Have you ever sat in a lecture, meeting, or presentation and found yourself utterly confused? Maybe the subject matter went completely over your head, or the speaker seemed to be talking in circles while saying nothing at all. Maybe you struggle to pay attention in such settings, regardless of whether it’s a classroom, a conference, or a sermon on Sunday. Teachers can’t seem to hold your interest.
It’s not that you don’t enjoy learning; of course you do. You can focus for hours on things that you’re interested in. It’s just that it’s hard to concentrate in these settings, though you’re not always sure exactly why. It’s like your mind checks out. Maybe you’re a college student who’s been pulling too many all-nighters—or a professional with too much work stress; we all seem to be tired these days, don’t we?
Or, maybe you find yourself very much enjoying these settings, but you still can’t get your mind to fully connect with the material. In one ear, out the other. You wish you had a way to keep hold of it, to clear the fog in your mind, and to really grasp the information being handed to you.
Alternatively, it’s possible that you don’t struggle with the above scenarios at all, and you’re here because you’re always eager to get tips to improve mental clarity. Self-improvement is like a drug, eh? There’s never any harm in reading a blog post about improving your mental clarity. We could all use a little bit of that, right?
Whatever it may be, I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to look at a number of ways that you can use note-taking to improve your mental clarity in the classroom, the boardroom, or wherever else you find that your mind begins to fog over when someone’s talking.
You’ll find a new sense of purpose and a sharpness of attention that you haven’t experienced before. Pen and notebook in hand, you will capture every key point and concept from the sea of information. You’ll be able to explain the main points of the topic to a 6-year-old or a 70-year-old with equal adeptness, weaving between poignant simplicity and nuanced complexity. Part of mastering a subject is knowing it so well, inside and out, that you can easily explain its bare bones essence or its many details with equal ease.
If your mind is feeling clouded over, you’re going to struggle to fully understand the subject material. This is a massive hindrance to your learning journey—but I don’t need to tell you that! Whatever reason brings you here, whatever struggles you have in your learning journey, note-taking is here to help.
Don’t believe me? That’s fine; I can work with that. A hint of skepticism is actually a good sign that you’re not far away from improving your mental clarity. Let me help you travel the rest of the way.
What Effective Note-Taking Looks Like
We already have an image of what it looks like to struggle with note-taking. So now, let’s try to imagine what good note-taking looks like instead. That should give you an idea of what we’re aiming for, as well as a hint of what note-taking can do for your mental clarity.
As you’re reading this description of taking good and effective class notes, try to identify where your own approach might drift and whether that might be contributing to your brain fog in class.
In the Beginning
Good note-taking starts with prep work. Before the class session even begins, you start thinking about the material and reviewing any previous handouts, digital notes, or sessions you’ve attended. You get out your supplies and name and date your paper.
When Class Is Under Way
Once the lecture starts, your focus only increases. Instead of struggling to pay attention, you’re able to follow the speaker’s every word and actively listen to what they’re saying. That phrase, “active listening,” means that instead of passively hearing the words, you’re actually engaging with them —analyzing them, thinking about the concepts, considering different angles, absorbing them into your own understanding, and capturing them on the page.
When you look at your notes from lectures, they are very well organized notes and easy to follow; it’s almost as if the essence of the speaker’s topic has been recreated in neat, concise, and comprehensive form on your page. Frankly, it’s a pleasure to look at with its cleanliness and orderliness.
Finishing Strong
And that pleasing visage pays off when it comes to reviewing your lecture notes. That’s right, good note-taking doesn’t end in the classroom; it continues into the world beyond. If you want mental mastery over the subject matter, you have to put in the work to memorize and study it. But not only to memorize it—to understand it, fully, to the point of being able to teach your knowledge to others or otherwise apply it.
Why It Matters
What you do during the lecture determines the bulk of academic success and your comprehension of the subject matter; so if you’re struggling with mental clarity, your practices here are, quite probably, the culprit. In other words— you have a note-taking problem. Maybe you’ve taken notes for years and yet have never experienced the above-mentioned description of good note-taking.
If that’s the case, then your heart is in the right place, and all we have to do is refine your methods—and then you’ll be amazed at the difference in how your mind relates to the content. Alternatively, maybe you’re not even taking notes at all! In either case, allow me to explain further how note-taking can revolutionize your learning, turn your life around, and sharpen your mind—all at the same time.
Taking Notes Creates Mental Organization
The first way that taking notes can improve mental clarity is by providing organization, both on paper and in your mind. One factor that contributes to brain fog is sheer overwhelm; having so much information dumped on you at once that your mind doesn’t even know where to begin, so instead it glazes over. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “being in a stupor,” this is pretty similar.
You may feel this way towards the end of the school year, when the exhaustion has been compiling for months as the subject material continues to advance, until you find yourself in a perpetual fog running on very low fumes.
But you can also feel this way even if your body isn’t struggling with tiredness; sometimes the information is also highly emotional and overwhelms both your mind and your heart. At these times, journaling has been proven extremely helpful for many people (and, I must point out, journaling is absolutely a form of note-taking!).
Other times, too much information is simply too much information, and you need to take a step back, reorient yourself, and devise a strategy to make sense of it all. This is where note-taking comes in: it offers strategies and methods for organizing information in a visual way that is clear and digestible.
Prioritizes Information and Discards Clutter
Many note-takers struggle to know just how much information is enough to record, especially when they’re just getting started taking notes in the classroom or elsewhere. There are two basic mistakes that note-takers make: first, they write down too much. Second, they don’t write down enough.
It’s tempting to try to copy everything the speaker says, word for word. But this type of transcription actually works against you. For one, it’s impossible to keep up for even the fastest of writers or typists; human speech is simply faster. You’re going to miss things that the speaker says. The fastest note-takers are only going to be able to record about 80% of the speaker’s monologue.
Dictation is also simply not an effective note-taking strategy because all you’re really doing is copying, and copying doesn’t require any real thought. It doesn’t prompt you to think about the material. And at the end of the day, you’re left with a book of notes that you’ll have to read through to find useful information, which wastes valuable time.
If you’re too overwhelmed or have trouble knowing what information is important, you may not write much at all. This is also not an ideal way of taking notes because it doesn’t give you enough information to work with in the review. There are too many gaps to be able to recreate the speaker’s presentation successfully in your mind. It may end up looking like a bunch of disparate, complete sentences or half-sentences that don’t seem to relate to each other much at all.
The ideal amount of information to write down is somewhere in the middle. Namely, you want to capture all of the most important points, concepts, key words, and themes that are discussed. How do you know what that is, you ask? Good question.
Start with your learning objectives: What do you want to take away from this learning experience?
Do you want a working knowledge of the topic?
Do you want to be able to teach it to others?
Do you want to be able to apply it to your life?
Do you just want to get a passing grade on your report card?
Your goals will shape how you approach class material when writing your notes, because once you identify them, your note-taking approach is all about trying to achieve that objective. For most dedicated learners, your objective is to understand the material to a degree that you can talk about it intelligently at any given time; you want to absorb this topic into your knowledge base.
That’s fantastic! With that in mind, the best note-taking approach you can take is to identify the main structures of the topic. By that, I mean all of the big picture themes, underlying concepts, and key ideas. Those thoughts should become the headings in your notes. Under them, you can write supporting details, but don’t write down anything that isn’t relevant to those key concepts and ideas. You’re trying to isolate the essence of the topic and really absorb it into your knowledge.
How does this improve mental clarity? Simple: it hones in on information that is prioritized and disregards everything else. Instead of experiencing overwhelm or having a bunch of random, disconnected facts cluttering your mind, you instead have sharp clarity and a deep understanding of exactly how the essentials fit together.
Once you’ve locked in on that, then you can add more and more minute supporting details. As my old history professor once explained it, you need some coat hangers in your closet before you can start hanging clothes.
Provides Structure and Organization
Too much disorganization can actually have the psychological effect of decreasing your well-being, encouraging poor eating habits, making your thinking less efficient, causing stress, and potentially even lowering your mental health.
You can avoid all this simply by walking into your session with a plan of action for your note-taking system. Assuming that by this point you’ve established what your learning objectives are, you can use them to start building a plan for organizing the upcoming information in a way that supports those goals.
Creating headings and topic groups is a key part of the organizational process, regardless of which note-taking method you use. Headings and subheadings add order to chaos and method to madness. You should start by naming your page with the name of the class or presentation, and then build a hierarchy downward from there.
Feel free to choose a proven note-taking method or style. These templates will instantly give your notes an orderliness that will make them much more effective for your goals. Here are some examples of the most popular note-taking methods:
- Outlining method: create a hierarchical outline of the subject using headings, subheadings, and supporting details in descending order, all with the use of bullet points. Each bullet point follows the preceding point.
- Cornell method: divide your paper into a narrow keyword column to the left of the page, a large note-taking section to the right, and a summary section at the bottom of the page.
- Mind-mapping method: starting with a circle in the center of your page, draw lines branching outward to other circles. In each circle, write a heading, subheading, or piece of information. This looks just like a brainstorming session.
- Charting method: use charts, tables, or columns to organize information by points of similarities or differences. This method is all about comparison.
- Boxing method: draw boxes or frames around information to group it into topics and subtopics. You can also draw boxes inside boxes.
Create a specific place to put any disparate pieces of information that you want to keep but don’t quite fit into the bigger picture of your notes. You want access to them, but you don’t want them to trip up your brain when you’re reviewing and fully immersed in the beautifully streamlined content that makes up the majority of your notes.
Take advantage of other structural tools as well. These techniques add to your overall organization by making your notes easier to read. Use color-coding, symbols, abbreviations, and paraphrases to make your page clean and tidy.
Creating organization in your notes creates organization in your mind. Everything has a place, and everything fits together. Organizing your notes makes them legible and clear—and your notes reflect your mind! Your thinking on the topic will follow in the wake of your ability to organize the information. And in addition to fostering neatness and clarity, organization will also support creativity in your thinking. By cutting out clutter and working primarily with the essentials, you’ll be able to draw more connections between them and walk away with deeper insights.
Taking Notes Improves Cognition
Note-taking is a big workout for your brain. Even a factor as small as handwriting versus typing your notes can make a big difference in your cognitive experience of them. Handwriting has been demonstrated to improve learners’ comprehension and retention of information due to its being a more complex and involved process than typing on a keyboard.
The motor movement of the pen, the spatial awareness of the page, and the slower pace that forces deeper attention and thinking all play a role in this. But even beyond this level, there are a number of cognitive benefits that we can derive from taking notes. Let’s look at a few of them.
Sharpens Memory
One of the hardest parts of learning anything is retaining it, which is where note-taking comes in. Studies have shown that students who take notes have higher recall rates and perform better on tests than students who don’t. It takes a lot of time and effort to move information from your short-term memory to your long-term or working memory; reviewing notes is one of the best ways to make this transition happen.
But even without taking extra time to review, taking notes on the subject engages your brain and establishes it more firmly in your memory. It forces you to pay close attention and think through what is being said so that you can record it in your own words in your notes.
Note-taking can actually increase the brain’s capacity for memory. If you recall the information repeatedly enough, it will strengthen those connections in your brain and cause the neurons to combine, creating increased storage capacity.
This is a rather wonderful thing, since around 40% of what you learn typically fades away within 24 hours of first hearing it. The brain doesn’t hold onto information that it deems useless or irrelevant. But if you take good notes and consistently review them, you can train your brain to recall up to 100% of what you recorded.
A sharper memory means a sharper mind. Note-taking can bring mental clarity here by crystalizing your knowledge base and your access to that knowledge base. You’ll have a better awareness of what you know and a better command of it because you’ve put the effort into understanding it.
If you put enough effort into your learning to actually retain a large chunk of information, you’ll no longer be swimming in data. Your brain won’t be overwhelmed by the amount of information being thrown at it, and you’ll actually be able to better grasp new information, relate it back to what you already know, and analyze it intelligently.
It’s also less strenuous on the brain when you can work with information that you already know instead of constantly having to review what you don’t quite know yet. Memorization is a lot of work, but once it’s locked in, all you have to do is maintain it.
Prompts Questions and Creative Thinking
We’ve established that good note-taking requires a lot of intentionality, thought, and engagement with the subject material. Part of what that inspires in the note-taker is a posture of inquiry and inquisitiveness. You’ll want to know more. You’ll be listening for what does and doesn’t make sense. You’ll start to see where there are gaps in what is being presented. In other words, you’ll be a more critical thinker. A big part of critical thinking is being able to ask the right questions.
You’ll be asking questions at every stage of your learning process. In preparation for the session, for example, you can ask yourself what things you might be curious to learn about the topic. During the session, you can ask the instructor any clarifying questions about what they’ve said or any points of inquiry that intrigue you. And after the session, you can come up with even more questions in your reviewing sessions. Questions drive learning forward. Questions make the topic yours.
In addition to prompting questions, note-taking also inspires creative thinking. Engaging deeply with a topic — studying and asking questions about it — will encourage you to start seeing patterns, relationships, links, connections, and associations between the information. You’ll have more out-of-the-box thinking, and you’ll start to create your own insights about the subject matter. There’s no brain fog to be seen here!
Taking Notes Leads to Actionables
What is knowledge without application? In the words of Christopher Crawford, “Knowledge without application is like a book that is never read.” Indeed, if it stays stuck in your head forever, it won’t do anyone else any good. Creating something with your knowledge — be it a podcast, a blog post, or teaching it to someone else — is what makes it truly come alive.
If you follow the outline of good note-taking that we’ve been discussing in this blog post, then the way that you approach your notes will set you up to do something meaningful with them. In fact, the entire purpose of note-taking could be interpreted as making knowledge organized and accessible so that you can master it.
And mastery involves not only a certain level of comprehension of something but also the ability to wield it skillfully. A master swordsman is accomplished in both theory and practice. A masterful physicist can both understand and compute. If we want to go back to our theme of mental clarity, there is a common saying among monks of various spiritual practices that says “contemplation and action.” As in, thinking and action are two sides of the same coin. There is an actionable element to truly knowing something. Excellence is character embodied in action; virtue is both principle and behavior.
Conclusion
Clearly, there are many ways that note-taking contributes to a clearer mind. The very act of taking notes effectively will wipe away the mental fog and sharpen your focus. It will give you the ability to better engage with the topic, learn it, and apply it. In short, effective note-taking is literally all about mental clarity.
We talked about how taking notes helps to create organization in your mind and your thinking. It does this by piercing through the overwhelming waterfalls of data and identifying the throughlines. Once you have mapped out the essence of a concept, it’s much easier to categorize all of the following details. You can do this by learning how to prioritize information as it’s handed to you. Disregard irrelevant factoids and focus on what points are actually important; this will include themes, main concepts, and key points. This will have the dual effect of crystallizing your understanding of the subject while also decluttering less relevant points.
Note-taking also provides structure and organization, which improves your overall well-being. Disorganization can cause some very negative side effects in addition to brain fog, including stress and poor eating habits. Organizing your notes makes them clean, tidy, and comprehensive.
Everything has a place, and everything makes sense. Since reviewing your notes plays a big part in your learning a topic, their clarity will transfer to give you mental clarity. One of the best ways to organize your notes is to use a note-taking method or template.
We also talked about how taking notes improves cognition skills, particularly when it comes to sharpening your memory and getting your brain’s creative juices flowing. You can actually increase your memory’s storage capacity by reviewing your notes.
It also sharpens your memory, which brings mental clarity because you are able to better navigate new information. Note-taking also involves a whole lot of questions, which keeps you mentally engaged and inquisitive and also inspires you to think more creatively about the subject matter.
And lastly, note-taking sets you up to act upon what you’ve learned. This is where your note-inspired mental clarity comes full circle: throughout the entire process of note-taking, you practice training your mind upon the skill or subject at hand, and through the process of doing so, it actually gives you cognitive benefits in return.
Until finally, at the end of your learning journey, you are left with the question of what to do next. And the answer, which you have created through your very approach to this endeavor, is to do something productive with it that will have an impact. As you begin to slake off your brain fog and achieve mental clarity, you may just find that you begin to see this clearly.