 So I've spent years taking handwritten notes. This is about four years worth of notes from my time at the University of Toronto. And then this is about four or five months worth of notes for a really big exam called the MCAT. And now in medical school, this is my first year worth of handwritten notes taken during my time here. But now I do pretty much everything digitally using either my iPad or my laptop. And so the question is, which one of these methods is best? So handwritten notes pretty much got me through seven years of university. I would attend the lecture and then take my own handwritten notes, lecture 20, take the notes, lecture 21, take the notes. And then when it came exam time, I would condense those lectures into as little information as possible. So a lecture that used to take up one page would now only take up about this much. And then again over here, small lectures, just condensed down into the really need to know information. Then before exams, I would read this information over and over and over again just trying to ingrain it into my head. So I could remember and understand everything when it came exam time. And to be honest, this method of writing down information, condensing it and then reviewing it over and over again worked really well for me. So research generally shows that handwriting notes means that you can remember the material better than if you were to just type it. One research study by Mueller and Oppenheimer even showed that students who take lecture notes by hand generally performed better in tests than those who took their notes on a computer. One of the reasons for this is because we can type so much faster than we can write. This means that when we handwrite our notes, we force ourselves to distill the information from the lectures into the information that we think is most important. The main issue when it comes to typing down your notes is that you're likely gonna just copy the exact information that's being said without thinking about what it is that you're writing down. Typing notes on a keyboard can be a very passive process where your job as students is just to transcribe everything that the lecturer is saying. Instead of when you take handwritten notes, you can really focus on making high yield notes with only the most important information. It also takes skill to write good handwritten notes. And certainly when I was writing these notes back in 2013 till 2017, I don't think I've quite mastered that skill just yet. You have to be able to condense the information down into something useful and pick out the key information from lectures. So this does mean that you have to practice somewhere or have some experience in taking good handwritten notes at to see the benefits of better recall. From an anecdotal point of view, when I write handwritten notes, I really feel that I'm much more zoned in and focusing on the information that I'm taking in and that I'm writing down. Because it's a slower process naturally, I kind of have to think about it more. When I'm typing out lecture notes on the other hand, I could be listening to the professor and typing down everything they're saying whilst having a full on conversation with my friend or watching the football game that someone is live streaming in front of me. And I used to do this all the time. I would have no problem even just closing my eyes almost going to sleep and typing away transcribing everything they were saying. Now, obviously in that scenario, I'm doing zero thinking. I'm not learning anything. I'm not absorbing any information. I'm just getting the information down onto paper or in this case onto my computer so that I can condense it and review it later on. But obviously, as you can imagine, that's definitely not an efficient way to be learning. Now, this isn't always the case, but most degrees, at least in theory, don't rely on your ability to recall a list of information. They want you to learn the theory and apply general concepts to situations in exam questions. Quick side note, this was extremely rare in my degree at the University of Toronto where most of our courses were just about how much information you could memorize from the slides. When that's the case, it's really important to figure out what your professor's courses are actually testing you on. If you want to score well, you need to match your studying technique to their testing technique. If they're testing you on pure memorization, then unfortunately, you just need to memorize. And if they're testing you on your application of theory, then you need to truly understand the material. Anyways, back to what I was saying. So the research shows that students with handwritten notes might understand concepts better because typing notes requires shallower processing than handwriting them does. But I think this is a very niche view of how most students study. Most of you watching this video, including myself, probably don't just use notes to learn. Throughout all these years of handwriting and reviewing and condensing all these notes, I was also using other resources to study. Things like videos, so sketchy medical, things like past paper question banks or past exam papers provided by the university. I was never solely reliant on just handwriting notes. But at different times through my university life, they've either been the home base or the core of my studying technique or just a peripheral additional thing on the side. A lot of the evidence from research studies is comparing just handwritten notes to just typing notes. So this doesn't include information about other study techniques. And I don't think it's very reflective of how students study today. And that's why I believe that digital notes can be really, really useful when we actually use them to facilitate things like active recall and space repetition, which I'm sure you guys are all sick of hearing by now, but they really do work as studying techniques. Now active recall and space repetition were still techniques that I was using when doing handwritten notes. It's just much more difficult when you're doing it paper-based versus a computer. Handwritten notes wasn't a bad way of studying. And if you study with handwritten notes and that works for you, then just keep doing it. I did it, like I said, for so long and it worked very, very well for me. It was only in the summer after my 30th of medical school and then in my fourth year of medical school where note taking in this way just became unsustainable. Really big exams like the USM Lee Step One, where there's just so much information to learn. And then in fourth year for my clinical years where I spent tons of time in hospital, just meant that I didn't have enough time to handwrite notes on all the information that was being constantly thrown at me. Now this kind of forced me into the realization that handwriting notes was extremely inefficient. I mean, so, so, so inefficient for my time. I've personally spent so much of my life in libraries or at home at my desk because I was just sitting there handwriting notes, which by nature is such a time consuming process. So starting in my fourth year of medical school, I just said, you know what? I don't have the time to sit down and take all these handwritten notes. And then that's when I had to adapt my studying habits and techniques to continue performing well at university. And so I started relying a lot on my digital notes on a computer. So there are some obvious pros to taking digital notes. Let me show you guys how I store all of my information on an app called Notion. So this here is my medical school page. I've got a whole bunch of different pages over here inside. But the main one that I wanna show you is my conditions page. So this is a list of pretty much all the conditions that I need to know in medical school neatly organized by a body system. Then if you click into each of these, they're even further organized into different parts of the body. And then each one of these will have a whole bunch of information color coded according to the different things that I need to know or that I want to know. And you know, it's all there easily with a click of a button. It's on my phone, it's on my laptop, it's on my iPad, I can access it anytime. So why are these notes so great? The first thing and what I consider to be really important is the search ability. So I can search across all of my notes for let's say, liver cirrhosis and just see what comes up. So here I've got liver cirrhosis. Again, under gastroenterology, I just click on it and suddenly I have access to all of my liver cirrhosis notes. These are screenshots that I've taken from previous digital notes. This is a picture I've taken from a book. And you know, here's all my information neatly organized in just one little quick search away. When I'm on the wards in the hospital and I see a patient with a certain condition and I need to refresh my memory on that, I don't want to Google the condition. I want to know my notes while I've written down and what I think is most important and relevant for me. So I can just quickly pull it up on my phone and find it like this. Now when I was dealing with my good old friends, oh, that's another reason not to store your notes on paper. So as I was saying, back when I was storing all of my notes handwritten on pieces of paper when they weren't ripped out of my folder, if I wanted to search for a word like liver cirrhosis, how in the world would I ever find it here? No matter how organized I would keep something like this, you know, with sticky notes and different headings, which I did do over here as you guys can see, there's just no way I could find this information easily, quickly and at a glance, which brings me to point number two. Once I've done my handwritten notes and I've put them away in a folder, they become useless. I will never, ever, ever look at these notes again because it's just too difficult. It takes too much time and it's not worth the hassle. Whereas my Notion document over here, I literally look through and use pretty much every single day and I have access to information that I've written so many years ago very quickly at a glance. And even now when I'm starting to study for a new exam, the situational judgment test, you know, I've got all these notes here and I can start building on them more and more and more. It's just such a better way of organizing your files, making them easily accessible in the future. Besides the fact that it's backed up online, I can never lose it. It's on my phone, my iPad, my laptop. I mean, those are just bonuses. A third point is that digital notes like this are really easy to edit and change. You know, if I'm looking through one of these conditions, let's say, I don't know, aortic dissection. So if I come here and I realize that I want to add another presenting complaint for patients who come with aortic dissection, I can literally just write it down. If I want to move this entire paragraph and just shift it down and put it over here, I can do that. And if I want to delete everything, I can do that really easily. Okay, let me bring it back before I lose it. But you guys get the point. This is so easily editable. I remember and I hated if I ever had to make amendments to my hundreds of notes like this, I would literally have to like cut up a piece of paper, staple it inside, you know, try and make it neat and obvious that I've made an addition over here. I hated it. And it was just, it made me feel like my notes were so much less neat, more disorganized, et cetera. One more thing that I would often do with my handwritten notes is I would always try to squeeze as much information as I possibly could onto a single page. And that meant that I would write things really small as you guys can see. And then if I wanted to add on additional information, I'd make sure to write to even smaller so that it didn't take up any space at all. Whereas here on my digital notes, like it feels like I just have this huge sandbox, this immense infinite playground onto which I can write and add notes and images and pages within pages and tables and headlines. You know, it's just, it's much more freeing than being physically restricted to a single piece of paper or a booklet of paper for that matter. Anyways, I could be here for days talking about the pros of taking notes digitally and taking handwritten notes on my iPad, type notes like this on Notion on my computer, but I've got a bunch of videos about those already on the channel. You guys can watch them up over here. So by now, we all know that active recall and space repetition are some really high utility methods of studying. Personally, I found that with handwritten notes, they just don't facilitate being able to quiz myself on the content that I'm studying. I would kind of have to just cover with another piece of paper, the piece of paper with notes on it and just reveal information solely in one piece at a time. Whereas with my digital notes, it's really easy to hide information behind different pages, behind different toggles and so I can quiz myself way, way easier. What I found was that if I handwrote my notes, then I would still need to do pass paper questions. And when I would do a question, then great, I'd have my notes that I could go back and refer to. But instead, I could just skip this whole handwriting notes part, just do practice questions and take notes from those practice questions. I've got an entire video on this studying method, which I still use up until today. I'll leave a link somewhere up over here. Now using this technique, instead of just copying or transcribing lecture slides and then being faced with this wall of handwritten notes every time I go to study, I could easily go through and read the questions that I was actually tested on. And then when I read the questions, I need to use my brain to try and figure out what the answer is and recall that information, which is such a more active way of studying and led to definitely better recall and consolidation for me. Having these digital notes encourages me to test myself using hidden toggles and pages within pages and review the notes more often. It's way too easy to just store away these paper notes in a file and literally never look at them ever again. With my digital notes, I can always access them on my phone, my laptop or my iPad. And so it just makes it easy to open up and then review the content. On top of that, I'll never forget that when I was handwriting notes on paper, every time I'd come across a diagram or a flow chart or something that I would need to copy, I would just have the biggest side because it would take forever to re-copy that image over again. Whereas in digital notes, I literally just screenshot it or drag and drop the image and then I can annotate on top of it. It was like a game changer for me. So now in medical school, knowing that I have this database, which is my conditions list that I showed you earlier, with everything in one place just makes me feel so much more secure and confident about the information. And when I'm on the wards or out and about, I know that I have access to that information very easily and quickly. Now, when it comes to spaced repetition, if you're reviewing your notes, either paper notes or digital notes on anything other than like Anki, which has its own algorithm for showing you information at different intervals, then you kind of have to build in space repetition into your own timetable. So I would do this by going on a calendar and like literally writing the subject to study over here and over here and over here and over here and over here. So I'd make sure I'd go over enough times at different time intervals. I also keep track of how many passes I've done of each subject in a table on Notion. And that way I know how many times have I covered this information before. When I was doing handwritten notes, I would write everything down. And then on my second review, I would write things down in a different color. And then on my third review, I would use a different color. And so I knew how many reviews I had done based on how many colors there were. And I knew which information I had added at different times because of the different colors as well. Definitely not the best way of doing things, but it worked for me at the time. So I mean, university is such a busy time. And you want to make sure that your educational life is balanced with your social life so that you don't burn out in the long run. And that's why I think it's crucial to choose study methods that are effective and are efficient. Anything that can reduce the friction of me studying and saves me time when studying is something that I really want to do. And this is why I think that taking digital notes is so key for me. And there might be lots of evidence that shows that handwritten notes are better than type notes or digital notes when it comes to learning. But I think digital notes have come so far since some of these studies have been done. And in my opinion, it makes the high utility stuff so much easier to do. I'm talking active recall and space repetition, quick access to notes and reviews, et cetera. And this is the main advantage for me using something like Notion where I can get organized and I can start writing myself questions and answers and I can hide information behind different pages and toggles instead of just writing things down nonstop handwritten, taking forever over and over again. But at the end of the day, like I always say, you know, study however works for you. If all your friends are doing anky and active recall and they say it's the best thing ever, but you're just not a big fan of it and you prefer to handwrite your notes and make them all aesthetic and everything like that, then honestly go for it. I took handwritten notes for so long and it worked very, very well for me. It doesn't mean it's a bad studying technique. I've just adapted to the different life and time commitments that I have. Now in my later years of medical school and that's what's working for me now. Maybe in a year from now I'll change my studying technique again. Who knows, I think being able to adapt and being able to change to your surrounding circumstances is also really, really important. And that's it. I hope this video has been useful and given you a little bit of an insight into why digital note-taking for me has become my go-to instead of studying with handwritten notes. I'm always interested to hear about how you guys all work. So please do let me know in the comments down below. If you enjoyed the video, don't forget to like it, check out and subscribe to my Patreon and I will catch you in the next one. Peace.