notes worth
re-reading

the test of a page of notes is not whether it captured the lecture. it is whether, three weeks later, it gets you back to understanding faster than the textbook would. most notes fail that test, because they were written to keep up rather than to be used.

stop transcribing

writing down what was said, in the order it was said, keeps your hands busy and your attention shallow. you cannot listen properly and transcribe at the same time, and the artefact is worse than the slides you already have.

write questions, not statements

instead of "the mitochondrion produces atp via oxidative phosphorylation", write "how does the mitochondrion actually produce atp, and what happens if the gradient collapses?" a page of questions is a self-test. a page of statements is something to re-read, and re-reading does not work.

leave the margin empty
on purpose

keep a third of the page blank while you are in the room. afterwards — same day, ten minutes — fill it with what you could not answer, what connected to last week, and the one sentence that summarises the whole thing. the notes become useful in those ten minutes, not during the lecture.

one idea per page
beats one lecture per page

exams do not ask "what was in lecture nine". they ask about an idea that appeared across four lectures. notes organised by topic rather than by date survive that; notes organised chronologically make you hunt.

the marker is what you
could not explain

when you hit something you cannot put in your own words, mark it clearly and move on rather than stalling. that mark is the highest-value thing in the notebook: it is a list of exactly what to ask about. post those, not the whole lecture — a specific question about one confusion gets a far better answer than "can you explain chapter four".

related

why re-reading does not work · asking a question that gets a good answer