app it's definitely more than people need because it's made for like artists and Architects and stuff like that but it it does a job in a great way it sounds to me that free hand and writing your notes gives you a lot more return but also that it's more difficult to do well and more difficult to do correctly and I'm seeing a lot of students are typing and the ultimate goal is to get them to freehand and to build that skill but in the meantime the bridge to going from

typing to freehand is a huge gap that without a coach or without anyone teaching them it's hard to navigate so kind of two questions here how would you get them from from you know typing to handwriting and while they're typing let's say that you are restricted to typing how would you improve big notes that makes sense yeah no that does make sense and I would actually say that I personally believe that it's much harder to do typed note-taking well than to do freehand note taking well and it depends on what you're considering as doing it

well if what you're thinking about is just getting information down then yes typing is easier without a doubt but actually the easiest way is to just download an audio recording Chuck it through a transcription software and then get it to just verbatim copy everything that was said and you don't have as automatic process so if it's about information down typing is faster but if we're thinking about it in terms of high quality learning that improves your retention and allows you to retrieve that information in the way that you probably need to for your tests and

exams especially for like curveball questions it's much harder to get that level of knowledge with any type of linear note-taking including type nodes because you'd have to have so many workarounds to work with the software to try to get it to do what you want it to do I think if that's the standard in terms of the type of thinking that you know is required like in a simple way it's like this if you want to be able to use your knowledge in a fluid way that allows you to bring multiple pieces of information together

and retrieve it and with complexity and nuance and you're able to adapt that information if the situation and will question changes you have to be thinking in that way as well when you're studying it you can't be thinking in a way that is isolated fragmented low level memorization heavy and expect to just be able like it's not it's not inherent just because you know each part in isolation doesn't mean you can actually bring it all together when you want to retrieve it at that level so you have to match the way you're studying with the

level that you want to retrieve it at so if we're thinking about doing that type of thinking then it's going to be very frustrating so I actually personally think that is Step number one is you can start with type note taking but people should start becoming more aware of where the goal post really is don't think about notes on the page because you know most people they've spent 10 years to 20 years how long they've been in you know education for they've spent all of this time they've been doing it this way they already know

that information on the page is doesn't really mean anything in terms of how they're going to perform otherwise just the more notes you write the better you do and then studying would be very easy I wouldn't have a job you know if we are aware of the fact that actually it's about this type of thinking that I'm engaging in and then we continue with type note taking they will naturally be a building frustration with the method of note taking so that would create a bit of fuel and motivation The Next Step would be to just

at least start framing out some ideas you could just have a piece of paper next to you and you could still use your type note-taking but when you're trying to engage in this thought process start just jotting down a few keywords and a few ideas while you're reading things be connecting things together on the page be looking at that page and be spending a lot of time thinking about how it's all related to each other how you can group things together and use like a little kind of just a scribble pad next to you to

do that and then over time you should start feeling more and more benefit from there and more and more frustration from the type note taking there is still a leap of faith though in my experience and it is difficult to do without sort of coaching or guidance but it's not impossible to do by any means it's difficult but there are more difficult things in life but it does take a little bit of a leap to be like okay you know what let's just give it a go just for today just for this one subject just

for this one hour let's just not type any notes let's just go straight with freehand and see what I can optimize there probably after two or three hours of tinkering and optimization you're gonna get the same level of results that you'd normally get with your type note taking anyway but you have to have the gopost set in the right place a lot of people have like a sense of dependency and insecurity about information on the page so when they have notes on like a WordPress or a notion or whatever other app that they're using then

they feel really secure about it so when they go to freehand and that huge massive dense volume of information is no longer stored in the way that they're used to that can make them feel insecure but again you have to think well what's happening in my brain in terms of the quality of knowledge that I've got in my brain that I'm actually able to access is that of a better quality in most cases the answer will be yes how do you know that you've reached that quality how do you know like you're talking about goal

posts how do you know that you're reaching that goal post that's a that's another good question uh so the first thing is that for a beginner it's very hard to know because you don't know whether you've done it right until you've already done it right enough times to real like to have seen the results from it this is the reason why it can be quite demotivating for beginners so for example when we're when we're coaching people through it we're getting them to get feedback constantly because we're the one that has to remind them like yeah

you're doing it right like and we're saying hey aren't you noticing this and this and this and this and these benefits what you're learning and they're like oh yeah now that you mention it I am noticing that so the things that we're often talking about is well how much are you able to remember like a week later if your attention is better just general confidence with the information how comfortable you feel about it and how easy it is to actually start thinking about it in a more fluid way normally if you're in that lower order

of learning when you think about the information it feels very isolated to begin with whereas when you're in that higher level it actually feels different different it feels like the knowledge is more known it does feel more intuitive it feels more obvious and it feels like you can really start anywhere and go in any direction and obviously there's different levels like there's completely not being able to do that at all and there's that you know that level to the extreme and there's a spectrum in the middle but it's about saying well where were you before

and are you a little bit closer to that now but the other thing is also sometimes I think about it from sort of hitting it from the other angle it's just go doing good retrieval practice that tests you at those higher levels so yes testing at the lower levels is useful for testing at the low levels however it's not very useful to see how good you are at the higher levels which could be exactly the way your exam will test you on so this could be like getting really really tricky questions if you've got you

know past paper questions that you can use it could be making your own or another great thing is making really tricky and challenging questions for your friends and then swapping them so you're trying to sort of challenge your friends you're trying to hit those higher levels those curveball questions um you know taking you know multiple Concepts that you know there is a relationship there and thinking well if I change these variables how does that affect this other concept if a goes up then B goes down then how does that affect C and if that's still

too easy add more variables well if a goes up and then B goes down but then D doesn't exist then how would that affect C if D is low how is that different to how that affects C we're adding multiple of these and this is the way that examiners think when they're creating difficult exam questions they're trying to catch people out that don't have that higher level of learning and so this is what's separating out that kind of 85 percent and Beyond Mark the types of questions that are forcing you to integrate more than just

have it in isolation so testing yourself in those ways is a good way of also seeing whether you've got that level of Mastery to um okay so to summarize you know that you're doing well with your notes you know you're reaching that level quality if you feel comfortable or confident if you're able to manipulate it flow all in any direction and then retention and then you you start diving deep into that feeling confident part because I do remember you talking about um was it using past papers and how knowing the right answer or checking your

answers isn't always you know the only thing to focus on you have to actually be sure that you know the answer with confidence yeah so it's it's in a way a little bit binary it's like this if you are asked a question and you are not able to answer it confidently there is a problem it's a very kind of black and white thing there so there's multiple like permutations that they can take so you either answer it right but you're not confident on it and then you check the answer it's like oh I got it

right well what does that tell you it doesn't really give that much value because it's like well you may have gotten lucky actually the issue is that you didn't know that it was right so there's a gap there so they could test you on very similar set of Concepts maybe in a slightly different way and that might catch you out that's the reason why a lot of people will set an exam and then they'll think like I can't believe I got that wrong like I did a question that was just basically the same thing before

when I was practicing however if you don't think about it in terms of like whether you were right or wrong but more about your confidence with that that's going to be more indicative of your true level of knowledge and the other thing is also if you you know answer it and you're not feeling confident about it and therefore you're kind of looking through your notes to figure out you know what what is the right answer here like you want to get to the point where you're like yeah I'm confident this is definitely the answer and

then you check the answer and it's wrong what does that mean so what that means is that you develop confidence but you were actually missing an entire perspective on the topic So within the perspective you are thinking about it may have been correct but there was a variable that you weren't thinking about there was sort of another factor that came into play that was completely missed so again what does that actually say again if we think about in a binary way if you knew how to think about the question in the right way you would

have gotten it correctly so therefore not getting it correctly even with having open book situation that means that method of thinking that could catch you out and often that's very powerful because those methods of thinking are very transferable there's probably lots of other places and other Concepts and other types of questions that will catch you out in exactly the same way and those are really difficult to catch if you're not aware of your confidence with answering it if you're not using that as your compass if you're just using it as an answer sheet it's sort

of like a mystery like sometimes I get it right sometimes I get it wrong I don't really know so I'm just gonna hope that it doesn't come up in the test and if it does come up you just get it wrong so um and so if you are missing that variable factor that method of thinking that perspective in the first place then that usually means that the way you've structured the information was incorrect so remember what I said before about how you're grouping and looking for relationships and trying to make it as logical and as

intuitive as possible there was probably a gap there there was an additional relationship that wasn't thought about there was something that you thought was intuitive but if you think about it it's actually not very logical or there was something that you know you thought usually that's going to be the case and this is going to be a little bit technical but I'll just say this because people will probably ask this question if you have that issue where you're testing yourself and you feel like there's that perspective that was missing it's more likely going to be

that you thought of something in a way that felt intuitive but it wasn't fully logical and so therefore it didn't really hold up in the context of it when you go deep enough rather than the other way around that it's uh logical but it's not intuitive that is most likely going to manifest and you being able to not remember what that relationship or structure was so making something intuitive helps you think about it and helps you hold on to the information but making something logical is what allows you to really navigate that relationship with high

accuracy yeah so yeah pretty deep on that but um yeah Circle back to notes [Music] about productivity in relation to those do you teach [Music]