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Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

When I was in university, my girlfriend at the time taught me about good note-taking.

- Use paper. I could annotate printed PPT slides with the whitespace on 4 per page, but sometimes would overflow onto the (blank) reverse side. Computers have too many distracting notifications.

- Write down questions with a big (?) and ask them at an appropriate time. Professors care much more about that than you think, in Western education systems (don't get me started about my ill-fated Ph.D. attempt in Korea).

- Use coloured pens. If you think this looks too feminine or gay, get over yourself. It's SO much easier to quickly speed-read and study once you're doing this. I would use red for formulae, green/pink for definitions, black for examples, pencil for diagrams, blue for everything else.

Example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/49613268401/in/d...

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Using a multi colored pen has helped me mark important information and add my personal context. For example, during meetings or brainstorming I'll mark up information using different colors (red- to do, green- new idea, pencil- plain, sequential notes). I found a good one that has all the colors I need and a mechanical pencil [1]. There is overhead of thinking which color to use, but the value of having the context later is much more.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Zebra-Clip-Multi-Functional-Barrel-B4...

I also like coloured notes.

I have some pictures of some here: https://medium.com/@richard.goulter/how-i-write-my-notes-94f...

My schema: red: problems/WTF!/etc., green: questions, blue: facts/reference, black: thoughts/everything else.

Neat! interesting to see your context management system. Thanks for sharing your notes. I like to sketch ideas, so use pencil so that I can erase and refine. Curious, how do you manage information from digital content, e.g., notes from reading technical/research articles or blog posts?

> how do you manage information from digital content, e.g., notes from reading technical/research articles or blog posts?

If I could always remember the right keywords to search for the articles I had in mind, I'd just do that.

For online content, most of the time I'll wait for a later 'cache miss' before any bookmarks/notes. (I'd either come across content when procrastinating on HN/etc., or from looking for it while doing a task. For the former, it's low-effort consumption. For the latter, it's hard to know if it's going to something I have difficulty finding later. IMO, it's not worth putting easy-to-Google things in; lots of stuff is easy to Google for).

For storing stuff, I prefer bookmarks to end up in pinboard, and notes to end up somewhere in org-mode. I've found the zetteldeft package to be useful for me. https://www.eliasstorms.net/zetteldeft/ (builds upon deft. https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ ). - If in rare cases I find I want to remember some key idea or jargon without having to look it up, then I'll go to the effort of adding it to Anki.

Thanks for sharing! I was also curious if you apply your paper-pen markup style to digital content. Btw, is there a way to send private/direct messages here on HN? thanks.

My study notes -- like virtually everything I have written for the last 30 years -- are solely in grey pencil [0].

> Use coloured pens

That didn't work for me, for two reasons:

Firstly, with coloured pens or highlighters, switching pens slows down the process of writing too much. Instead I just use pencil, and summarise, focusing on making strong logical connections with other stuff I am learning.

Secondly, I don't read my notes enough that colour makes any difference. I found I retain information best by writing, re-writing and summarising. Actively writing engages all my brain. Just reading notes isn't enough to make it stick.

[0] A 0.9mm Pentel P209 mechanical pencil, to be precise.

What's the story with the PhD in Kora? :)

Short version: The university promised a scholarship; the professor didn't pay it. Taking it up with the international student office led to the professor saying "You said bad things about me to people in the administration, get out of my lab" -> no professor, no lab, no university, no student visa, no country.

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