Epistemic status: untested hypothesis but seems obvious now that I’ve thought of it.
When choosing your note-taking method, you should take your entire learning system into account.
I’ve been taking handwritten notes until now, mainly due to research indicating that handwriting notes improves retention relative to typing notes. At the same time, I use Anki for active recall and spaced repetition. However, this combination makes writing paper notes superfluous—the retention benefits obtained via handwriting notes are probably dwarfed by those of active recall. In that case, I should optimize for the speed at which I can take my notes and move them into either summaries or Anki decks, a goal to which taking notes on paper is antithetical.
The “handwriting improves retention” is probably accurate but incomplete—it doesn’t account for the time spent on note-taking, or for the interactions between note-taking and studying.
Personal context: taking notes at a summer camp where far more of the content is unfamiliar to me than in classes at school. The notes I take during class come out more disorganized if I don’t have the time to fully process the content during class, and written on paper, incurs the overhead of having to sort through and rewrite them. In school that’s at most 5-10% of my notes for a given class, but it’s closer to 50% in the summer camp. Observing the terrible inefficiency made me consider overhauling my note-taking system.
Epistemic status: untested hypothesis but seems obvious now that I’ve thought of it.
When choosing your note-taking method, you should take your entire learning system into account.
I’ve been taking handwritten notes until now, mainly due to research indicating that handwriting notes improves retention relative to typing notes. At the same time, I use Anki for active recall and spaced repetition. However, this combination makes writing paper notes superfluous—the retention benefits obtained via handwriting notes are probably dwarfed by those of active recall. In that case, I should optimize for the speed at which I can take my notes and move them into either summaries or Anki decks, a goal to which taking notes on paper is antithetical.
The “handwriting improves retention” is probably accurate but incomplete—it doesn’t account for the time spent on note-taking, or for the interactions between note-taking and studying.
Personal context: taking notes at a summer camp where far more of the content is unfamiliar to me than in classes at school. The notes I take during class come out more disorganized if I don’t have the time to fully process the content during class, and written on paper, incurs the overhead of having to sort through and rewrite them. In school that’s at most 5-10% of my notes for a given class, but it’s closer to 50% in the summer camp. Observing the terrible inefficiency made me consider overhauling my note-taking system.