From note-taking to note-making

There are three key principles to making good notes:

• Rephrase the original idea. Don’t use the author’s or teacher’s original language.
• Connect ideas together. To help with understanding and recall, make sure to create links between the ideas you are studying.
• Build upon the ideas. As you learn more about a topic, add more examples, more questions, and more related ideas.

At all stages of making notes, the keyword is: active engagement.

The use of diagrams that visually map information using branching traces back centuries. Popularised by Tony Buzan, an English author and psychology consultant, mind mapping consists in visually connecting information around a central concept. It has been associated with better memory and recall, better creativity, and better connections between concepts. To take things further, you can try more advanced methods for thinking in maps.

A long-term endeavour to cultivate your curiosity (planting seeds), expand your knowledge (growing trees), and produce new thoughts (harvesting fruits), digital gardening consists in crafting and connecting evergreen notes in a non-hierarchical repository, similar to a personal wiki.

A simple process used by German sociologist Dr Niklas Luhmann to publish more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles in his lifetime, the Zettelkasten method uses index cards and unique identifiers to interlink notes together. The book How to Take Smart Notes does a fantastic job at explaining the method.