Taking notes during lectures or reading may be counterproductive.
Disclaimer: I still take notes sometimes. And I regularly highlight on my Kindle.
But a while ago, a lecturer told me to never take notes while listening to lectures. His reason? When you take notes, you’re not actually listening to the lecture. You’re engaging your brain less.
I’ve started to apply the same logic to reading.
Here are a couple of reasons why I don’t take notes while I’m reading anymore.
- It’s distracting. Whether it’s pulling out my phone (which itself is addictive and makes it harder to focus on reading) or whipping out the notebook, it breaks the mental concentration needed for a meatier book. It might also mean you’re less likely to remember the thing you’re reading.
Plus, it just takes you out of the book. The best reading experience is an immersive one.
That said, taking notes after a reading session (or lecture) might be a great way to optimize learning without distracting from the reading itself. - It slows the reading process. If you find a memory-retention benefit with notetaking, then go right ahead. But as I’ve pointed out, I tend to benefit from reading actively instead of recording information outside my brain. If notetaking isn’t helping retention – or worse, if it’s hurting it – then you might as well do without the distraction and the slower reading process and read more and more quickly.
While you’re at it, stop reading crappy books.
- It doesn’t tax the memory. If you are thinking while you write, this might not be the case. But most of us just copy some text down and that counts as our “studying”. But copying something down doesn’t mean you’ve learned it or integrated it. In fact, writing something down (especially typing it) may not tax the memory the way it needs to be taxed.
You know that slight stress that you feel in your brain when you’re thinking? It means you’re learning. Neural connections are being made. No pain, no gain. Literally.
So… what do I do instead?
As I’ve hinted at: I just think, even talk to myself to internalize the concepts and connections and visualize them. Or I think about things they remind me of. If something is of particular importance, I’ll take some time and write out a summary after I’m done reading.
Memory is in part how we make connections, and connections need to be made actively.
So keep thinking. And enjoy your reading rather than taking notes you might never go back to.
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