Taking notes is something I consider essential to a learning process. Generally, if I'm trying to learn a concept, whether it be for school or my own learning desire, I try to take notes that are meaningful, something I would be willing to read sometime later, and happily show to others. My usual process is to always start messy and move the messy notes into a separate notebook; one that's neat with helpful visuals. These visuals tend to be drawings or multi-color text that helps me distinguish topics like vocabulary, conceptual explanations, hypothetical usage, and do's and don'ts.
Here's an example of me learning about Python classes and object-oriented programming in Python:
Pretty messy right? These notes are what I take as I'm learning, whether that be through video or reading. I don't want to disturb the flow of either learning process, so I typically don't pay attention to how pleasing my notes look, but rather focus on how useful my notes are.
Once I've finished the rough learning, I then take the time to revise my notes in my neater notebook. I'll generally clear a whole page or two based on the subject and write down the biggest takeaways alongside the information that I found to be the most useful.
Now that I have a clear section, I'll re-read my notes to determine what I would want to keep or throw away. I generally like to mark the order of what notes move in first, and cross out each section as I go. This way I prevent myself of writing down the same thing and keep a clear track.
I'll continue this process up until the very last section and voilà! A nice section on Python classes and OOP that I can refer to in the future
If you take notes and have any tips or recommendations, I'd love to hear them! I absolutely adore seeing other people's notebooks and sometimes even draw inspiration from them so please do feel free to share!
Top comments (4)
I’m probably the worst note taker in history, but the very act of scribbling anything as I’m taking in new info helps my process.
My notes:
scribbles always help me when I start to pay less attention to a video or lecture! they always bring extra life to notes :)
I use to take notes like that before. Now I'm taking notes by writing code that works and commit on github. That way I fill my Github profile while learning.
That's a genius way! It sounds like it helps keeping what you know updated for anyone to view which is an added bonus