How to organize your notes so you can study from them

Most note systems are built for filing: everything has a place, and finding a page is easy. Studying asks a different question — can you pull out one subject's material and test yourself on it in the next ten minutes? A system that is beautiful but cannot do that is a hobby, not a study tool.

A system that is enough

1. One folder per course. Not per week, not per lecturer. Deep folder trees cost you time every time you save something and rarely pay it back.
2. One note per lecture or chapter, titled by topic and date. "Heart failure — Tuesday lecture" beats "Lecture 7".
3. When a topic continues, add to the same note. Thursday's follow-up belongs at the bottom of Tuesday's note, not in a new fragment you will forget exists.
4. Keep the source. Slide numbers, the textbook page, the date — so a confusing line can be traced back.
5. Turn notes into questions weekly, not in exam week. Five questions per lecture, written while you still understand the lecture, are worth more than fifty written in a panic.
6. Keep a list of misses per course. It is the best study plan you will ever have, and it writes itself.

Paper, laptop or phone

Use the one you will actually keep up. The research comparing handwriting and typing is mixed: an influential 2014 study found that longhand note-takers did better on conceptual questions, and a later replication did not find a reliable difference. What matters more is what happens after the lecture — whether you work through the notes and later test yourself on them.

What to skip

• Rewriting notes neatly. It feels productive and mostly is not — see is rewriting notes worth it.
• Colour-coding systems that take longer than the studying.
• Highlighting as a study method. It marks what to study; it is not the studying.

How Quat does it

Quat is an iPhone and iPad app I make, so this part is an interested party talking.

When you save a capture — a photo of a page, a PDF, a link or a lecture recording — Quat asks which folder it goes in, and you can make a new folder right there. Cards made from a note follow that note's folder, so each course's cards stay together. When a topic continues, you can add the new capture to the bottom of a note you already have, and its cards join that note; when you make cards again, only the new part is used. Every card carries its source — what captured it, the day, and the note.

What Quat does not do: folders are one level deep, with no folders inside folders. Your notes live on your device rather than in the cloud, so nothing syncs to a laptop; if you need your cards elsewhere, you can export them.

Sources

• Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), The pen is mightier than the keyboard, Psychological Science.
• Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019), How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking?, Educational Psychology Review.
• Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.