 Trying to take notes from a large textbook is super overwhelming, and medical school had to easily read 20-30 pages per lecture, and thus hundreds of pages each and every week. But here is the note-taking strategy that I used to help me ace all my classes without the excess time. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. Today I'm going to break down the exact strategy that I used in medical school to go through a very hefty textbook and syllabus, and basically talk about how to take notes, how to use them effectively, and most importantly use it to be able to study for your quizzes and tests without having to go back and reread all your notes. So step number one is to really rethink how to take notes in the first place. So most students, including myself in both college and medical school, will take notes usually the wrong way. We often think of notes as one of two things. One, we try to make the information condensed town into something we can understand, and two, we try to basically transfer from one modality, being the textbook, to another, like an outline or a word doc, however you want to do it. But essentially it ends up being a big outline into a shorter one, and still we have no idea what it says and have not given any attention to the review process, which is the most important. And if you're anything like me as an early medical student, you thought you're being efficient by transferring your notes into like a nice word doc outline or a notebook, only to find out that you really had no time to actually master the content that you put in there in the first place. And I suspect a lot of you guys that are watching this right now are nodding your head to be like, yep, that's me, what the hell do I do? And don't worry, I was in the same shoes, but two things that really helped me go from an average med student to somebody who was able to get A's on their tests is really asking two questions. When I was reading from a textbook, instead of thinking how am I going to make something into my own words, the two things I was looking for is one, what in the world is actually important in the paragraph set of reading? And then two, how do I want to transition that into something that can use later on to easily review? And the next few steps will get into both of them very specifically. So step number two is just do one task at a time. When I was in college and definitely as an early medical student, I thought it made sense to read something and then try to put it in my own words as a word doc or on the side and the margins of the textbook. But then I found the waste of time through context switching. If you're unfamiliar, context switching is basically a fancy word for multitasking. When you're doing something, for example, like reading the textbook and then writing your notes at the same time, you think you're being efficient, you think you're being effective. But over multiple studies, we found that when people are doing multitasking, even with just two activities, 20% of the energy and time you're spending is simply transitioning between the tasks. There's no effectiveness. That's about spending 100 minutes or roughly an hour and a half reading a syllabus chapter or a lecture. Then while I think I'm being efficient for the entire 90 to 100 minutes, really 20 of those minutes are simply me transitioning to figure out like, what did I just read? Writing it down and then going back to like, where did I leave off? And really that's the biggest issue. So if you want to read your textbook quicker, if you want to read it more effectively, stick to one task. So go through your reading and we'll talk about how to do that in a second and then come back and write your notes, which I promise you will be much more effective. So the big takeaway again, is that when you're faced with a huge amount of texts to really think about your reading and your note taking completely separately. Now let's actually get into the reading of your textbook and we get into step number three, which is to mark your notable topics and ideas. Now when you're reading through your textbooks, you're going to come across two or three paragraphs and if you took a step back, you'll be like, I understand the main idea here. Here's some pieces of details. And this is really what this section of this textbook is trying to go for. And then you'll do the next thing for the next table, the next graph, the next set of paragraphs. You kind of get the bigger picture. But you don't want to waste time later on by having to come back and try to figure out what the main idea is again. And so one of my favorite strategies to do in medical school when I was reading a really text heavy syllabus or something from a textbook, like for example, this is a textbook that I was given a study from my internal medicine boards. Usually I would do is I would read two to three paragraphs and try to get idea of like, what's the main idea here. And once I understood that, then I would try to essentially put a star or marking, you know, any type of notation to the margins of that paragraph to basically say, this is kind of the sentence that overall summarizes what you're about to learn. So then it's easy for me later on when I'm looking at all my markings to say, oh, like this is the sentence that refers to the big idea of this paragraph. And so a simple rule that I would give myself is to read about three to five paragraphs in the text, depending on how kind of heavy it was on information and may marking next to the lines of the sentence that it corresponded to essentially, these would be the things that I would want to take notes on. But because that I want to waste time trying to take notes now, I'm essentially just leaving a mark saying, come back to this later. If anything, if you forget, you can just read that line and say, Oh, like that's what I was trying to take notes on. Now you kind of know, and you have a little marker to come back to for later. Now, if you're given a textbook, obviously in the digital age in the form of a PDF or an ebook, you could definitely guys can check out the episode that we did on essentially how to remember everything you read. I go through an example of a PDF in that video, I'll link it down below. But the same concept, you can highlight the first line of that paragraph or the sentence that you want to be able to remember. And again, come back later and write your notes. So that way you can finish your reading and then come back and focus on your note taking. Now we are going to take a pause right here because I know I was there that you likely have questions at this point. Before we go into note taking, probably asking about like, what is note worthy? Like what is high yield? How do I know when I'm reading something that something is should turn into one of my notes versus just a piece of detail? I just kind of know is within the textbook. Great questions. Number one, definitely recommend you guys check out this entire video that I broke down on the Q&A method. This is like the method that completely changed my note taking strategy in medical school. And so again, I will link that down below to help tons of students. It's also the format of what we'll talk about later in this video. So make sure you guys check that out down below. Number two is to really focus on thinking about big ideas and then focusing and honing in on the details. So see the forest and then focus on individual trees. So when you're reading your three to five paragraphs, one of the big questions you want to ask yourself is like, what is the big idea that could be testable here? If you're learning about a disease in medical school, first things you want to know obviously is like, what is the disease? Why does it happen? And then eventually you'll kind of get into how do I treat it and specifically what medications do I use? And so when you're reading, you definitely want to think about your learning as a tree and branches. Think about everything as a tree. What is the main idea within the first three to five paragraphs you're reading? And then what bits of details do you want to add on to to make the tree look a little bit more complete? And then finally, number three, and this is really what made the transition for me being like a C to a B student to somebody who's getting consistent A's is as I was reading three to five paragraphs or whatever it may have been on my text, the main thing I'm looking for is what question could come out of what I just read? Like what would my professor like to ask about, particularly if you've taken multiple quizzes and tests from the same instructor before or for that same class, what would be fair game? What kind of things could I be test on? Now, if I could say, for example, they want me to understand how to recognize this disease on a microscope through pathology. And here this paragraph is talking about what it looks like under a microscope. I may want to start that and come back to it later because I know that could be testable. I could see how it could easily write a question with that being the answer. And this is the biggest transition that you can make as a note taker because now you'll start to look at paragraphs as essentially the test maker and not the test taker. What questions could come out of what I just read? And then you can find opportunities to make markings and highlights next to those sentences that would be those respective answers. And after practicing this method, if you're still struggling trying to figure out what the hell is important, a few recommendations that we give to a lot of our coaching students is sometimes just go watch a quick YouTube video, maybe like five, 10 minutes, you can watch this super fast on 2x and just try to get a foundation on the topic that you're about to read on. So if I was going to learn about a disease, it may make sense to watch a five minute video that somebody's like spent lots of time on, on that disease, then read the 20 to 30 pages that I was given at medical school. And if I saw something in the video and now it's in the text, that's how you'll, that's something that should definitely show up in my notes. And the more times you do it, you'll be able to say like, I've heard this multiple times but professor also mentioned this in class when they're talking, this is something I definitely want to take notes on. And on the note of coaching, if you are somebody who is struggling on their medical journey, get the grades you want and just spending way too many hours have no idea what to do next, click down below to just kind of see our coaching program just to see even if you're barely interested. The type of results that we've been able to get students within the span of just two weeks, frankly, will work with you for the span of anywhere from eight to 12 weeks. If you're interested more about those programs, I'll link it down below. Now step number four is to finally come back and to focus on your note taking. Now, I completely changed how I studied medical school once I discovered a very quick and efficient way of studying through Anki, which we don't talk about in this video whatsoever. But if you guys are interested, the most popular video that we have here on YouTube will be linked right here. I'll also link it down below. I'm super effective. I go over the basics of Anki. If you're a complete newbie, you don't feel comfortable. But even if you're comfortable when you want to see some advanced strategies, I can really just change the game on how quickly you study and the grades you get. That video has been by far the most popular that we have here on YouTube. So I'll link it down below. But the first strategy that I was ever doing in medical school that, again, was still effective. The Anki one just worked a lot better for me, is basically what I'm about to go right now. And that's called the Q&A note taking method. So here's how basically I would do a Q&A method. So for example, this is the textbook that I use for my board studying. And essentially, when I was reading, I was looking for marks that I would want to come back to later. For example, here we're learning about gastroparesis. This is basically where the stomach has due to, you know, autonomic and neural issues won't do a good job contracting. So people have nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain. And so I'm finding sentences and lines that would be important to come back to and definitely be testable. So for example, this first line here, we're learning about essentially what gastroparesis is, the best way to test it. And then here, specifically, we're talking about dietary and medication things we should be knowing for. And then finally, this big highlight, which is a hint hint, it's almost like your professor telling you this may show up on the test, talks about, you know, common side effects that people have with the medication above. At this point, I haven't really written any notes. But because I've marked this, now I'm going to go back and say like, let's try to quickly remember what I was going for. Okay, this is the diagnosis. This one's talking about how do we test it. And then this one's going to be talking about, you know, overall treatments, et cetera. And so now that I've been able to quickly refresh on what I want to take notes on, the most important thing is to actually go back to my note-taking method. Now, there are tons of ways that you can take notes. The most simplest that I used in medical school was having a word doc per lecture, and then writing down my notes in that fashion. And we'll talk about exactly how to do it. Now, as technology advance a little bit since I've been in medical school, you have tons of other tools, for example, like Notion, that you can do a lot of things on. But you can keep it, again, very simple and just doing this on a notebook or on a word doc. But I'm going to show you exactly how I take notes through Notion. All right, so now we are officially in our Notion database. This is essentially what we call the Notion method table that we use for a lot of our students in the level up your setting course. So if you guys are interested in just having access to this template and then being able to use it for your classes, that'll be linked down below. But essentially what this is, is just a growing table where you can look at every single lecture and then have all of your material in a easy note-taking fashion. So as you're going through your textbook, you can easily write the questions and the answers as well as the lecture syllabus or the page that it came from. In addition, the nice thing about Notion is that you can nicely categorize things. So if I was in biochem and I was learning a specific pathway about the CREP cycle, I could put CREP cycle. And then as I get closer to my quiz and test, if I feel like I was struggling with the CREP cycle, I can just tell Notion to show me all of the questions and answers, even if it came from various different chapters and lectures only about the CREP cycle. That way you can really perfect that topic. And using our Notion method that we've created for students, you can essentially come back and review over time and understand, did I actually review and do an initial pass on my material? Do I feel confident going into my exam, as well as how difficult something is? So you can use this Notion database that's in the level up your setting course for a variety of things, but also including external resources outside of your textbooks. If you're watching videos, you're using question banks, so many different things, but essentially your entire questions from your lectures from your textbooks is in one place. Now if Notion is something that is foreign to you, you can easily use something that we call the simple Notion method. Essentially, and when this is just a template, you can go and put all of your lectures in using the toggle function. So let's say I had just covered lecture one and I'm going into lecture two. You can essentially add all of your questions and notes from your textbook. So let's say now I have gone through my textbook and have found all my markings. Now I can find those respective questions that I want to come back to and mark down or my specific notes. And then I can put in all the specific evidences or if I'm too lazy, I can just put the page from the lecture or the textbook that it came from. And I can essentially do this for the duration of that textbook. Now if we use lecture one and we use our example from the textbook and said, let's go over a gastroparesis. If I just open this, you can see that I have my various questions from that section of the textbook that we were talking about. So I can use gastroparesis and I can put all the answers down below here in the toggle function. If I want to quiz myself, I can just, you know, quiz myself and then reveal the answer, which is really nice. Same thing for the treatments, using bullet point fashions and again, if you're lazy, you can just put the page number that it came from or screenshot things if you have a digital textbook. So the toggle function is very nice. It keeps it very simple. One advance and pro tip that we use and for our students that we work with one on one in our coaching system is we'll recommend essentially being able to stratify if a topic despite you quizzing yourself on it is something you're strong on versus something you're weak on. So let's say I've answered all of these three questions. Now I want to be able to say, is this question something I'm going to have a tough time remembering later because I don't feel quite as confident. In that case, I may want to move it to my weak point toggle kind of chapter or folder. And if I'm feeling pretty good about the treatment of gastroparesis, I can say I'm mastered and maybe I don't really know how to diagnose it quite yet or don't feel comfortable that I will in two weeks when the quiz or exam rolls around, then I can just put it into weak points. Now when you come back and review lecture one before your test and quiz, you can have all of the specific topics essentially within both the mastered and weak points and it makes sense that I should probably start with the questions in the weak point section first and then go to the master. If you want to do this on a daily basis, you can also just have a big master deck as well as a big weak point deck and move them according to lecture. I like to have as stratified per lectures that kind of know what was asked and learned through my textbook reading for the entire lecture or the entire chapter and then move one by one. But again, when I'm reviewing, I would come back to the weak points first and then once I nailed us down, I would move them into the master it section. That way every time I was getting closer to a quiz or test, I could say for this lecture or for this textbook reading, I feel confident about all the questions that I made for myself. And that again makes it very easy. So again, if you want access to the entire notion method and the entire notion database, that is included for all their students in the level every setting course. And if you're interested in working with us one on one to kind of implement a system like this or your personalized day to day and studying, just let us know in the midnight program, which I'll also link below. Now hopefully you guys get a lot of value so far, but I promise you we're not done. Step number five is to give yourself a timer for each and every phase. A lot of students will struggle with the note taking process because there's typically no end date. Everyone is basically saying I'm going to read this textbook till completion and even if that takes me two hours versus one hour, I'm going to do it. But you have to understand that the most important thing is actually reviewing those questions and the notes you make, not so much of actually putting them on an outline or a piece of paper. So you have to have some kind of time component when you're reading a textbook and definitely when you're making your note taking process. Now this time will be dependent on one, how long you take, how long your lectures are, how quick of a reader you are, but once you come to a baseline. So for example, if you have a 15 to 20 page lecture, let's say it takes you an hour. That means that you should mentally know that about 30 minutes I should be more than halfway through the lecture in my reading. That's because usually your energy level will dip, your efficiency will dip, and you'll typically not spend as quick of a time going through your lecture on the second half. So you already want to be past the halfway mark. So with 20 pages, you want to be on page like 11 or 12 by the 30 minute mark. This is a good way to be able to look at the clock and say I'm right on cue or I'm going too slow, I need to speed up. And once you find yourself kind of getting in a flow with the method, you may want to ask like how do I even do this even faster? Simple strategy is to take that one hour and cut it by you know 25 minutes or 25 percent. So if I'm spending 100 minutes on activity and say well let's try to get this done in 75 minutes. That means that same 20 page lecture needs to be done in 70 minutes. That means I need to be halfway now not in 50 minutes but actually at like 35-37 minutes. So having that quicker timer I promise you will force yourself to be more efficient as long as you're focused and not distracted in the rest of your environment. And as a pro tip you can do the same absolute thing which you're note-taking when you come your note-taking and saying how long does it usually take me to transfer my notes into a toggle function or a word doc? The answer is like it takes me 30 to 45 minutes per hour. You can say I'm going to try to do this in 45 minutes and then try to figure out where your halfway mark should be. If you're still taking notes on page five and you're already spending 30 minutes on what should have been an hour task you're too far behind and you need to speed up. In the same way if you're already more than ahead and beautiful you're right on cue and you may be able to finish that task even sooner. And I can't talk about note-taking without talking about how the hell to review them. So step number six is to systematically come back to your notes and your review process as predictably as possible. Now this is really what we spend a majority of our time doing when we coach students particularly in medical school of how to create a schedule where your note-taking becomes faster so then you know lecture one is going to be covered the first time on this day it's going to be covered the second time on this day. I'm going to guess that most people that are watching this probably don't even have a system where their note-taking is on point which is why you're watching this video understand and even less likely probably don't have a system where you can come back to that lecture the second time. But imagine if you can cover each lecture at least twice before each quiz and test. How confident would you go through? That's exactly what we help all of our coaching students do through a personalized step-by-step system over the span of anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks. Even if you're not sure if it's going to be for you I encourage you to just go click down below just to see the results that people have gotten and try to ask yourself is that something that I wouldn't want in my own life. But if you want to try to instill the system yourself you should be able to say if I'm covering and doing the notes on this lecture I'm going to be able to review this lecture for the first time and ideally the second time on these following days on my calendar should be kind of booked in like an appointment, no ifs and buts I'm negotiating around it and then you can see how predictable your schedule should be but now you know that every day every lecture is kind of plugged into your schedule to review again the first time and the second time before your quizzes and tests. Now if you got value of what we covered so far there's tons of free options that I promise you'll give value from. First definitely check out all the videos that we mentioned in today's episodes including the Anki video the Q&A video as well as the video on how to remember everything that you're reading I will link those down first down below. If you want some of our best free resources for people on their medical journey definitely check out the med school success handbook these are 30 plus tips that I found to be helpful both for studying time management and all of the obstacles and hurdles that medical school throws your way, how I was able to overcome them hopefully they help you out too. And again if you want results ASAP and you have no idea what to do next and definitely check out our coaching programs down below we work with students all across the medical journey aspect including medical students and people from PA pharmacy dental you name it but also all across the world. So again if you're just interested to see what kind of results we can give you link down below tons of testimonials and I'll let you make the decision. But if this video was helpful then definitely check out this video right here on all the study strategies I use in medical school to get a 3.9 GPA as well as this video right here on my favorite study strategy in Anki step-by-step exactly how I used it plus advanced strategies. As always my friends thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully I was a little helpful to you guys on yours I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.