HOW I TAKE NOTES _ readings + lectures

Hey everyone, welcome back to Caitlyn's Corner. Last year I posted a How I Take Notes video and ever since then I have been constantly getting messages to share more note-taking tips. I'm happy to be delivering on that today, but before I get started I do want to say a huge thank you to Poster Brain for sponsoring today's video. Post-it sticky notes have been a back-to-school staple for me, I kid you not, since elementary school, so to say that I'm thrilled to be partnering with them would be an understatement. With all that being said, let's dive into the video. To share these tips I'm actually rewriting some notes I took, or some notes from my third year business courses, and the first thing that I always start off with whenever I am doing a note, particularly for reading, this is what my reading notes would be, is to write down the title of the chapter, the chapter number, and I like to write them in boxes because it's just a really easy way to isolate the title and make it stand out and it's not complicated at all, especially because I do tend to gravitate towards writing my notes on grid paper. As I mentioned last year, I like using grid paper or blank paper for my notes because I feel like I'm more likely to be creative with my note-taking and that helps with my recall of information that I'm writing down. Something new that I started towards the end of third year, and I'm going to try and make more of a consistent thing in fourth year, is adding a homework tracker to my reading notes. So if I have a reading that has homework questions, you do this little table at the top of your notes where you write down a box for each question that you have, and then underneath it you write down the difficulty level after you've completed it. So I'm going to sample fill them in, but a question that you completed very easily, you would do a check mark. A question that had some difficulty would have a dash, or I guess a minus mark, and then one that was complicated that you need to go back to, I put a star. You'll find this really helpful when studying because you'll know exactly which questions you should work on the most, so that if they pop up on a test or an exam, you are ready to go. Another note-taking tip I have is to embrace color in your notes. I'm adding some yellow to my title box, but you're quickly going to see that yellow is the color scheme for this chapter on attitude change. It helps with not only recalling just information in general, but also remembering which information goes together because sometimes that in itself is difficult. I always, when doing reading notes, keep track of page numbers because I take a very simplistic approach to my notes. I don't really find a point in wasting time like basically transferring every piece of information from the textbook to my notes. Whenever I do that, I go into autopilot mode when I'm note-taking and I end just that. I become a photocopier and I'm not really processing what I'm writing and then I don't end up understanding anything. I only write down what's important. I condense as much as possible, so keeping track of page numbers is important because if I'm reviewing my notes at a later time and come across the topic that I'm not remembering or understanding quite well, I know exactly where to look to find that information out and then I can go to the textbook to read about it. If I'm forced to condense, I have to actually think about what information is being presented and go through the process of figuring out what's important from that that I need to write down. It's a more active form of note-taking. I continue to bring color into my notes through headers and definitions. Whenever I write a definition out, I add a color so that my eye is easily drawn to it and then I also use color for headers because, again, it's just another way of clearly communicating to your eyeballs that a new topic or subtopic has begun. Before continuing on with the rest of my notes, I'm just going in with a post-it flag from one of their value packs and adding one in, surprise, surprise, yellow. We're keeping with the theme to the top of the page to keep track of my current page. If you come across any tables or flowcharts or graphs in your textbook or your reading, I'd highly recommend just taking a second to consider whether it's something worth transferring because oftentimes those visuals are put there for a reason to help clarify information or even to summarize information. I also think any type of visual is also great because it just gives your brain a break from writing out bullet points, which is not necessarily the most fun time in the world, but hey, if you can draw an arrow and some cool flowy lines, that's a hoot. Speaking of visuals, you can also take a post-it note and draw a graphic. In this case, I'm drawing an actual graph on the post-it and flip it over and you can write any information that's relevant to that graphic that you use. Again, this is just another way of adding color and bringing attention to an important piece of information and also just making it a little bit more fun to do your notes. While doing my readings, if I ever have any questions, I always like to keep track of those questions in my notes and I think a really great way to do that is to create a little box for the question and the answer so that it's very clear to you that you have a question that you need answered. You could also write down questions that you think will be asked on an exam and answer it in your notes so that, again, that's just another study tool that's already ready for you when it comes time to study. A theme that I think you will have noticed by now, one that you'll continue to notice throughout this video, is that I do like to make my notes creative and play around with different ways to present information. Now that being said, my notes are not an art project, they're not my bullet journal, they are my notes for school. So sometimes they're less colorful and less unique and other times they are very much the opposite of that. But I think whenever I make at least some effort to make my notes visually appealing, they end up being better notes for me because I want to use them and I like looking at them and if they're well thought out then they're going to be well thought out in a way that makes them easier to use. So I think taking the time during this process ends up benefiting my future self when it comes time to studying. My approach to taking lecture notes really depends on the class. Sometimes I even take them online. I actually am going to do a whole video on how I take notes digitally because I do do a combination of handwritten and digital notes. But when doing a handwritten lecture note, I often start off with any announcements that the prof gives at the beginning of lecture. So the way that I separate that from the actual content from the lecture is by creating things like boxes, which are also a big theme throughout this video. So I start off with just the top of the box because obviously it's a lecture. I don't know how much information the professor is going to be giving. So I leave room to write down that information and then I fill in the box afterwards. And because like I said earlier, lectures can be unpredictable. If you forget to add a piece of information or just want to highlight some key takeaways from the lecture, you just write that on a post-it note and add that post-it note to your page. Well that about wraps up today's video. I hope you guys enjoyed it and could take away something useful from it. Thank you so much for watching and an additional thank you to Post-it Brand for sponsoring today's video. Their products have played a key role in keeping me organized for years. You can find links to all the products I used today in the description box below. If you like today's video, be sure to give it a big thumbs up, hit that subscribe button and notification bell if you haven't already, and let me know in the comments below what's your number one note-taking tip. I will see you all very soon with a new video and until then, bye guys!