Taking Notes That Future Me Would Appreciate

As the next academic year is approaching and as I’m starting to prepare for the exam I postponed, I’m noticing that the kind of notes I made for literature readings last semester aren’t actually that useful by themselves. I like taking notes by hand because limiting myself to what my hand can write with one tool makes for less thinking about how the note looks, something I’m invariably prone to obsessing over when I dread the work. The lack of menus/options and the fact that I wouldn’t want to write too much because my hand would hurt are a feature, not a bug. This way I don’t make note of possibly unimportant details and would write only what’s really relevant as a brief overview of what I’m reading. All in all, I’m satisfied with this approach – in the short term.

Problems arise when a few weeks go by since making those bullet point summaries and I remember the concepts in them, but not the title beneath which I would find what I need. So I have to look through the various texts I read to recount information on a concept which is frequently scattered across multiple documents relating each to a different text. The solution may be obvious: Take notes based on concepts, not texts. But that stands on shaky grounds when you’re still unsure how relevant a concept is at all. Worse, when you’re unsure, it might be wasted time to invest into creating a note about something fleeting.

The alternative, which I plan on sticking to henceforth, would be simply creating a note with the concept’s title and making a list of which classes/texts work with it. An index, basically. I could always go back very easily and find the answer to my query without trial and error. The best part about this is that the index creation takes way less time than condensing disparate pieces of information across different texts into one note and I could still condense when I feel like or when it’s materially beneficial; for example when revising before an exam.1

Many of my classes reference each other’s topics directly every now and again2 so this process is proving necessary or else I might end up spending way more time on looking up info I had already learned than actually putting it down properly.

  1. And it’s not like I’m writing a thesis for which I’m looking for specific information which would cancel out this whole problem for the most part. ↩︎

  2. It was satisfying to see the dots connect with time when more context was continuously being added from different perspectives. That’s one of my favorite things about political science so far, as opposed to economics where I could safely forget most things once the exam was over. ↩︎

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