6 Protocols to UPGRADE iPad Note-Taking (according to research)

If you use an iPad to take notes, whether it's for meetings or work or lectures, you're most likely doing it wrong. Over the past 15 years, I've taken thousands of notes and spent hundreds of hours experimenting and understanding note-taking research. And in this video, I'm going to share six of the easiest tips to upgrade your iPad note-taking. So, let's get started with number one. Think on paper. If the reason you're writing notes is to take in new information and make sense of it and formulate an opinion, come to a conclusion, store it in your memory. In other words, you're using note-taking to help you with learning something. Then you have to understand that your limitation, your bottleneck is not going to come from how fast you can write or which app you're using. It's going to come from how fast you can think because learning in the end of the day happens in your brain. The reason note-taking can help us with learning is that it offloads some of that cognitive effort in the brain. So instead of trying to juggle all of this new information and organize it and connect it together and make sense of it purely mentally, we can actually draw it out and we can track our thoughts on our notes. But this is very hard to do if you are writing notes that look like this. And as someone talks, you just write in sentences. This does not represent any kind of real thinking or processing or organization. If all you're going to do is write notes to just have a reference of the information, don't even bother writing notes. Use a transcript. You know, record it. Use AI to summarize it for you. You don't need to be writing notes just as a reference to come back to later. Instead, when you're writing notes, you should be thinking about taking some of those key words and understanding, well, what is the ultimate purpose of those key words? How does my notetaking fit in with this sense of purpose? How do I use this note-taking skill combined with a sense of purpose to give me a big picture understanding? And when I have a big picture understanding, naturally what will happen is that I will have better questions to ask. I will form better conclusions and I will be able to develop stronger levels of expertise. See, this kind of note-taking that I've just demonstrated for you right now shows the relationship between the ideas. You can get a flow of the thoughts and if new information comes in at a later point, we can then see where it can all fit and how it can all additionally connect together. So as we continue to learn, our notes reflect our latest understanding of the big picture of the topic. This is how we make a mind map, a true map of the mind. So don't do this, do more of this. Tip number two, write less. The more you write, the less you will learn. There's even research that says that when the word count in your notes goes up, your performance actually goes down. If your word count is high, it most likely means you're writing notes more like this. It's more verbatim. It's just taking down the information. If you are so busy with writing notes that you don't actually have time to think about how it connects and making meaning out of it, you're not doing much learning. So, if I'm learning something new, even if it's incredibly complicated and very dense and very technical, I am writing words that look more like this. I'm using key words and key ideas and I'm trusting that I will be able to understand that when I have an arrow connecting this thing to this thing, I will remember what that arrow means. I don't need an entire sentence to spell it out for me. And so by spending less time on the act of writing out the words, it gives me more time to think about the ideas and therefore drive better learning. This is also the reason why I don't tend to type out my notes either. A lot of people start with writing by hand, maybe earlier in school, and then eventually you just type out all of your notes because it's faster. But here's the thing is that it's only faster if your objective is to just get words on the page. If what you measure is how fast you can learn the information, getting that data into your brain in a way that you can use it and retain it, then that is much slower because you're doing very, very little processing. And by the way, before I go any further, I want to make it clear that note-taking is just one part of learning really effectively. And so, while this video is focusing on just tips to do with note-taking with an iPad, which can be very powerful, there are some other things that you may want to check out as well. And if you want a single snapshot into the key areas of the way that you learn that might be holding you back and wasting time, then

the easiest way that you can get that snapshot is by taking my free learning system diagnostic quiz. It'll ask you a few questions. It takes a couple minutes to fill out. And then at the end, it gives you this report that tells you which areas of your learning system are doing well and which areas are holding you back. Learning to learn is a complicated task. And if you're wondering where to even start, then this quiz will help you with that. I'll leave a link to it in the description. You can go down, open that in a new tab. Don't do it yet. Finish the video first. But once you finished the video, make sure you check out that quiz. But moving on to tip number three. Use an infinite canvas. The most frustrating thing is when someone has a tool like an iPad and then I see the way that they write notes and they're using note-taking apps that are just like it's just a page or it's this narrow A4 column that just scrolls down forever. And the reason this is so frustrating is because it's a massive lost opportunity. Learning is by nature a very messy back and forth process. There are lots of ideas that pop up. You might have a few ideas. Let's say A, B, and C. And you wonder how they could be connected. So you might say, okay, maybe it's connected like this. Uh or maybe it looks more like uh, you know, like this. Or maybe there's, you know, like another arrow like this. When new ideas come in, you don't know exactly where it fits. It could fit here. And so on and so forth. So you actually don't know what the overall shape of your notes is going to look like until it's almost done. So when you use an infinite canvas, it actually allows you to expand out your knowledge as it grows. You don't have to worry about fitting it into a page or running out of space on a margin. And let me tell you, not connecting information in a meaningful way that would help you with your retention and understanding it deeply and really become an expert at a topic because you just didn't have space on your page is the stupidest reason to compromise your learning. The app that I'm using is called Free Form and this is free. It comes bundled with your iPad. If you have an iPad that's on the latest iOS, you will have this app and it does everything that you need to write effective notes. Using an infinite canvas gives you the freedom to just explore the topic completely organically without any restrictions, which in turn allows you to connect and explore ideas more freely, which results in better information retention and deeper expertise faster. Tip number four, use doodle anchoring. The human brain's ability to process visual information is tens of thousands of times faster than our ability to process written information. And we can actually exploit this in our note takingaking by doodling and drawing small images and visuals of the things that we're trying to learn within our notes. In fact, this is something called dual coding. It's this idea that we learn things more effectively when it's explained both verbally or in words and non-verbbally like in images. And even if you're not an artist, it doesn't matter. So you take a look at this example that one of our students sent through. This is a mind map of the immune system. And you can see that they've drawn these fairly, you know, small crude little drawings uh just going through the most important things that they think will help anchor this topic into their memory. So now when they think about this mind map and topic, they not only have the words and the connections and the ideas themselves, but they also have the image that they drew as a memory cue. And you don't have to go overboard. I would actually argue that this person went just a little bit overboard. You can just create one or two key doodles at topical landmarks, points that when you think about this topic, you want to be able to just anchor straight into that concept. And on the plus side, doodling also helps to increase your focus and reduce boredom. So if you have a tendency to get easily distracted or bored when you're studying, then this can also help you. But this next tip helps even more. Tip number five is to lasso more. The lasso tool is one of the most convenient and powerful learning tools for iPad note-taking. If you're not familiar with the lasso tool, uh in most apps, it looks something like this. Some kind of logo that looks like a lasso. In free form, it's actually this striped pencil icon. And what the lasso tool allows you to do is it lets you select something and then you can move it around. Now, this is a very simple function that completely changes the game of how you can write notes. As I was explaining here, you don't know where new ideas are going to fit when they come in. Trying to make the decision about where to place it immediately as that information comes in can be very overwhelming. It's much easier instead just to fit it somewhere that you think makes sense. And then later, when you're thinking about it, you can just use your lasso tool to then move it around somewhere

else. If you feel like some of the notes you wrote before look incorrect to you now, you can just lasso it and then you can just move it to the place that you think now makes more sense. So let's say it's there and then we can rearrange our mind map very easily. In fact, if you're not rearranging ideas and moving things around pretty frequently, then it means that you're not learning as efficiently as you could be. This is because some of the most valuable cognitive processes that result in good memory and deep expertise come from rearranging and reorganizing the information. Think about it like having a really messy room. You might not even know what is scattered on the floor, but as you go to systematically clean things up and tidy your room, you would look at each item and come to an understanding about what is in your room. Now, let's say in this process, you have to move things around. You thought that your socks could go in this drawer, but later you realize you need that drawer for something else. So, you move the socks somewhere else that makes sense for you. By the end of this tidying process, you will remember where every single item is in this room. And you won't need any flash cards. You're not going to need to repeat it. You will just know because it makes sense and it's organized because you spent the effort mentally to organize it. That is the process of learning. When I'm learning something new, up to 50 to 60% of all of my time spent on writing notes and looking at notes is spent on lassoing things, moving things around, rearranging and reorganizing to see if I can make it simpler and easier to remember. And if you struggle to think about what to rearrange and how you could make it fit differently, then it probably means you need this next tip. Tip number six, use Zoom toggling. Connecting information to the big picture is the secret to learning more efficiently. When things make sense in the big picture, you hold on to it. You understand how it works. You can use that information more fluently and more like an expert. One of the key signs of an expert is that they can talk about a complex topic in simple ways because they know what is important and what isn't because they can see the big picture. It is really hard to keep your eye on the big picture if you are looking at the picture like this. It is so close to you that you have a tiny field of view. When you use something like an infinite canvas app, you can zoom in a lot and you can zoom out a lot. And when you have a pretty big topic like this one for example, and you are all the way over here, it is really hard to see how this particular point that's being made right here connects to anything else because you're just too zoomed in. This is what it means to zoom toggle. Every time you add a new concept, actively zoom out into the big picture and ask yourself, how does this new thing fit with all the other things? actively look for ways that it might connect or rearrange with other pieces of information. This helps you to restructure and reorganize it in a way that is simpler and more intuitive and helps you with your memory. If you go back to that tidying the room analogy, it means that every time you pick up an item, you are looking around the room to see where it makes sense to place it. An efficient learner will regularly be zoom toggling out to the big picture, then into the detail, and then out again. So, those were some of the six easiest tips to upgrade your iPad note-taking. If you enjoyed this video and you want to upgrade your learning overall, then check out this video right here where I go into some other techniques in more detail. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.