hey friends welcome back to my channel my name is connor dibblin. I'm a fourth year medical
student at King's College London studying in the city of London and in this video i'm going
to show you what I think is the best way of making notes on your laptop using my Favourite
productivity app... Notion! I'm going to leave a link to the template below that i'm going to
show you in this video and so please feel free to go check it out me and notes have a bit of a love
hate relationship i know that in the last few videos i've spoken about studying i've said the
notes aren't really a very good way of studying but notes are a fantastic way of jotting down
content as you receive it you know in lectures in tutorials you don't have time to be trying to make
flashcards while you're hearing the content you need to make notes now for the first four years
of university i made all of my notes extensively and exclusively on my ipad pro if you want to hear
more about how i use the ipad pro to make notes in university then please let me know in the comments
below let's jump straight into my notion and i'll show you how i make my notes and i'll talk to you
about why i think this is such a fantastic way of making notes first of all remember to hit that
like button and subscribe we're going to try and keep this short and sweet so let's dive straight
into my current fourth year notes i've only started using notion this academic year really
so i've only got my fourth year on here currently i would like to at some point bring over all of my
other content from the previous years but that's gonna take a while i'm currently on my third
block the quality improvement project is something that runs through the entire thing i've finished
women's health i finished pediatrics and now we're on to mental health so i'm doing my psychiatry
basement split between child and adolescent mental health or cams and older adult mental health
this is what it looks like when i've created a new page to do a new topic i set out my title i
just give myself a little hint about what year it's in and then i set up my page to have notes
flash cards questions and then extra resources we're only interested in the notes today so
let's talk about that i've got this handy little button here which i just click and it generates a
new template that i can work on the first thing i'm going to do whenever i do this is i just
tell myself what day i'm working on this just to add today in notion that drops in the date that
you're currently on which is fantastic the next thing i do is i'd say what topic we're currently
working on now obviously we're not currently in a lecture so let's just say that this is lecture
notes you might see that this is divided into four sections we have this section we just filled
out which is the date and the topic and that's important because it does hint your recall to
have a look at those to think about when you did it and think about the title of the session the
main body of the notes section is divided into two the main bulk of which is dedicated to our notes
now here we're going to be taking notes just like you normally might we're taking in bullet points
and each time we come across a new kind of main topic we're going to be setting
out what that is so let's say that within this session we had topic number one
and within topic number one we had several points we then move on to the second topic within our
session at the end of a full session you probably have between 10 and 30 different bullet points
laid out for the different things you've covered within that session the reason this note-taking
system is so powerful is that you then at the end of every session you need to go down to the bottom
and summarize in one or two sentences everything that you learn that session
what this does is it makes you reflect on the content you've just learned
and this really cements that knowledge into your brain and it sets you up perfectly for task number
two task number two is when you're coming and looking at this session or these notes for the
second time so the first time is when you've done them second time is when you're going to come
and review them for the first time what you're going to do is you're going to read your summary
you're going to have a maybe even a quick look at your notes preferably not
and you're going to be trying to recall some questions that were answered within the session
so topic one might have been on heart anatomy and your first question might
be what are the four chambers of the heart your next question might be what is the innovation
but this doesn't just apply to medicine you could also be studying history or something so you know
i don't know anything about history what was the date that's kind of what i imagine historians care
about i don't know let me know in the comments if i'm wrong so your first run-through is creating
your notes and quickly summarizing your second run-through is to create some recall questions and
the thing here and i think all of you are going to have realized this these are active recall
questions asking yourself questions about content without looking at prompts within the content
is active recall this is the best way to learn and to memorize anything it betters your
understanding it increases your memory it creates new links within your neurons it's just fantastic
we now have our summary done we have our active recall notes made we have our notes here on
the right now there's one section we haven't done this is something which i think is really
important what actions do you need to take to better understand this content this is not about
memory in this case this is not oh i should study this content four more times so i can remember it
properly now this is actual actions that you can take to understand the content better let's say
this is the heart anatomy the actions needed might be that i would like to download an app in which i
can see the heart in 3d and that might be really useful for my understanding it's got nothing to
do with the note taking it's got nothing to do with my active recall questions my active record
questions are now there forever and whenever i want to come and review this lecture or review
this tutorial i don't need to look at my notes i can just come over and i can read my active recall
questions and that's my note-taking system it works amazingly on the laptop i really love this
way of taking notes in notion it's so easy all the little notion shortcuts make it so fantastic too
and this is how i'm going to be taking all of my notes on my laptops from now on please feel
free to check out the note-taking system below the template is just there you can download it
and add it into your notion including the new note button which just makes it all so easy
and that's it for the note-taking system i hope you can see that it's very simple and it works
very well at least for me i think it'll be awesome if you could all try it out the template for this
system is just below so check that out and of course like subscribe for more however that's
not the end of the video if you are interested in why this note-taking system actually works
stick around for the next two minutes i promise i'll go over this in just two minutes so let's put
two minutes on the clock and let's go so this note-taking system this is called the cornell
note-taking system it was designed at the corner university for the students in the 1950s the
reason this note-taking formula works so well is that the system actively encourages you to reflect
on what you've written in that lecture or that session and to do this you summarize your notes
so the first thing you do is you write your notes during the lecture you do that in real time while
the person is talking you then summarize at the end of the session the next time you come and look
at these notes instead of passively just reviewing or re-reading your notes or highlighting something
what you're doing is you're creating questions to ask yourself if you can't answer them you look
back at the notes and you find the answer within the notes if the answer is not there then you can
go ahead and do your further research and that's absolutely fine as well but these questions you're
creating these active recall questions and these are amazingly powerful at making you remember
content often just making your notes summarizing then creating a few active recall questions is
enough to pass your exam something i found really powerful within notion and within this note-taking
system is that you can reorder your notes as you review them so let's say you're going through your
recall questions and you're thinking oh i'm not sure i really understand this maybe the first
question you're asking yourself relies on the second question already answered so then you can
reorder them you can drag and drop within notion and that's really powerful thank you so much for
watching this video i really hope you found it useful i'm really loving exploring notion and
finding new ways that i can use it and i hope you are too please like and subscribe comment below if
there's anything else that you'd like to me to work out for you in notion anything we can work
out together if you want to hear more about how i use the ipad pro to make notes in university then
please let me know in the comments below first of all remember to hit that like button and subscribe
bye