My university note-taking | Zettelkasten & more

Conventional university note-taking—furiously copying lectures word for word—often fails at its supposed job: helping students learn and remember. The core problem is attention. When students split focus between listening and writing, parts of the professor’s explanation slip by, including linking sentences and crucial definitions. Even worse, detailed notes can reduce recall later, because the brain may treat the information as “offloaded” to external storage and then discard it after successful transfer.

A second reason the traditional approach is losing ground is redundancy. In earlier decades, classes were a primary gateway to unique information because books and other references were harder to access. Today, syllabi, typed notes, textbooks, video explainers, and websites are widely available on demand. That makes the reflex to capture everything in real time less valuable—especially when students can retrieve exact diagrams, mechanisms, and definitions quickly later.

The alternative starts with a simple but decisive rule: different notes serve different purposes, and the workflow should match the goal. The emphasis is not on abandoning pens or keyboards, but on being intentional—asking whether a given jot is creating redundancy or supporting deeper understanding.

A concrete example comes from biochemistry. When a professor explains glycolysis and highlights an enzyme such as glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase, the advice is to avoid writing down the mechanism itself. Instead, one brief cue—like “mechanism”—is enough because a clean diagram can be found online when studying. The time saved goes to fully absorbing the explanation during class, rather than trying to draw and understand simultaneously.

From there, the note-taking system is organized into three layers. First are fleeting notes: quick captures of ideas that arise during the day, such as a blog topic or a research lead, stored in a phone app, paper, or an iPad notes app. Their purpose is reliable capture and easy access for later processing.

Second are embedded notes, used most often for university learning. After listening to lectures or reading textbooks, the student converts remembered concepts into flashcards—typically question/answer pairs—using tools like Anki or emnode. The key is spaced repetition: regular review builds long-term memory. The example flashcards target enzyme-specific knowledge, such as what reaction an enzyme catalyzes, which amino acids matter in the active site, and how a proton moves during catalysis.

Third are Zettelkasten-style notes, aimed at creative thinking and idea interconnection. Instead of treating lectures as another compartmentalized notebook, the system encourages atomic, interconnected nodes with backlinks—capturing personal insights and relationships across sources. The guidance includes avoiding textbook copying, not turning the system into a subject-sorted archive, excluding obvious entries, and writing only what one genuinely cares about.

Taken together, the workflow channels class time into attention and understanding, uses flashcards to convert knowledge into durable memory, and relies on Zettelkasten networks to connect ideas into a bigger picture—so learning becomes both more efficient and more meaningful over time.