In August of last year, I started using Obsidian and doing conceptual notetaking, in a departure from my typical lecture-by-lecture or full curriculum notes studying style. It’s a decision that’s had broad ramifications on how I approach learning and the knowledge I gain during the day-to-day.
The core driver of this change was an increasing sense over my first year of undergrad that things had to change in my studying style. I got by (very well, in fact) in high school doing the IB programme by taking broad, sweeping notes of the curricula. In university, what do you do? Coverage ebbs and flows from resources.
So the core premise is:
- What happens when you need to retrieve information quick?
- Paper notebooks and lecture-by-lecture notes are great. They’re quick. But searching for a concept you covered is hard (imagine wasting time searching between a range of lectures 10 to 20, for example) and takes up needless brain space.
- What happens when future courses build on the material?
- Our brains aren’t infallible. On so many occasions, classmates have spoken about how they barely remembered material from many classes by the next semester. If it was hard before to refer to our lecture-by-lecture sequential notes during the semester, what happens when we want to refer to them later down the line?
- What happens when we learn outside of school?
- The knowledge has to go somewhere. Oftentimes it complements material we’ve learned quite well already, but it might feel out of place in a course’s notes.
- We want to explore our learning and knowledge outside of the context of a course, so that our notes can continue to dynamically grow.