In this module, you're going to learn about the Lean Cornell Note-Taking Method, a note-taking I developed that helped me make the most out of my lectures.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you take notes the usual way, you feel like you need to take detailed notes of the entire thing or else you won't remember it?

It's kinda like a vice that we've picked up somewhere.

You end up with tons of notes that you won't actually review later, even when you DO re-read them you get no benefit whatsoever.

It takes so much time but you're NOT really learning anything because you're too distracted to take note of everything important.

In cognitive psychology, the conventional way of taking notes — taking as many detailed notes as possible and reviewing them later (or at least, intending to) — is called the "storage paradigm" of note-taking.

It's not inherently bad if you actively recall as a way to review, but if you care about study balance, then it's no doubt an inefficient strategy that sucks your life.

The better alternative, based on 30 years of note-taking research, is to use the "encoding paradigm" of note-taking.

Basically, to use your notes for jotting down processed information rather than raw information.

You mentally process incoming info before you write. The effect is similar to how writing down steps to math solutions — it helps us think about incoming information more clearly.

But let's go beyond the theory and into the practical.

This simply means taking Lean Notes as much as possible.

Why? Because it reduces your study time. There's no other way to put it.

When you take lean notes:

• You only need to write "chunk representations", as we'll talk about later
• Decoding these chunk representations forces you to reconstruct the big picture in memory
• Instead of having material you won't review later, you'll have a set of notes that you can easily connect and transform into Active Recall questions
• You make the most out of your lecture, you save a lot of damn time because you can focus on what the professor is saying

And when you combine that with a way to remember newly learned information — Active Recall (which you may already be familiar with) — you could save HOURS upon HOURS of study time.

...which are exactly the things you're going to learn in this module alone.

First, you're going to learn how to do Lean Note-Taking. Verbatim note-taking doesn't work. You don't have to have a transcription of the entire lecture, nor have a notebook that looks like a textbook in order to learn the material. 

Here, you're going to focus on MENTAL PROCESSING.

You'll learn:

• How to pick out crucial points to take notes on
• The best note-taking method that works for anyone (hint: analog vs digital doesn't matter much)
• The only 3 things you should write on your notes

The second step is transforming those lean notes into Active Recall material. Re-reading your notes is useless. By creating questions, you're doing yet another active processing of the material and you start thinking like your professor. 

This is high leverage, since these are also the materials you'll use when you prepare for your exams or when you start to use Anki.

Two key elements make this work:

• The encoding specificity principle; and
• The referring address technique

The third and final step to LCNT is performing active recall. You're going to learn a 7-step sequence for properly executing Active Recall so you can be 100% sure that you'll remember today's lecture. 

The best part: Reviewing an ENTIRE lecture now means recalling for only a few minutes and voila, you're DONE.

Move on to the next lesson when you're ready.