How to EFFECTIVELY take NOTES, study LESS and make MONEY as a STUDENT!

hey guys it's mitchell here so you're going to have to take notes a lot in college sixth form and university so you need to know how to do it properly so that way you can minimize your time revising and spend more time in actually enjoying your life so with notes you are going to have to take down information that your lecturers or teachers or tutors tell you it may be their unique way of explaining certain concepts or equations or anything like that so if you follow all of these tips i'm actually going to show you how you can monetize your notes and sell them online towards the end of the video so be sure to stay tuned for that so the first question is why you should even take notes in the first place so i imagine there's some of you here that haven't really taken notes before because they've been given stuff by teachers and then you've just been able to learn that and just basically done what your teachers have told you that doesn't really work as you get into college sick form and university so in general you remember about 10 of what you hear so this is when you're sitting in class you're actually paying attention you'll only remember roughly 10 of what they're saying you remember about 20 of what you read so if you're just sitting there reading a textbook and again you have to actually be concentrating this is active reading not just kind of scanning the words and then it's kind of just filtering into your brain then going out of your ears okay now if you were to read these notes properly and read them out loud to yourself or to another person you can remember up to 50 of this now if you write the notes in your own way read them thoroughly using your brain and also read them out loud to yourself so all of this at the same time so you write the notes then you read them out loud to yourself again making sure that you're actually understanding the concepts you can remember up to 70 of this now it's important to remember that i'm not talking about typing here when i say writing notes i specifically mean writing using a pen and paper or a tablet so the reason why you should actually take heed of this advice and actually get good at note taking is because you'll spend less time revising and more time actually enjoying your life and your time at university or sick form or whatever you're doing okay so as for equipment um pretty obvious you need a pen and paper yeah wonderful right however there are some extra things that you can get which will actually make your notes and take them to the next level so the first one i'd suggest is things like highlighters and colored pens so the reason why this is really useful is your brain groups things together naturally that are color coded so for example with my notes i may have let's say my class notes are the ones i'm scribbling down in class in black pen blue pen is my rewritten version i have questions for my teacher in green and then i have kind of an orange color or a purple color for what i need to so messages to myself so let's say i take down a diagram in class it's a bit scruffy i might say purple rewrite this and make sure you have different colors between these two points okay just to make things super clear and interesting or i might say that the diagram has to be accurate so the actual measurements matter now i did say earlier that typing absolutely sucks however it's the 21st century and technology has graced us with a way to solve our issues instead of carrying around all these pens and paper and all that random stuff and paper's a real hassle and also it's better for the environment right you can use a tablet so a lot of schools and universities actually provide tablets however i imagine most of us aren't fortunate enough to have access to that so if you just buy yourself a relatively cheap tablet you can actually do all of your note taking on a tablet and there are actually more advantages than just you know the environment and scruffy paper there there are apps designed for note-taking and they're absolutely amazing so here's what i would suggest you do if you're lucky enough to have a tablet if not then pen and paper is still completely totally fine what i recommend you do is you email your teachers lecturers whatever in advance and ask them for the powerpoint or the slides or the notes that they're going to use in the class and what you're going to do is download that file now all of these note-taking apps allow you to import files into the note-taking app itself and then all you need to do is in the lesson use your magic pen that you get with the tablet and you can highlight certain parts you can rewrite certain parts next to it and the best thing is it's not restricted to a4 in my time that i've taken notes and this isn't just for university or for sick form it's also when i've kind of done self-studying things like programming i've had to write notes of pen and paper a4 is so restrictive okay because sometimes your diagrams need to be bigger sometimes you need a table that's a lot bigger sometimes some your teacher will say something and you write it down then they'll say oh actually never mind change it to this and it's the most frustrating thing in the world and you feel like throwing your pen at them don't do that with tablets they have an a you can erase them instantly that is a kind of understated benefit and b it has an unlimited width and height so if you want you can make a table a thousand columns long if you want to for some reason you can draw scale diagrams if you really want to there are so many features that allow just an amazing time with note taking okay and it's also it just looks neater for some reason my writing on a tablet always looks nicer than writing on pen and paper so i don't know what kind of magic that is but that's another benefit so you may be thinking what kind of apps so the personal my personal choices for the apps i have too one is notability and there's one notable thing about it it allows you to do something really cool it allows you to record audio while you're writing now that might sound like something ridiculous but let me give you some context let's say your teacher's just written an equation on the board right and you're copying out that equation but you can't really hear what they're saying and you don't really have time to write down everything they're saying while you're writing down the equation right what if you could record what your teacher is saying while you're writing the equation and then when you come back to the notes you can click on the equation and it will replay what your teacher said hopefully i don't know if that makes you as excited as it does me i've actually only ever used a tablet for note-taking very recently and it is such an amazing thing because a okay let me give you some uh a little backstory i went to university a few years ago and some of the people in my class would actually sit there with a recording device or their phone and record the entire lecture and these lectures were between two and three hours long now it sounded extremely painful to me that they would go home listen to the two three hour lecture and add to their notes because i know for a fact that the lecturers and the teachers would take breaks there would be um random questions from people that you might not care about you hear your friends talking about random nonsense or your teacher kind of stumbles or whatever all of this stuff is irrelevant things and you don't want to have to listen to three hours of class again when you've just sat through it with this you can record only the bits you like and you don't have to go through and cut it up or rewrite the words because it's already organized in your notes right it's amazing so that is the one key thing with notability because there's actually another note-taking app i prefer but it doesn't do that one thing and that's called good notes goodnotes does literally everything that um notability does except record the audio which is why i mentioned it with the notability it does everything else it does though and there's one massive benefit is the organizational structure is a thousand times better now your brain may have just immediately turned off when i said organizational structure and you died of boredom but believe me when you have like lots of notes with lots of different subjects being able to organize them really really nicely is so important so for example you might have subject and then it would be what level it is so asl a2 if you're doing sixth form and then it'd be topic then chapter etcetera whereas with notability it looks a bit uglier and it's a bit more difficult to navigate so personally good notes is better for me but again if you find another app or you want to use notability it's totally fine but personally the second goodnotes allows you to record audio it's dead for notability okay next when to make notes uh might seem like a ridiculously obvious thing to say but in my opinion there are actually two stages to making notes okay maybe three if you want to stretch it and be really precise the first stage is when you're actually in class or lecture or whatever this is when you write down only the absolute essential key things so this is stuff that you can't find in textbooks please do not waste time copying out things that you can just read online or get through a textbook because you will miss the other stuff you will get more time which means you won't be able to write as fast you won't be able to write the key points down your brain will start turning off and everything will go poorly okay that might be a bit of an exaggeration so only the essential things so if your teacher has a unique way of explaining something or limerick if you're one of your classmates asked a really good question and you want to know the answer and you want to record it if your teacher goes through an exam question you want to note down the model answer that is definitely one that i would recommend those are things you want to copy down you also want to write in shorthand so this is when you're literally you screw grammar screw punctu punctuation all that stuff just write down in shorthand what you think this should these should be notes that you can tell what you were saying at the time in the short term so by the end of that day you should be able to go okay i get what i mean now if you look at these notes in a week's time they won't make any sense to you that's totally fine because that's not the point of them now as soon as humanly possible where this is during a break time lunch time a free period which you will get during sixth form college university or when you get home you need to start writing out these notes properly so let's say you have an hour of class i would recommend spending between 30 and 45 minutes writing notes it can be a lot less than that so in certain subjects you may not actually need to write that much may take you 15 minutes but expect up to 45 minutes and what you're going to do here is you're going to have your textbook out you're going to have the notes that you've taken out ideally you would have your teacher's lesson notes as well and maybe an online resource that sounds like a lot of different things but you don't need to use them all at once and what you're going to do is go through your notes and basically fill in the blanks what you've done is made like a skeleton structure and you're just going to fill in the stuff put the meat on the bones so to speak so if you went through let's say photosynthesis turn to the photosynthesis page in your textbook and write out the notes fully write them in your own words please don't just copy out the same thing over and over again if you want to remember a specific phrase exactly they recommend that you write it out eight times now you may think okay cool that's fine but let's say you're letting you do four pages of notes what's better to write those four pages of notes again or to write them eight times writing them out once in your own words is far better you remember it far faster okay you're not looking to memorize stuff you're here to learn not memorize i know that those things get kind of confused a lot of the time and again you want to use color group things together and probably the most important thing please write down questions for your teacher i'm going to set you a challenge and again when we do the scheduling video which is coming out shortly i will make sure you schedule in time for this schedule time every single week to speak to every one of your teachers once it doesn't matter if it's a two-minute conversation where you say hey what's the homework or you spend half an hour with them talking through some questions you didn't understand if you build that habit it will just it will make your life a lot easier your teachers will like you they're more likely to write references and things like that for you which you should start thinking about now and again like you may wonder how do i get time to do this during the day if i'm at school for six hours and i meant to do half an hour per subject that's like another three hours of note taking it when do i get time again yes it is a lot but with the proper schedule i promise you it's a lot easier than you think use the time when you're at school or university already to write these notes your free periods are so so so valuable because if you have let's say an hour of free periods in the middle of the day what else are you gonna do sure you can mess around with your friends but what if you just did an hour of note taking there and that way you only have to do 30 minutes at home far more it just makes more sense it's far more intelligent okay okay so what is the kind of overall strategy what are some other tips and tricks first things first and i can't stress this enough get yourself separate ring binders okay you're going to separate it under two things one the subject to the level let's say you're in sixth form you're going to have year 12 and 13 let's say you do biology biology year 12 biology of 13 different folders okay if you're at university one folder for every single module if you're at college one uh one folder for every single subject or division inside of that okay and in each of these folders you're going to have subject dividers and those are going to separate your chapters okay now there is every single year and honestly i fell prey to this as well i say oh you know what i'm doing three subjects i'm gonna buy three notebooks i'm just gonna keep all my notes in my notebook what could possibly go wrong everything can go wrong it always goes wrong it's horrible many things can go wrong so let's say on a day you have history english and law for argument's sake again this works for any three subjects doesn't matter now let's say you forget your history notebook at home that means you're going to write your history notes in your law notebook and then you're not going to remember to rip out your lawn uh page from your law notebook but then even if you did how would you put it into a history notebook it's going to be out of order you're going to have loose pages in your notebook and these pages will fall out and then your life will be horrible and everything will go bad okay probably not that not that badly but it happens all the time also what happens when you need to buy another notebook for a subject again it's not organized i'd also like to remind you that by the time of your final exams and it doesn't matter if you're doing university college or a levels you're going to have around 200 to 300 pages of notes now if you say you know what i want to do that and stuff chapter 2 and sub chapter 3. are you going to be able to find that easily or you're going to flip through 300 pages of notes trying to find that one specific thing realize that you've lost it and you waited an hour of your life and you've tortured yourself it's much better i promise you it takes literally 30 seconds every single day to just come home rip out all of your work and also you're going to get handouts from your lecturers and your teachers so you need a place to put those if you just slot them into your notebook they're gonna fall out and you're gonna have a horrible time and you put them behind each one so let's say it's my biology folder and we just did chapter one and what i'm going to do is in order i'm going to put all of my classwork homework um mock uh exams that i've done and handouts and putting me in order nice and neatly i'll label my stuff with the chapters and everything and also my notes as well okay and then as this fills up it's going to be nice and orderly okay if i want to find chapter 2 stuff i open up my biology folder pick out the subject of chapter turn it over from there done takes 10 seconds and i promise you this takes about 30 seconds every single day but people tend to be quite lazy so what i like to do is in my schedule i literally write down that for 10 minutes when i get home i'm just going to organize my work that's it i get the job done i get the kind of task complete now i do hear complaints like but then i have to carry like four folders and four notebooks why if you plan what you're going to do during your free time you only need to bring like one folder right and that's the one that contains whatever work you need for that free period so don't worry about bringing all of them or like having to like develop huge back muscles just to carry your bag to university or something it's i promise it's a lot easier than it sounds okay so as promised i'm actually going to flip over to my computer now and i'm going to show you a few websites where you can monetize your notes make a bit of extra cash again don't expect to be like jeff bezos or anything but you may get who knows if you get like 100 pounds it's pretty good as 100 as you would have got normally you might discover you have a knack for it and then go into things like ux or ui design or graphic design maybe lay out your notes nice and neatly and maybe you can make a bit of money from it so let's get over to it okay so here we are uh this is stevia.com this is probably the most popular note selling website um around so i have a few other links in the description they all work practically the same way so all you need to do here is as you can see you can find different study resources but in which in our case we're actually looking to sell some stuff you just click cell and then all you have to do is select which level it is so what's your level of study it can be a level b tech ib or university level so it's worked for pretty much anyone so let's say a level and then you select the exam board so then let's say it's aqa what subject should we do let's do physics right actually let's do uh just big geography it doesn't really matter module it can be introduction or let's see so we type in geography actually comes up with the chapters that are there so we can just say geographical skills and then all you do is you choose your files to upload and just drag on whatever one you want so it has a 60 megabyte file limit size so i'd recommend just doing pdfs for example and then you can also add another course and that's literally all you have to do after that you just describe the documents it gets published and then you can start earning money so super easy they all work the exact same way but i would recommend studia this isn't kind of endorsed or anything like that but this is definitely what i would use but it's super easy to do and you just get the money straight into a paypal account or bank account okay so i hope that you found this super useful um be sure to check out the notes uh taking sorry the note selling websites even i've left links to all of them in the description along with some sources for different note-taking methods if you're interested um again there's no harm in just putting yourself out there on these note selling websites don't worry if it's not good enough do you know what happens when it's not good enough no one buys it but honestly who cares it doesn't matter it's up there now maybe someone will buy it someday and you'll make money that you never would have had before as always i hope that you have a truly wonderful day and i'll see you in the next one