During this time, I spent quite a bit of time meeting with Dr. Richard Watson. And during one of our meetings I brought up the issues I was having. His first question was based around how I was taking notes for the course.
Finding out that I was taking notes wrong was great. But it wouldn't have been too useful without learning an alternative approach. So, Dr. Watson asked me to try a different type of note-taking technique.
I started following this reverse note-taking process years ago and I still use it today. Through this time, I've noticed a number of key benefits to this approach.
First and foremost, by having the knowledge that I will have to recite back the key components of the lecture forces me to have an increased level of focus. This is opposite to how I used to take notes. My old way of taking notes would many times distract me from the concepts being discussed. I would hear a concept that I felt was important and I would take my focus away from the speaker and focus on writing down the topic.
Another benefit of reverse note-taking is that it forced me to think of the lecture as a unified story instead of a series of facts. Let's go back to our illustration of Napoleon's battle at Waterloo. If you listen to a lecture about the battle and take notes during the class, you'd probably do things like write down the following:
Lastly, the reverse note-taking approach made it easier to review the lecture material compared with my old style of note-taking. Before that I would rarely listen to a lecture recording. Even if I had the intention to listen to the recording, other priorities always seemed to override the task. I mainly attribute this failure to the fact that I, for some reason, trusted my notes.