3 Ways to give yourself an advantage by making notes now

As we ease our way into term 1, assessments are still on the distant horizon.

For most of us, this means the little energy and concentration a summer of
'not doing much' left us with can be devoted to the hard task of adjusting to reality.

While taking things easy may seem like a good idea at the time, delaying your return to HSC mode is only going to give your future self a more stressful, time pressured experience later.

So, rip off the Band-Aid of post-holiday blues and do something your future self will thank you for: get a head start by making notes early. Before jumping to the conclusion that you don’t need your notes now, or that you can’t effectively make them as you have little content to work with, hear us out.

Without further ado, here are 3 of the best ways to give yourself an advantage by making notes now:

1. Make a scaffold

It goes without saying that the best way to structure your notes is by the syllabus. The syllabus guides the exam questions, the way you learn the content in class and the way we create our video course, so neglecting it would be sacrilege.

Most of us tend to format notes according to syllabus points and sub-points at the end after having collated all the content. However, doing it this way is in fact incredibly inefficient; you’ll end up dealing with irrelevant content and uncertainty about exactly what goes where.

Rather than putting your notes under syllabus headings as you go, we recommend sitting down at the beginning of the term and making a scaffold for each subject’s study notes before learning the content. That way, when sitting in class or watching a video you’ll be able to consolidate your notes in the one place under headings that are directly relevant to your exams.

Not only will this keep you organised and prevent the mayhem of loose sheets of paper, it’ll also save you time later as you won’t need to procrastinate by formatting your notes into a neat looking structure. You’ll also have a clear understanding of the direction you’re going – a checklist of what you’ve done and what’s to come.

By making a scaffold for your notes now, you’ll be able to stay organised and on top of things. By the time assessments roll around, you’ll have a full, useful set of notes that you can use to study.

2. Refine your notes as you go

You know that one kid who brags about having 60 pages worth of history notes? Well, I’ll give you a heads up: that’s not actually something to brag about.

The purpose of making study notes is to synthesise the content into a short, comprehensible summary - not to re-write the textbook. But for even the most well-intentioned note-makers, ending up with excessively long notes can simply be a matter of having no time to cut them down.

To prevent this happening you should refine your notes as you go, rather than waiting until you have a complete set of notes to cut them down. Not only will this save you time later, it will also benefit both your retention and understanding of the content. As you read through and edit content while it’s still fresh in your mind, you’re unknowingly cementing it in your long term memory.

The aim of summarising your notes is to ideally filter them down to only a few points per topic, and a few pages per subject. While this may seem daunting now as there’s ‘just too much you have to know’, by beginning the refining process early on, your notes will gradually evolve until there’s more in your head than on the paper.

3. Get creative

There are countless sources preaching the benefits of alternative note-taking – we’ve even jumped on the bandwagon ourselves giving flashcards and other weird study habits their fair share of praise.

These tactics are definitely useful, but they aren’t a top priority. When you get down to the nitty gritty of HSC year, the reality is you simply don’t have time to ‘get creative’.

But at the moment, while you’re still in the foothills of the mountain of HSC work, you have the luxury of time to try and test new note-taking methods. Experiment with mind maps, diagrams, flashcards, tables, whatever your heart desires.

The point is there’s nothing to lose: if you find something ineffective, you don’t have to worry about having ‘wasted time’. No matter how silly some things may seem, you’re still interacting with the content in a way that’s going to help you remember it later on.

So, spend some time over the next few weeks researching new styles of note taking and giving creative methods a test run. Not only will it be way less boring than writing endless dot points of Calibri in a word document, you will come to understand yourself and learning style better, figuring out an effective way to retain information that works best for you.

To wrap up:

With a bit of motivation and our advice you can make the most of the light workload over the next few weeks to get a head start on those study notes.

• Set up a scaffold and format your notes by the structure of the syllabus
• Begin the refining process early for maximum efficiency and retention
• Use your extra time to get creative and try out all those fun note-taking strategies you otherwise wouldn’t have time for.

All in all, don’t forget that a little hard work now will always pay off later.