Making Notes Is Holding You Back - Do This Instead

Hi, I'm Tom. Welcome back to the channel. This video is going to be about making notes.

And making notes is something I've been passionate about since my GCES. Um, passionate about not making notes. The reason being that I've always found it to be very time consuming.

So, we're going to really dive into detail in this video about why people make notes. um what the process of making notes looks like for a lot of people uh why you shouldn't make notes and then also to give you a good alternative strategy to making notes. So let's jump straight into the video.

So the first question, the first thing we need to look at is why do people make notes? And I think it's uh important to start with why people are doing this in the first place so that we can address um address those reasons really. So the first reason uh which is a good reason is to collect information.

Whoops. Information. So essentially when you study a course like medicine or even your A levels any type kind of course engineering whatever it is you need to collect together information that you need to learn.

Um so there's loads of different resources that you you have access to. You'll have your lectures, your clinical placements, textbooks, online resources, videos, podcasts, whatever. There's so many different resources you can use to study from.

And so the process of making notes is essentially collecting together all of that information in one place. And it can either form kind of a quick reference uh and guide. So you've got a really complicated textbook.

It's full of horrible uh long paragraphs that are very detailed. You've got lecture slides. You've got stuff you've picked up on clinical placements.

You've got all these different resources. And rather than keep going back to all of them again and again, you put them in a set of notes and that creates a quick reference guide. It's a very good reason.

And the other thing is for future learning. So you are reading through a textbook and you think I need to know this information. I'm going to create a set of notes to put that information in a place where I can learn from in the future which also seems like a great reason.

Second reason for making notes which I also think are is a good reason is to help you learn. So when you when you uh talk to people and they and you ask them why do you make notes and they say well this is the best way that I've learned. I've found that making notes helps me learn the information that's why I do it.

So essentially the idea is that it increases your engagement. So you're reading through a topic rather than just passively reading through that topic. Making notes helps you feel like you're engaging with the material and um actually taking more of it in.

Second reason is to organize a thoughts. So you read through a topic and by making a set of notes on that topic you feel like you've organized the thoughts into your set of notes. Sounds very good.

And the third thing is by actually writing this improves the memory. So by handwriting information there's that has actually been shown to improve how much you retain that information. So again really good reason for that.

Now we're moving on to some reasons that I think are uh bad reasons for making notes. So if these apply apply to you, have a good think about uh whether it's sensible to be doing that. So reason number three is that this is the default study method.

So you might be saying to yourself, well, um I just thought that's how everybody studies. That's kind of the the way to do it. So this is like everyone We'll put this in speech marks is doing this.

So, everybody makes notes. That's just what you do. You go to the library, you get your textbook out, and the way that you study is you make notes from that textbook or you bring up the lecture slides, you make notes from the lecture slides, or you go on a YouTube video and you make notes of what's written in that YouTube video.

So, this is kind of like the default thing. This just what everybody does. If it's your default strategy and you've not really thought about it, that's uh um that's what I want to kind of discourage with these videos.

I want to make you more conscious and intentional with your study strategies. So, you're not just, you know, doing something by default. You're actually thinking about it and you have a reason for doing it.

So if anything you're doing is kind of the default, you've not thought about it, then I would encourage you to really give some thought about why you're doing it that way. Have you tested whether that way actually works and would you be better off doing it a different way? Second thing here is it could be advised by teachers.

So when you're in school or you're at university and the teachers say you should go and make notes on this topic because that will help you learn it or some something to that effect. What you're doing is taking advice from the teachers but that teacher may not have actually thought about um whether that's a good strategy. That might just be their default.

Maybe when they were at university they were told to uh just make notes on topics. They didn't think about it. That's what they did.

It got them through their exams and now they're passing on that advice to you without really looking at, you know, whether this is the best strategy. And then the other one is uh Instagram. So this is where you you you know Susie Suz's always in the library.

She's got a beautiful set of notes. They look stunning and you're always envious of her notes. And then you turns out Susie's on Instagram.

You go on her Instagram and the notes look absolutely beautiful and she's got hundreds of thousands of followers and she's got sponsorship deals and she does really well. In fact, she sells her notes and she's uh now a millionaire and she doesn't have to study medicine anymore. So, you want to be like Susie?

Well, that's great. I mean um having beautiful notes and putting them on Instagram and becoming an influencer is is great but that doesn't mean that um make making notes is the optimal way to uh to actually study for your exams and this is what we're talking about here. So let's move on to the next thing.

Number four reason, which is again not a great reason, is you're not really sure what else you can do. So, I've heard this reason before say, "Why do you make notes? " And either it's the default, um, you know, that's what everybody does, or I'm not really sure what else to do.

What else would you do? how how else can you learn if you're not making notes? Um so therefore making notes must be the way to do it.

And number five is that it's low effort. And this isn't a this isn't a reason that somebody would give consciously. I don't think if I asked them why' you do it, they wouldn't say well it's easy.

Um, or maybe they would, but making notes is kind of shallow work. And what I mean by that is you can go to the library for 10 hours a day, sit down at a desk, and just copy stuff out from a textbook. And while you're doing that, you can be flicking backwards and forwards to your phone, you can be chatting to other people.

we can go and get coffee and and everything can be very nice and easy and chill because you're just, you know, just copying a textbook. It's quite straightforward. This is shallow work and it's easier than doing the hard work of really trying to learn the stuff.

Um, making notes is kind of like the easy option. It's much easier than really trying to get your head around top a topic, really trying to learn it, testing yourself, free recall, all the things I've been through in the other videos. Um, making those is kind of an easier strategy and you can do it for longer.

So if you're doing deep work, I found that if you're doing deep work, meaning really intense, cognitively demanding tasks where you're really trying to learn stuff, after maybe an hour or up to 3 hours, your brain is fried. So when I was revising for for my finals, I found that I could almost just max out at like four hours or 5 hours in a day. Um, once I hit that level, my brain was so tired from trying to process and retain information, I just couldn't do any more work.

So, if you do this deep work, people might find it so challenging that after a few hours, they can't do anything more for the day and they think, "Oh, this is this is not a good strategy because it's so tiring. " So they go to note takingaking which you can do for 12 hours a day without much effort because it's easy and they think well 12 hours must be better than two hours but in fact when it comes to learning the two hours of deep intense work is much better than the 12 hours of kind of shallow easy work. The other thing here is it's like procrastinate procrastinating.

Sorry about if any of my spellings are wrong on these videos. I'm not I'm not good at multitasking. So, there's this procrastinating aspect of it.

So, there's always this I don't know if you've ever said this to yourself. I'll start learning after making notes. So there's this idea that you'll finally start learning the information after you have your all your notes organized, set up in in one place, you know, um put on a shelf in a beautiful ring binder colorcoded, labeled up, highlighted, everything else, then you'll start learning.

The problem with this is um of course that you never get to that stage and you never start learning. But be careful if you're kind of putting off the hard work of actually learning it and making notes as a kind of excuse procrastinating activity to put off the hard work. Be cautious about that.

All right, let's move on to the next thing which is reasons not to make notes. Okay. Reason number one is that it's time conssuming.

So making notes takes hours. when it comes to to making notes uh and transferring information from one place to another that's going to take you hours and hours and hours um putting together your own resource from scratch uh takes takes you forever. So for example when I wrote the zero to finals medicine book uh the first edition in 2018209 it took me 9 to 12 months of really really intense hard work to put together that book.

Now, if you're revising for finals and you've got three months to revise and your idea is to create something equivalent where it's like a set of notes that you can revise from for finals, how are you going to squeeze in what took me 9 or 12 months as somebody who'd already learned that information and was working as a doctor at that point for a couple of years? How are you going to squeeze that into this three-month period and then have enough time to do multiple repetitions of each topic um before your exams? It's just too labor intensive.

And the problem is you have limited time. whatever sort of course or exam you're you're working towards, you need to uh go through the content of that course multiple times leading up to the exam. And you may have two, three, four months to to get all that information together, then cover it multiple times.

And if you're going to create a perfect set of notes that's, you know, beautifully colorcoded and everything else before then, plus go through it multiple times before your exam, um, you're you're going to be in a difficult position. I give you an example. When I did my third semester of medical school, which was the first semester of my second year of medical school, I decided to put as much effort into that semester as I'd ever put into any exam or more in fact.

And my goal was to, you know, do really well come top of the year and really excel in that semester. So, I put in more time to that semester than any other semester and any exam that I've done since. I was literally doing 12 14hour days every day for the whole semester and putting together a beautiful set of mind maps.

So I was taking information from every resource that I could think of from the books, from the um from the tutorials, from the PBL sessions, from the lectures, from everywhere. And I was putting it all together and creating these beautiful mind maps. And I had this massive folder of mind maps that covered everything I could think of.

But the problem was I then didn't have enough time to actually learn those mind maps at the end. So I ran out of time and I'll talk about this uh this semester a couple of times as we go through the other reasons. Second reason is copying doesn't help.

So let's illustrate what I mean when I say just copying out notes. So sitting in the library, you've got a textbook that you're trying to learn from. You're creating a set of notes and then you've got your notepad which you're going to put into a folder, keep for later and study.

So you you sit down at the uh desk in the library, I open the book. Let's say you're studying sepsis. And what you do then is literally almost wrote copy this.

So you're doing a topic on sepsis, right? And then you're um reading through this. Sepsis involves a large immune response to an infection.

So you put sepsis large immune response to infection. And then this causes causes systemic inflammation and organ dysfunction. So literally copying out almost word for word from the textbook.

And then you put a nice colorful box around this and you highlight some important words. So large immune response, systemic inflammation, organ dysfunction and you need to highlight of course infection. So what you're doing here is just making it look really nice and pretty.

And then the next thing is you move on to pathophysiology. So the pathophysiology is macrofasages, lymphosytes and mar cells recognize pathogens and release cytoines. So macrofasages, lymphosytes and m cells.

So they recognize pathogens and release cytoines such as interlucans and tumor necrosis factor. So interlucans and tumor necrosis factor and to activate the immune system. And then to make this look pretty, you put a box around each one of these.

And then these here, what they're essentially doing is just copying this out. And you can do this for hours at a time because it's not particularly cognitively challenging. And so at the end of 12 hours they have uh you know a beautiful set of notes that basically just represents the same textbook that they used originally.

This is not a this is not a good way to learn the information. Copying doesn't help you retain the information that well. There is some good evidence that rephrasing or reorganizing is better.

So if you read through the whole topic and so you read through the whole of sepsis and then you try to reorganize the idea and reexlain or reproduce the idea but in your own words and your own phrases, reorganizing it in some way or using mind maps to kind of visually structure what you've just read. That's better um than just copying. However, let's move on.

So, this is what I did. Um this is the strategy I used when I did my third semester of medical school. So, number three is over reliance or using it as a crutch.

So once you have those set of notes, your brain then says, "Oh, I've got the information there. I don't need to retain it. " Um, so essentially your brain says, "This is not worth me retaining because I know it's just in my set of notes.

" So, you might have this experience where you're in your exam and a question comes up and you think it's in my notes, but you don't have it retained in your head. What really really matters is how much information is retained in your head. And the fourth reason is that you don't know enough.

This is really important and this may be even the most important reason why you shouldn't make notes. So when you create a set of notes that you're planning to then use later on. So you're going to use this set of notes to revise from in preparation for your exams.

Let's say you're making that notes the first time you come across this material. The issue is you don't have enough knowledge and understanding at that point to create an optimal set of notes. So when you go through that content from your notes, you're learning from the ignorant version of you.

So when I made my mind maps for uh medical school in my third semester and I put I I collected information from various sources to make a mind map on say Crohn's disease or say the um uh motor neurons in the body because it was a physiology uh semester. I was putting down into my mind maps my limited knowledge from my first review of that topic. And so when I went back to that mind map and tried to learn it, what was I learning from?

I was learning from my ignorant self who didn't know much about that topic. So when you're trying to learn something uh you need multiple repetitions of that topic, right? So the first time you learn something, your understanding of it is a bit impaired.

It's not great. You might kind of understand it a bit. Um this is a bit like if you watch a movie, you'll kind of understand the movie.

You watch the movie the second time and suddenly you realize all these details that you didn't get the first time. Then you watch it say six months later and suddenly there's a whole new meaning to the movie where you think oh I completely missed this this part of the the movie and this is happening when you go through content multiple times. You'll read through a topic, you'll get a general gist of it, but you might be a bit confused on some aspects.

And if you put that down in a set of notes, and then you try and learn from that set of notes, you're learning from your first impression of that topic. So when you make some notes, you're capturing your current understanding and therefore you're limiting your potential. If you're revising from your current understanding, future you is never going to get any better.

So going back to the original sources helps you to really pick out even more detail. And this I've seen over and over again with my uh own learning over the course of A levels, medical school, then post-graduate exams and even now as a GP when I keep going back through things, rewriting these textbooks and so on, my level of understanding is increasing with each iteration. And so if I was just relying on my original kind of impression, I would never get any better.

At at the same time, everything is updating. So um things are changing. You're I I've heard people even as sort of GP trainee saying, I'm going back to my medical school notes.

Well, by the by the time you've been a GP trainee from medical school, the guidelines have changed, research is updated, treatments are updated, things that used to be recommended and no longer recommended and so on. So, um, you want the most up-to-date information and you don't want to rely on your older self who didn't understand it as well as you do now. So, the next question is what to do instead.

So, what to do instead? So, you don't want to make notes. You're kind of convinced that making notes is not a great use of time and is not going to um help you improve your exam scores.

So, there's two good reasons in my opinion to to make notes. One is to collect in sorry, one is to collect information. So what you're doing is you've got all these different sources of information.

You've got your lectures, books, and so on. And you want to get all that information in one place. Um, and you want to have it there so that when you come to do space repetitions, learning that topic, you've got a source of information to come back to and learn from.

This is a good reason because there are so many different sources. But um like we've said there's all these limitations. So what I would do here is suggest this external uh internal database strategy.

So your external database this is your kind of uh notes and the external database is one source of information where you keep all the things that you need to learn and the internal database is what you know and this is actually what's retained in your in your brain in your memory. So the external database is where you put stuff externally so that you can learn from it. And the internal database is what you have in your mind.

And your goal is to transfer things from the external database to the internal database. And you want to create an external database as quickly and rapidly as possible. The difference between this and traditional note takingaking is that people think that the note takingaking which is kind of creating the external database is the actual activity itself.

But in this uh strategy this process is the activity transferring it from the external to the internal database. So you want to um create an external database as quickly as possible. So what you do is start with a readymade uh set of notes study guide.

And maybe years ago this wasn't as practical, but nowadays there's such good resources available that you don't need to make your own notes. You can just get started straight away. So an perfect example of this is the zero tofinals medicine book.

This is designed um to cover medicine and there's also a surgery, pediatrics, obsini book and so on. But if you're doing A levels, there's great study guides available. If you're doing GCSEs, same thing.

If you're studying um any other topic, there will be an equivalent to this. And you can also um if you don't have anything available nowadays you've got things like grock or chat GPT where you can say make me a set of notes on this topic. It'll make it and you can just print that out, put it in a folder and you're good to go.

That's an external database. Obviously, you want to double check some of the key facts because sometimes they're a bit unreliable, but they're probably 90% reliable and they're going to be more often than not um as reliable as you would be if you were making the notes yourself. So, yeah.

So, you want something like this. So, it's got uh key information in a really succinct format. So every time you come to learn that topic, you can go straight to this and start learning from it.

Um, and then let's say you're where did my pen go? Let's say you're you come across some kind of information here that you want to add in. Um and so let's say you're going to a lecture and your lecture is about uh liver cerosis, right?

So you're covering liver cerosis for your lecture and liver cerosis is already a topic in your external database. But so ideally before your lecture you study this so that during the lecture you have that information at the front of your mind ready to go. So ready to um you know incorporate the new information from the le lecture into your existing understanding of the topic.

And then during the lecture if you find that they go through some kind of detail that's really important that you know is missing from your existing external database you can add in the detail. just put it in here as a as a very succinct detail that um you know in the white space that you can then learn from later. And this way you're not starting from scratch.

You're not creating anything. You've already got an existing external database, but you're adding small details. And worst case scenario, if you need quite a lot of information to add, you can just put a page in with your additional scribbles, but very very succinct.

Don't put too much information because with your external database, you want to be able to study it. You don't want to be overwhelmed by it that there's just too much information there. So, that's the external uh internal database strategy.

So, you're starting with an external database. you're adding details as you need to and then you're um then you're learning from those details repeatedly doing repeated study sessions. So let's uh add that here.

So you start with a readym made set of notes, add details uh as needed. And the other benefit to reading through it before you you go into a lecture as well as helping you understand the lecture better and incorporate the new information means that you don't have to take notes in that lecture. And um so you're not spending the whole lecture just kind of frantically trying to write down everything that you're going to need to know for later.

You can really focus on absorbing the information and just add in the details when you need to. And then the fourth thing is spaced uh study sessions in order to transfer it to your internal database. So that's the external internal database method which solves this problem of collecting together information by kind of rapidly collecting information and then transfer and focusing on transferring it to your internal database which is what's in your memory.

So the next question is or the next good reason for making notes is uh to help you with learning. So this is actually the process of um creating your internal database. people think that but the process of taking information from a textbook and putting it in your own notes helps you to you what you're doing when you're doing that is actually transferring it into your mind.

Um so importantly this is only beneficial if only if you're rephrasing slash reorganizing slashteing. So if you're taking that information, you're reading the whole topic, not like the example I showed you, but reading the whole of sepsis and then reorganizing that information in a novel way that can help you learn. But a better way, in my opinion, is not to make notes.

You're not creating a set of notes. What you're doing is taking your external database and you're studying it in a way that transfers it straight to your internal database. And you if you want to know how to do this, go to my video on read and recall.

So this is the strategy for taking information from the page or from your external database and transferring it to your internal database. You're not making notes, but you can be writing things down or rephrasing or teaching. So, what do I mean by this?

Well, you're going through your external database or the textbook or whatever you're using to study and instead of making notes, what you're doing is jotting things down, reorganizing ideas. You can do free recall or explaining it to somebody else as a way to learn. But then at the end of the study session, instead of having a set of notes that you're keeping for future revision, you've got a set of scribbles and ideas that you then throw away and you get rid of them.

And so you're getting the benefit of um you know, note takingaking for learning, but you're not taking for keeping the notes. You're just doing it for learning. And so you're not precious.

They don't have to look pretty. They're not um you know going on Instagram. They're just scribbles that help you while you're making them to learn, but you're getting rid of them.

And then the next time you'll go back to your external database and do it that way. So, that's the end of the video. We've been through why people make notes, why you shouldn't make notes, and the solution uh to to making notes, the alternative to making notes.

Hopefully, you found that video helpful. Um, do leave me a comment below. Um, if you have any further questions or any ideas or you disagree with what I'm saying or you have another reason for making notes, I'd love to hear about it.