Stop Wasting Time: A Teacher’s Take on the Best Note-Taking Tools for University

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

I spend five, sometimes seven, years of a student’s time in education preparing them for the next stage of their lives. Whether its an apprenticeship, full-time work or onto University, there are so many things to choose from when it comes to planning for the rest of your life.

If you’re looking to start University – or have just enjoyed your first week or so there – you’ve probably come to the same conclusion that I did when I started my First Year there – ten years ago now:

University is hard.

Not hard in the sense that you’re going to struggle with the key concepts and modules – that all comes down to a mix of personal interest, enthusiasm, hard work and enjoyment. University is hard because it’s taking you out of your comfort zone – a classroom – and putting you somewhere totally new. You’ve also been given the freedom to choose how you want to work, when and where you want to do it.

No wonder it can be so overwhelming.

So, let’s allay some fears and put things into perspective: keep reading for a guide to the best way to take notes everywhere and anywhere you might work, whether it’s in a notebook, on your laptop, or anywhere else.

If you’re not caught up, I’ve already been busy putting together an essential guide to starting University. Get those read ASAP so you’re ready to hit the ground running:

The student’s playbook: note-taking in action

Note-taking looks so different depending on the context in which you’re making them. Let’s take a look at how this looks in the main places you’ll be stopping and jotting key concepts and ideas.

In the lecture hall

Before class begins, do all the pre-reading possible. Review the notes that you made in preparation for the lecture, or whatever notes you took in the previous seminar, to remind yourself of what you’ve learned already. This’ll help to reduce the impact of the forgetting curve, which you can read more about here.

When you’re sat in the lecture hall itself, keep your ears peeled for key phrases, like when your lecturer says things like, ‘this is important’ or ‘to summarise,’ to help you to extract the most central ideas. It’s important that you don’t just write down whatever’s being said verbatim and instead capture key thoughts. After all, what you’re hearing shouldn’t really be that new if you’ve done the pre-reading.

Once you’re done, think about the power of 15 minutes. This is a critical habit of reviewing and clarifying your notes shortly after the lecture to make sure they’re streamlined and only capture what you truly need. Equally, you might re-read what you’ve got and realise that you’re missing something massive, so now is your opportunity to add to it.

In the seminar room

Don’t be the person who hides behind their laptop screen. Do the pre-reading, go to the lectures, and then be ready to bring your ideas and discuss them with your fellow students. The professor in the room is only really there to facilitate discussion and foster idea acquisition.

The sheer number of times that I was sat in a seminar room and having to do all of the heavy lifting when it came to conversations was painful – and it was obvious who had done the reading and who hadn’t. You’re spending a lot of money to go to University, so make the most of it.

In your bedroom (or the library)

The best laid plans of mice and men never usually work out. You might suggest meeting a friend in the library after your lectures, but after a couple weeks, you might end up just going straight home. Or, even worse, you might get distracted and start talking to each other, getting nothing done and keeping the rest of the building distracted.

So, regardless of whether you’ll be doing the majority of your studying on campus or in your own bedroom, here are the key things to bear in mind:

  1. Set up your study space for success. You want to be in an environment that’s conducive to your learning, not one that’s cluttered. A tidy desk means a tidy mind.
  2. Sit with all of your tools. Make the coffee, grab the highlighters and pop your laptop on your desk with you before you begin. Otherwise you’ll be constantly getting up and down, and you’ll never get through what you need to.
  3. Setup a Pomodoro timer to keep yourself focused. If that doesn’t work, here’s how to become indistractible, so you’ll never get distracted again.

The tools that make it easy (digital or analogue?)

Make no mistake: the tools that you use are important to taking effective notes. When I was at Uni, I hand wrote everything when in lectures, seminars, or when I was revising. When I was gathering evidence for essays, I’d use my laptop. These days, everything that I do is digital – but sometimes I like to hand write my digital notes, and so for that I’ll use a stylus (read my review of my favourite digital pens).

Ultimately, you should experiment and see which works best for you – this might change depending on the context. Either way, when making your mind up, it makes sense to consider the pros and cons for each method.

Whether it’s digital or analogue, pick the method that works best for you

Analogue tools

On the one hand, writing everything using a traditional pen-and-paper improves memory and retention, since the act of physically writing by hand activates more parts of the brain that are related to learning and memory. It’s a slower process and forces you to summarise and synthesise information, rather than just transcribing things word-for-word. I actually experimented with this when I did a Master’s in Teaching Studies with one of my Year 7 classes a couple of years ago.

Equally, with a physical notebook, there are fewer distractions. No notifications, no pop-ups, no temptation to switch to social media, keeping your note-taking intentional. Likewise, you can set your mind to focusing on adding some creativity to your process. If you’re using a laptop, you’re unlikely to be able to easily doodle, unless you’ve got a touch device with a stylus. On pen-and-paper, you’ve got the freedom to draw, doodle, mind map, or use colours and symbols to represent whatever you want on the page. This is really great for visual learners, and especially so if you’re studying subjects like chemistry, where diagrams are essential.

Finally, analogue tools are reliable. You don’t ever have to worry about a low battery, a software crash or lost file. Your notes are always accessible, as long as you’ve got your notebook.

Of course, these tools aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. One thing that my students find with their handwritten notes is that they lack searchability. Finding a very specific piece of information from a month or more ago can be tedious and lead to a lengthy process of page-flipping. Yawn.

Not only that, but if you want to stay properly organised, you’re going to need to follow the age-old process that you’ll have followed at school or college: a fresh notebook for every subject.

Carrying multiple notebooks around campus can be heavy and cumbersome, and it’s also easy for pages to fall out. The amount of pages that I had to constantly sort into folders was an exhausting process. Some of them were even subject to spilled coffee, meaning that I had to rewrite a page of washed-out scribbles. Not fun. That was on top of all of the times that I had to write, scribble out, and rewrite my notes when I’d made mistakes – so if you care about perfectly aesthetic notes, this might not be the method for you.

Also, you know how sometimes you’re too ill to come into Uni, and have to stay the day in bed? When that happens, you’ll need to rely on your friend’s notes – trouble is, if their handwriting isn’t the best, it becomes really hard to share these.

Digital tools

Let’s look at the more modern approach.

Unlike handwritten notes, digital notes are highly searchable and organised. Using apps like Evernote, OneNote or Notion means that you can search by keyword. You can also create a logical folder structure to keep everything neat and tidy. Plus, using digital services makes it easy to access your work from wherever you are – on your laptop, tablet or even phone, if you need to, so you’ll never need to worry about forgetting to bring the right notebook. It’s super easy to then share notes with a classmate – and you’ll never lose them either, since most digital note-taking apps sync to the cloud automatically.

Just don’t keep them all on a USB stick, or you’ll suffer the same fate that I did in my First Year, when the device corrupted and erased a week’s worth of work.

Care about perfectly aesthetic notes? Digital note-taking has never made it easier to edit, change and perfect your notes. You can make your digital notes look handwritten if you choose the right font – which can even mimic your handwriting.

That all being said, digital note-taking isn’t perfect. You’ve got access to the World Wide Web, which means a huge potential to get distracted. The same device that holds your notes offers access to social media, games, and literally everything else. Even while writing this, I got distracted by a notification on my iPad.

You might also suffer from a dead battery, software bugs, or internet issues which could result in problems with syncing, leading to conflicting files if you’re not careful. This is all not forgetting the fact that these things cost money. Even the cheapest of tablets are an investment compared to a simple notebook and pen, and that might be something that you’re simply not prepared to spend money on.

Moreover, while handwriting your notes can help with memory and retention, the opposite is true for digital note-taking, since you have greater capacity to write down everything, as opposed to actively summarising as you listen. While you can circumvent that issue by using a stylus to jot down notes as if it’s a pen-and-paper, you might find that the tactile feel of the glass screen doesn’t quite compare to writing on paper.

These are all things that you’re going to need to consider when making your purchases in preparation for the start of lectures and seminars. What are you most prepared for? How are you going to record everything that you learn? If there’s anything critical that I’ve missed, let me know in the comments below.

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