The Art & Science of Making Study Notes

The title makes this post looks like a lesson for school children who make notes in the class room while listening to the teacher.

They can learn a thing or two from this too, but notes are not only for school children & undergrads.

Notes take away the burden of having to memorize things. Since the field we’re in changes continuously we have to keep on learning and my notes are my trusted friends who never fail me.

It all started due to two weaknesses. I have terrible memory and terrible handwriting. Forget the lessons, I have a hard time remembering faces of my university colleagues and even my lecturers. If you ask me to name a few subjects I took, I’m embarrassed to say that I’d struggle to do it.
Despite this issue, my academic records are not so bad. In the beginning it was due to my hand written notes. But they were not pretty, it was not motivating to study those sad ugly handwritten notes.
Things changed when I was doing my MBA. Lecturers shared soft copies of lecture notes, mainly slide shows. There were so many and since they were in PowerPoint they took a lot of space. Many students just printed these and studied. I was depressed at the thought of having to study piles and piles of notes. I started coping and pasting them into a word doc and noticed I can shrink a 10-page slide show to a single page. Ever since I’ve been perfecting my method of digital note making.

I try to make my notes as comprehensive as possible and at the same time as compact as possible.

Many have asked what tools I use to make notes. I happen to use a ground breaking platform called Microsoft Word! Jokes aside it’s the best & the most popular word processing application ever, and has catered to all my note making needs over the years. I don’t see any requirement to switch to another tool. Plus I don’t use any add-ons or templates, just basic plain Jane features everybody has access to.

Here are some basic settings that help me to squeeze in more content per page without cluttering it.

Design
Style Set: Modern

Layout
Margins: Narrow
Columns: Two

I set Orientation as Portrait mostly, but in some cases I switch to Landscape if the images, tables are too large to fit into a column of a portrait setup.

I love minimalism and try to bring it to all aspects in my life. I have a long way to go before I call myself a minimalist, but I see the benefits of it in many areas including my study notes.

Even as a software developer my favorite mantra is simplicity. In my opinion the best solution is the simplest solution that gets the job done. I find it very satisfying to refactor code and reduce number of lines and make it more readable, to the extent of treating it as a hobby and spending hours doing so. (yes I agree, I’m weird & I need to get a life)

My notes reflect my obsession with minimalism, sentences are rephrased to make the point as clear as possible in minimum number of words. All the non-value adding content is removed.

When we blog, write a book or deliver a talk we try to make it interesting and adopt a story telling style. But when it comes to notes I find the opposite approach works the best. Boring, short & to the point serves the purpose.

Whenever I go though the notes again I find opportunities to ‘refactor’ the content and make it more clear or more concise.

Another way to make it compact is to ensure there is no redundancy in your notes. In courses, books, lectures they introduce redundancy with purpose. In fact, it’s a great tool to internalize a concept; present it in different ways and give multiple examples so that the mind can absorb it better. But notes are a reference to something we have already learnt & internalized.

You do need to include examples in your notes, but keeping it simple and stripping it off to the bare minimum helps to save space.

Sometimes the format we present certain information can make a drastic difference in how clear and compact it is. Presenting them in tables, bullet points or in illustrations is usually a better than lengthy texts.

As they say a picture are worth a thousand words, illustrations help us to provide information in the most compact & clear way. Sometimes I Google illustrations that are not included in the course/lecture & add it to the note and sometimes I take screenshots from video lectures. If the illustration is making the point, there is no need to waste the precious space by adding texts explaining it. You can save some more space by cropping the images to remove unwanted parts and changing the wrapping style to square if the images are small. If it’s a table using ‘Autofit to Window’ option makes optimum use of space.

Some material can use special formatting. Say for example there are some code examples. Having them in a different font color or a background color can set them apart from the other material. They can have a smaller font size and even less spacing between the lines.

You got to be careful with the design formats though. Usually fancier the design more space it will take. Take Word table formats for example. I always go for the basic plain table format with ‘no spacing’ unless the table contains lengthy content that can use a bit more space.

The best way to ensure the note captures all the details is to keep updating it as we learn. This is easy with online and individual learning, since we can pause listening to a video/podcast or reading a book and update the note. Digital learning resources are very note-friendly since we can easily copy paste content and optimize them as we like it.If it’s a classroom session or a live broadcast where we cannot take our own time, we can always jot down key points and update the note later.

Navigation and search are two main reasons that make digital notes stand out from physical/hand written notes. In Microsoft Word you can format the titles as Heading 1, Heading2 etc. I never go for custom formatting, the ready made ones work fine for me. Once the headings are in place we can use the left side navigation pane to navigate. Since it shows the overall structure/organization of the entire material I find it it gives a clear organized picture to the mind and help me remember things better as well. Once the note is complete or if you want to share it with someone you can save it as a pdf and in options panel enable the option to convert headings into bookmarks. This way generated pdf will have a navigation panel as well. Optionally you can add a table of contents, but navigation panes are more useful.